Built a blind tasting app — looking for feedback from serious tasters*
I put together an iOS app for running blind tastings and figured this forum would have the best feedback on what’s actually useful vs. gimmicky.*
The basics: host adds wines, players guess blind on their phones, scores are tracked automatically. You can customize what players guess on (varietal, region, vintage, etc.).*
It’s free and I’m not trying to sell anything — just want to make it better. If you host tastings regularly, I’d love to know what would make something like this worth using.*
For my tasting group, every participant brings a bagged wine on a theme. Bags are randomly numbered and tasters assign guesses to the numbered wines, with reveal and scoring at the end. Does your app support this setup?
Yeah, I have just pushed an update for apple to review where the host can blindly grab wine bottles and then put them in the bags and number them, and them taste the wines and submit their guesses and at the end take the bottles out of the bag to see if their guesses are correct.
Are you trying to use either the Court Grid or WSET systematic verbiage for this?
Dry tasting notes are an excellent way of practicing and are something I use to keep somewhat on point. What I would highly suggest is building the database to fit with either the Court of WSET styles as those are written down and proven systems rather than inventing something entirely new.
Feel free to DM me for more chatting. I earned my Diploma in 21 and intend on applying for the MW program in May, so I would hope I qualify as a serious taster
I have implemented a WSET and Court of Master Sommeliers style tasting grid, that walk you through the steps of the grids(Appearance, Nose, Palate, Quality Assessment, Conclusion) and allow you to fill a grid out for each of the wines in a game. And you can select which style of grid that you want to fill out, like Court of Master Sommeliers, or WSET. I am was trying to make the app able to be used by students who are practicing. I would love for you to try it out and give me some feedback on what I need to change and improve!
I assume that if the host loads the wines, the idea is not to do it completely randomly as in one 20 year old Amarone, a young Sonoma Pinot Noir, a Chilean Merlot, etc.? So it would be useful for a themed tasting in that case.
But what is the advantage of using a phone vs paper? Or am I showing my age - I don’t live on my phone so maybe it makes sense to people who do. Not trying to be discouraging at all, because on some level the idea is kind of fun, but if I invite people over and they spend time on their phones, I don’t invite them back.
You can theme the tasting or just go totally random—it’s completely up to you! you pick the wines to add.
The main advantage of using the app is that it handles all the heavy lifting. It makes the initial set-up much faster, automatically calculates scores, and gives everyone immediate feedback. You can also see how your friends are rating the same wines in real-time.
My favorite feature is ‘Progressive Mode.’ It lets you answer questions in a specific order and use the feedback to learn as you go. For example: if you guess a wine is a Merlot but the app tells you it’s actually a Pinot Noir, you can use that info for the next question. Instead of guessing Napa, you might pivot to Sonoma since you now know you’re looking for a region famous for Pinot.
Thank you! The host can set how many points each question is worth. So you can set the variety to be 20 points, the Region to be 10 points, etc. By default each question is worth 10 points each.