Quini is a free wine tasting and rating app developed in Vancouver. While it is designed primarily for the average consumer, it is useful for neophytes and geeks as well. The language is simple, but useful. The whole idea behind Quini is to help consumers discover their wine palates quickly, and wine pros to archive and share detailed visual wine reviews. (Link to the video appears at the bottom of the article.)
Quini provides recommendations based on your previous entries. You can also follow kindred people who like what you like. This helps people discover new wines that they will like. Quini helps to remove the ‘risk’ in trying new wines. One of its best features is that everyone uses a standardized system with standardized language.
The word ‘Quini’ is Latin for ‘one of five’.
This is a true 100-point scale unlike other popular 100-point scales that are no more than 20-point or 50-point scales in practice. A Quini score is made up of the following five aspects of wine evaluation:
Eye – 15 points
Nose – 30 points
Mouth – 30 points
Finish – 15 points
Opinion – 10 points
The iPad utilizes the ideal version of the program, though it is still a very useful program to use on iPhone, Android or desktop computer. On mobile devices, dragging a ‘petal’ upwards produces a numerical score and dragging it to the right provides a subjective assessment. The iPhone is a simpler version, designed for ‘on-the-go’ scoring such as at wine events. You can do it all with just your thumb. In addition to scoring wines, Quini offers other features such as ‘Your Taste Profile’, which keeps track of how many wines you have tasted by region, winery and varietal. This is where Quini can quickly make you a wine expert, just by checking your taste profile before you head to a wine store or restaurant.
You can post your colourful wine reviews entries to Facebook or Twitter and you can take screen shots of your summary to share with friends. You can even make food-pairing recommendations and add your own notes. Quini is quick and easy – it only takes about one minute to score a wine. You’ll be surprised at how quickly your knowledge grows. Quini even offers rewards for multiple entries. I’ve scored over 100 wines so far and find it an easy to use app.
Quini tasting seminars have been conducted at Sutton Place Hotel, Everything Wine in both North Vancouver and South Surrey and at Legacy Liquor Store. Check out their web site for upcoming free tasting events – http://blog.quiniwine.com/wine-events/.
At the heart of it, Quini was developed to solve business problems. It collects consumer sensory and behaviour in real-time and helps to show trends of what people like, rather than simply relying on experts’ scores. For example, it might show that the BCLDB should expand their selection of Argentinian wines, and specifically the softer reds. The wine listings database covers virtually all wineries in Canada, the US and Mexico, as well as thousands of wines from the major wine exporting countries of the world. Give it a try. The links to the app are at www.quiniwine.com.
