TheVine is a wine rating app, with South Africa starting to see a few of these coming out now. After all, the wine industry is a very big part of south African culture.
Built by Kaizania IT Services, TheVine is also endorsed by SouthAfrica.net, as can be seen in their tweet:
Have a thirst for SA wine?
#TheVine is our country’s premier app for wine tasting: budurl.com/2h4l
“” South Africa (@SouthAfrica) July 30, 2012
The app is light and easy to use, and to cut to the chase, nothing much at all. In fact I presume that this is simply the first version, which will later be updated with new functionality and features. On the plus side, it seems to work well, the screens are fluid and the basics of wine rating are displayed. The app did crash once on my Samsung Galaxy S2, though, and immediately rebooted to the home screen.
After creating a profile (you cannot rate a wine without doing this), the only option is to search for wines and then rate them. You can see others who have left comments and an aggregated rating score out of 5 stars. However, you cannot connect with anyone, share anything, see their profiles or even all the ratings.
The main drawback thus far is a very basic and poor graphic design. The app screens show a bland background and other than wine estate logos and profile pictures, I could not find any images or even colours.
All in all, for a first attempt, TheVine gives us a basic outline of things to come, or so we hope. I would very much like to see a great deal more features and a full list of South African wines. Let‘s see what they have in store for us once they release further versions of this wine rating app.
Next week we‘ll rate the app of a competitor, RealTimeWine (www.realtimewine.com).
Download TheVine app on iTunes, Blackberry App World or Google Play.
About the author: Jess Green is a digital entrepreneur, passionate about tech, web and mobile. Follow him on @jessello.
