Of all the apps that I have reviewed, I’ve managed to stay 95% within South African borders, which just shows we are starting to produce some great apps. But interestingly enough, three of the last 10 have been wine apps. Is there something happening in the wine industry that I don’t know about. This week, strangely enough it is not a wine rating app, but a single farm that has chosen to go the extra step in digital.
Steenberg Wines has an app out for Blackberry, Android and iPhone/iPad, making it accessible on the 3 top smartphone brands. The app works well, the design is fine and the images are gorgeous. On my Samsung Galaxy Android phone, everything ran smoothly and the size of the app download was not big and sits on my phone at 6.98MB.
The app includes sections about the farm, wine tasting, attractions, news (blog posts) and of course the wines. Each section gives good information about Steenberg, and I would expect that anyone having this app would get a far deeper understanding of the farm and its wines.
However, the question begs, how much did this cost? Also, what is the real value in it? Perhaps the reason that this is South Africa’s first single winery app is that it’s just not necessary right now. Let’s be honest, if you want to go to the winery, you’ll go, and use the app, but afterwards, you have almost no use for it.
One of the most important parts of an app’s success is the engagement on it after the first download. With one app for every winery, I’m not so sure there will be engagement or many downloads. Nevertheless, an app is an app, and it’s interesting to see how the wine industry is producing more and more of them.
