Wine Pairing, Deviled Eggs, and What's Right

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:00:00 -0400

We’ve gotten some great feedback (mostly positive, some negative) on the wine pairing algorithm behind Wine Steward. It seems like a decent time to talk a little about wine & food, moods, and people.

Pairing wine with food is a finicky sort of thing (if anything can rightly be described as finicky). People have their own tastes, for one, and for another, people have what I’ll describe as moods.

I, for one, am constantly passionate about one or two kinds of wine at any given time. For a while, I religiously watched NFL games with some junky food (deviled eggs are my favorite — if you can find a good looking person to make deviled eggs for you, you’ve got it made) with either a cheap Cava or a fancy Champagne. I couldn’t, really, drink anything else. Watching football with a Cremant? It’s easy to feel a little awkard when you’re spending your Sunday afternoon that way.

The lesson I learned at the time was that sparkling wine goes great with everything. Which isn’t true, really, but was true enough at the time because it was true for me.

Wine, like food, ought to be a social lubricant, a part of the ceremony. There are basic guidelines here but no hard and fast rules. Almost everyone likes to have other people at the table, and almost nobody likes to have all of them so drunk they’re yakking on their dinner plates or punching out the labrador. But some people like to talk politics at the table and others would prefer to, I don’t really know, stare at their shoes. And like the company you keep, what you drink is completely up to you.

So Wine Steward is trying to help you find the basic guidelines, the guideposts, or whatever metaphor you prefer. When we first sat down to build Wine Steward, the conversation went like this:

“A wine pairing algorithm? Doesn’t that take the fun out of it?”

“What if it can help one or two families drink a few things they wouldn’t normally try? And if they find something they really like, that would be great, right?”

So pass me a deviled egg. I’m drinking cab franc these days.

Sample of Wine Steward

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:56:24 -0400

We’ve made a simplified web version of the Wine Steward iPhone app. It lets you get a few pairings for wines, but does not have the rest of the features of the application. Play with it and let us know what you think!

Wine Steward in the App Store

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:41:28 -0400

Wine Steward has been approved by Apple for sale in the App Store. We’re grateful for the support of a few friends like Amy Haldane and to folks we’ve never met like Robert at flight404.com for their ideas.

Working...

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:36:42 -0400

We currently have a few different apps in the works at the moment. We’re really happy about Wine Steward, which we think is one of the prettiest and most interesting wine applications (whether on the iPhone or elsewhere) out there. It’s a kick, and we hope you think so, too.

Inklings

Wine Pairing, Deviled Eggs, and What's Right

Sample of Wine Steward

Wine Steward in the App Store

Working...