sommelier
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Lousy sommeliers can let D-Vine pour the perfect glass of wine
Wine -- what's not to like? Well, plenty if you serve it wrong or -- gasp -- with the wrong food. No one wants to be the guy who turns up with a warm Chardonnay for a fancy chuck steak dinner. Enter D-Vine, a smart wine dispenser that not only serves up a perfectly chilled tipple but also helps you pair it with food and even order more vino when you're running low. This is the future, and we like it.
Amazon Japan has free on-call wine advisors
In some cities, Amazon will deliver you alcohol, including wine, within an hour. But which one to choose? Japanese enthusiasts will now get help thanks to the new Sommelier service. Between noon and 5 p.m. ET, you can leave your number and one of the site's professional wine advisors will call back to let you know if a Chinon has good body and vanilla overtones, or whatever. You can also tell the sommelier what you're serving, and they'll recommend a wine based on your budget. In one example, they suggest a Beau Rivage Blanc French Bordeaux or a KWV Classic Collection Pinotage from South Africa for yakitori skewers.
Cellar 2.0 adds handy email hooks to wine manager
What cheers the soul more on a cold winter's night than a fine glass of wine? An app to keep track of that wine, perhaps. The new 2.0 version of the $2.99 Cellar for iPhone [iTunes link], out now, adds more fun and new sharing options to the good-looking wine management tool. If you're a high-level oenophile looking for a hardcore wine research and cellar inventory app, Cellar may not be for you (I'd recommend the powerful and savvy Drync for $4.99, or the free ad-supported version), but for casual imbibers and wine fans, it's a charmer. Cellar is simple to use and fun to show off. You add bottles one at a time to your collection (slotting them into the cellar, the garage or the wishlist), customizing the look and label of each bottle and adding vintage, price, ratings and other details if you have them. Your bottles are displayed attractively in a horizontal rack, which can be swiped back and forth; turning the iPhone or iPod touch from landscape to portrait mode switches you into a new detail view where you can see your notes and other info about a particular wine. The UI is graceful and well-detailed without being garish; an app about wine, after all, should carry itself with a degree of classiness. When I first looked at Cellar last summer, one of the drawbacks of the app was that there wasn't a good way to share your wine collections or favorite bottles with friends, nor could you easily back up your cellar data. Both of those issues have been amply addressed. You can now create 'bottle links,' very long encoded URLs (amenable to abbreviation by URL shorteners like TinyURL) that, when opened in the iPhone mail app, Mobile Safari or popular iPhone Twitter apps, auto-launch Cellar and load the bottle into your collection, label and all -- magical. You can also backup and restore wine libraries from your Mac or PC, or merge libraries with other users in the vicinity using the app's built-in Web server via Wi-Fi. New searching, sorting and statistics options add to the improved/introduced feature list with 2.0. Cellar 2 doesn't have the wine search capability of Drync or some of the other wine apps on the store, but it does have panache; it's a showcase app for my iPhone on looks and functionality, and it's perfect for keeping track of the bottle you drank out on the town that you want to remember for purchase later on. Check out more of the Cellar interface in the gallery below. %Gallery-80305%
Japan toying with idea of cellphone "sommeliers"
Japan seems set to begin licensing cellphone vendors as "sommeliers" in an attempt to help guide cheerful consumers through the quagmire of choices available for handsets and plans in Japan. Japan's communication ministry is looking to the private sector to manage the potential nightmare exam and certification process, with children's online safety highlighted as an important part of the plan. Mobile sommelier sounds like a pretty sweet title, we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a week daytime calling package.[Image courtesy AFP/File Photo]
DS releases for the week of July 16th
We hate to break it to you -- but if you're in the U.S., there are no new DS games this week. And here we were all coasting on a post-E3 high, too, stuffed with news and excitement. Sigh. Guess we'll just have to ogle the releases around the world, then. Collect your oglin' glasses and hit the jump!
EA unveils Booze Training
EA is proving that they really are interested in Japanese audiences: not only are they designing MySims with Japanese gamers in mind, but they are making training games. Three of them!They're all about drinking, too: Bartender DS, about mixing drinks; Sakashou DS, about sake, and Sommelier DS, about wine. The software is designed to help you choose fine beverages and properly store your wines. Sim City DS producer Hiroshi Murakami said that it was his hope that people would spend the 2950 yen on Sommelier DS and then buy good wine instead of going directly to the cheap stuff.
