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iPhone wine application created by Omaha sommelier

Here’s the dilemma. You’re in the grocery store scrambling to get the right ingredients for dinner, or you’re on your way to friend’s house and you need to grab the right bottle of wine. Gobsmacked you stand in the wine aisle praying that someone will help you. The guy on the business end of a mop can’t answer your questions.

The gal behind the counter clipping her fingernails doesn’t appear to be of much help either. Anxiety mounts. Then, frazzled, frayed and flummoxed, you grab your cell phone, iPhone preferably, and consult with your personal sommelier, Jesse Becker, creator of the Wine To Match application. Your stress evaporates.

Master Sommelier, Jesse Becker of the Boiler Room Restaurant in Omaha, along with programmers based in California, has created the ultimate easy-to-use wine/food paring tool. Wine to Match, launched on July 24, this application is the result of many months of research and hours of writing out meticulous wine pairing details.

How it works is simple. One selects the primary component of the meal they’re going to prepare from a list with icons. For example, lamb. Next one is asked the cuisine whose flavors will dominate, for example Dutch, Greek, Indian, Cajun, etc. Then, one will chose the cooking method, say braising, and last, chose traits (spicy, fatty, sweet, salty), and ingredients that might be the most pronounced such as onions, garlic, vinegar, fruit, etc. Once everything is entered, a process that is easy and takes seconds, a list of wines pops up. Along with possible wine parings there’s even info on what glass to to use to serve the wine and the names of on-line wine merchants who carry the wines recommended.

In a sample run a not-so-orthodox dish, a spicy African braised lamb with garlic and onions was entered. The wines Wine to Match hit on were: Bandol, Barbera, Left Bank Bordeaux, Cabernet Franc, Dolcetto, Jumilla, Montepulciano, Mourvedre, Pinotage, Sangiovese, Tempranillo, Teroldego. The suitability of the wines selected is determinable by the size of the font, the bigger the letters the more likely the pairing will work best. The algorithms contained in Wine to Match enable the application to chose a wine from over 75 billion different combinations.

“I’m still adding wines,” said Becker, “and there is a version two already in the works that will work in the other direction, that is, you know the wine and want to make a dish that would work well with the wine.”

To view the slide show that sends shivers down Alabaman’s spines titled Wine Porn, click here

More wine?

Eat Like Athena

[Thanks: http://www.examiner.com]

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