Idiot Meets App. Result? Carménère Shiraz

So I have a new phone and what better than to start downloading onto it some time-wasting and irrelevant new apps? And of all those, what better app than this wotwine thing which people have been talking about for the last few years? Yes, the comments have not been uniformly favourable and yes, the wotwine webpage actually redirects you to its users' less-than-fantastic experiences ('frustratingly unstable'...'Ok but a bit hopeless at times'), possibly in an attempt to forestall complaints, possibly as the result of an administrative error, but anyway. Since the experts' panel on wotwine boasts five Masters of Wine and one Master Sommelier, how bad can it be, really? It even claims full man-of-the-people credentials by allowing you to search for wines costing as little as £1 - there aren't any, but that's scarcely the point. There's nothing to stop you.

Down I load it: Your Supermarket Sommelier. Okay, it gets stuck updating its database but clears after a while and it's only asked for my email address once, a masterpiece of reticence in this day and age. I check my phone for 4G and location and head for the dreamland of mendacity which is my local Waitrose. This, I tell myself, will be a proper test: Waitrose's bottom shelf, quintessential garbage, and so I let wotwine loose.

Fact: it crashes each time I try to use it and needs a re-start on every occasion. On the other hand: when I finally point it at the barcode of a 2015 Storm Tree Shiraz, it comes right back at me with with Mass-produced, dilute wine with synthetic fruit and astringent acidity and reckons that £4.50 a bottle ought to be top price, rather than the £5.69 being asked. In other words, it instantly has a ring of authority once it's stopped bailing out on me. Ditto when I run Le Reveil Cabernet Sauvignon past it, a wine I drink more often than I should on account of the heartwarming cockerel on the label: Simple, light wine with chalky tannins, light body and some red cherry and blackcurrant character, it declares, which is exactly what the stuff tastes like. The app also argues that I should only pay £5 a bottle, not Waitrose's preferred £5.99 and once again, their judgement seems to me incontestable. The fact that they've even got these awful, meaningless, wines covered is a miracle; but bull's-eye assessments on top - what a world we live in.

So now I am completely in thrall to my phone and wotwine, to the extent that after a minute's use, I am letting it choose the wine for me, more or less wholesale. What comes up? A 2012 Luis Felipe Edwards Carménère Shiraz, which it thumbnails as a Spicy wine, with reasonable character, a bit thin, but sound, while, to my astonishment, concurring with the £5.99 price tag Waitrose have slapped on it. Helplessly won over, I have completely lost all power of self-determination, and instead grab the bottle with robot fingers and take it to the checkout.

The actual booze? When drunk? Just like wotwine said. I'm not entirely sure, now I think about it, that I would subscribe to the bit thin line, given that most of my red wine tastes like cold tea and this Luis Felipe stuff doesn't, but that may be a purely personal issue. Which means that, allowing for the fact that the app crashes all the time - the Android version, anyway - I can see that I will never again need to exercise any sort of discrimination when faced with the great Waitrose Wall of Disappointments. All the choosing, all the heartbreak, will be taken out of my hands. I feel a fleeting pang, yes, at yet another loss of human agency - counterbalanced by the certainty that this is just one of many things over which I now have no control and anyway, at my time of life what do I expect? I also take Fiona Beckett's point about the apparent reductiveness of wotwine, which brings almost everything down to a price point - real or ideal - leaving her to complain, 'Isn't wine a little bit more complicated - and rewarding - than that?' To which the answer, for many of us, is no, although I respect an individual's right to squander cash for drink if they really
want to.

Oh, yes, there's also a canard to the effect that supermarkets, which can read wotwine just like anyone else, will up the prices of wines which are trending on the app, thus defeating the object of the exercise. Could be. But, look, we're nit-picking here, we're just making unnecessary trouble. One the basis of one hasty experiment, I can confirm that if you can get it to work, it works. And so does the rest of my new phone, so it's a big day all round.

CJ