Brand new wine application: "Wineries" for iPhone or iPod Touch

We talked to the founder of this idea, Marcus Franzen, who is totally in with this trend.

YOOPRESS:Mister Franzen, what relationship do you have with wine...?

FRANZEN: Well, when I was a child I used to stand in the steepest vineyards of Europe and watch my parents pick the grapes. My uncle owns the winery Reinhold Franzen (weingut-franzen.de) in Bremm at the Moselle and my father founded the project "Vinitorum Quaterni" (vinitorum-quaterni.de) with three of his friends. This project was all about refurbishing old and fallow vineyards, which now come forth with excellent Riesling wines.

YOOPRESS:How did you get the idea to make a wine guide for the iPhone...?

FRANZEN: Well, I started developing applications for the iPhone more like a hobby. I have a degree in IT and I work in the management branch of an IT-consulting company. After a while you kind of lose the contact with the actual programming, which I always enjoyed a lot. Since my wife is a doctor I first developed a couple of applications for the medical branch.

It was actually my father who had the idea to develop a wine guide in which the wineries could introduce themselves with a GPS function in order to find particularly wineries that are closeby. I mean how many times do you leave your wine guide book at home when you need it on the road? Furthermore, we simply wanted to offer wineries and wine friends a direct source of information.

YOOPRESS:So what was your part in the development of the iPhone app...?

FRANZEN: My father, Dr. Karl-Heinz Franzen, took care of the selection and the communication with the wineries. My wife took over some organisatory tasks and I was the one who designed and developed the application itself, and I also made the webportal for the collection of information.

YOOPRESS:Do you canvass the wineries and are there any conditions of participation...?

FRANZEN: First we concentrated on the well-known names in the wine industries in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and offered them to register their winery with us free of charge.

As of right now we do not have any "tough" conditions, although a membership in an organization like VDP for example, does of course increase the chances of being selected by us. However, if some wineries convince us of their quality in another way, we take pleasure in accepting them anyway.

YOOPRESS:You named your info-website: "beste-weingueter.com" (best-wineries.com), which again is a sign that you do select wineries. Do you not ever get any problems with wineries that are not listed in the known wine guides for example, but those who would like to become part of the wine app as well?

FRANZEN: Well, of course you call for conflicts if you show that you are selective. However, so far we did not have too many problems with wineries and we are always prepared to be convinced by a good bottle of wine from any winery.

We generally do not go after the common wine guides, since you have to pay to be included in those and we would probably not receive any insider's tips this way.

YOOPRESS:Do the "best" wineries promote your project or is their listing free of charge?

FRANZEN: As of now we do not have any supporters for our project, we do not have any marketing of our apps and the listing of wineries is free. The application costs 2.99 euro right now, which is very cheap compared to the price of a wine guide book.

YOOPRESS:Okay, now let us switch from the view of a vintager to the view of a wine fan. Please tell our readers what the highlights of the app "Wineries for the iPhone" are.

FRANZEN: The application offers three different tabs. The first tab, which is the search, lets you choose a combination of wine-growing region and vine type. Depending on the selection, the second tab - a list -shows you those wineries or the third tab shows you the location of the respective winery on a map.

If you select a winery from the list or the map, you will see a detailed picture of the winery. There you can see all the information about the winery that the winery itself chose to expose about itself. You can see two pictures and a profile of the winery, opening hours and the possibility to send a mail to the winery directly from the application or you can call them or get on their website right there.

We published some screenshots on our website "beste-weingueter.com" to give you an idea of how the application actually works.

YOOPRESS:Is this basically all the application can do or is there any other features that you are working on...?

FRANZEN: The next step will be to include other wineries. The version we have right now already includes 262 wineries and we would like to increase that number.

In terms of functionality we still have to send a new version to Apple through the review-process, which may take a while. Our goal is to make it possible for wineries to change their information online and to update users directly.

Naturally, we are always pleased to read any improvement ideas from the wineries or application users, after all this is how the best ideas are born.

YOOPRESS:Thank you very much for your time and info. (aw.yoopress)