Trends-Tendances: QelviQ, Easy Way to Perfect Wine Temp

Digitalisation has changed many things, even in the world of wine. Online shops, dedicated wine search engines, online rankings, digital wine profiles and even online tasting sessions... And soon... the digital sommelier? Everything that digital technology has brought to the economy has been reflected in the wine sector. Wine lovers no longer need to have a whole library of wine guides. Just Google the name of the wine you'll be uncorking this evening and you'll find everything you need to know about it.

Online Wine Platforms

The two most popular (free) wine-related apps and websites are winesearcher.com and vivino.com. Wine-searcher.com, with offices in the UK and New Zealand, was created in 1999. The website was described as "your go-to resource for everything in wine and spirits - wherever you are in the world". Enter the name of a wine and wine-searcher.com will give you information on its origin, grape varieties, winemaker, vineyard, style of wine, tasting notes and ratings, quality of different vintages, price, importers, shops where to buy it, food and wine pairings, etc. Every year, 240 million searches are carried out by over 5 million active users every month.

Wine Tasting With VR Headphones Is Not Yet Possible, But Who Knows What The Future Holds?

Vivino.com was founded 11 years later in Denmark and is now based in San Francisco. The ambition was to do better than wine-searcher.com. The search engine simply announces "Search any wine": enter the name of any wine and we'll tell you all about it. The app allows you to scan the label of a wine in a shop and instantly obtain information about it. There are already 60 million regular users. In terms of sales, vivino.com goes much further than wine-searcher.com. Wine-searcher.com only locates the nearest wine merchants and importers, whereas vivino.com offers online purchasing. Which brings us to the second great revolution brought about by digitisation: wine e-commerce.

E-Wine Merchant

Most importers and wine merchants now have their own online shop, where you can have your wine delivered (free of charge or for a fee). You can even contact foreign wine merchants. Many webshops also analyse your 'oenological profile' on the basis of your buying behaviour and suggest other wines that match that profile. This makes it easier to discover other wines.

The latest innovation is that it is now possible to buy wine using cryptocurrencies. The first wine merchant to accept them was Bordeaux-based BTC Wine. But it goes even further: on platforms such as winechain.co, blockbar.com and wiv.io, wineries can now sell their wines directly to private customers using cryptos and NFT.

Online Auctions

Would you like to sell one of the treasures in your wine cellar? In the past, you would have had to go to an auction house to do this. But thanks to the Internet, it's much easier these days. Idealwine.com was founded in 2000 by three French wine lovers who worked at the Paris Stock Exchange. They decided to create a global digital wine exchange. Today, it is the world leader in online auctions and direct sales, carrying out no fewer than 400,000 transactions a year, and it is also an astonishingly comprehensive website, listing the hammer price of virtually every wine available for auction in the world. Do you own a precious vintage? Check its current value directly on idealwine.com and, if you wish, you can sell it at auction or to connoisseurs in sixty countries.

Online Oenology Course

Want to find out more about wine? You'll find plenty of online wine courses on YouTube. Those of Jancis Robinson, British wine critic and author of the reference work The Oxford Companion to Wine, are of excellent quality, well structured and very British. Wine's Cool Wine School is an initiative that explains the basics of oenology in a series of lessons. There are also several YouTube channels for wine lovers, to which you can subscribe free of charge: Wine Folly, Wine Spectator, James Suckling TV, Wine and Spirit Education Trust, Wine Enthusiast, Wine Pages TV.

Online Tasting

Until now, it has not been possible to pour yourself a glass of wine and enjoy it digitally. However, tastings are being organised online. In the past, wineries would invite journalists from different countries to come to the launch of a new wine. Today, the wine is sent to the journalists and they are given a date on Zoom to taste it at the same time as other journalists and exchange their impressions.

Your Digital Sommelier

Flemish sommelier Steve Bette puts together wine lists for restaurants that cannot afford a full-time sommelier. He has also created an app for restaurants: James presents himself as a digital sommelier. Bette encodes their wine selections and descriptions in a database. Restaurant customers can then consult them on their iPad. The app shows them the best wine and food pairings for each dish. James suggests one or more wines for the selected dish. "If we get everything right, I think James will replace the paper wine list," says Steve Bette.

Xavier Verellen, a former sales director in the media sector, is even marketing a personal sommelier for all wine lovers. QelviQ is originally a digital chiller that looks up a wine's ideal serving temperature from its label, then brings and maintains the wine at that temperature.

"I've solved a big problem in the wine world," explains Verellen. "Unlike beer and coffee producers, hundreds of thousands of wineries around the world are unable to guarantee that their wine, which has taken so much effort, is served at the ideal temperature. That's what QelviQ offers."

QelviQ has now been enhanced with an app that lets you manage your wine stock and choose the ideal dish for each wine, as well as a sommelier service that answers all your questions 24 hours a day.

And Metavers For Wine

Take secondwinery.com, founded last year in London by a team of wine experts. On this platform, you can explore the world's best wineries in 3D (even with a VR headset) and find out all about how wine is made. "So real you can smell the wine" is the website's promise. Tasting wine is not yet possible, but who knows what the digital future will bring?

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