Vivino to launch new personal match rating

By Jo Gilbert

Published: 17 February, 2020

Vivino is due to launch a major new feature to its wine-rating app which will usher in a new phase of ‘personalisation’ to its business model, Harpers can reveal.

Vivino is the crowd-sourced rating platform which connects wine lovers worldwide by inviting users to ‘scan’ and rate wines online.

And now the app is due to add a major new feature which will show users how likely a wine will stand up against their personal preferences via a ‘match percentage’.

“We listen to what our users tell us they want and in 2020, a huge focus will be on personalisation,” Danish entrepreneur and Vivino founder Heini Zachariassen, told Harpers.

“We weren’t able to do this years ago because we needed our data to be in a place where we could build this feature, but we are so excited the data is there now.”

The new ‘personalised marker’ comes at a critical time for Vivino.

Founded by Zachariassen back in 2010, at the time of writing, the app has 11 million vintage specific wines in its database and 42 million users who have all latched on to its ‘sommelier in your pocket’ conceit.

The app also appears to have reached a critical mass of activity just before Christmas.

It took Vivino five years to hit 100 million scans for the first time. But just two months after surpassing the one billionth scan mark, that number had already jumped ahead to 1.1 billion.

According to Paul Armstrong, consultant and author of Disruptive Technologies, personalisation is now a “really sexy area to keep folks hooked” as app developers like Vivino are now able to leverage over ten years of data.

The new feature is due to launch later in the year.

Looking back on the past decade, Zachariassen said: “The democratisation we have been talking about for 10 years is here and producers are excited about it. With 42 million users, we are seeing an eagerness and excitement to partner with us to reach consumers directly.

“We are actually seeing them move away from the use of critic ratings to leveraging the power of consumer ratings and information. We have built more opportunities for them to partner with us to tell their stories to our users as well.”

Is this really the end of the critics? Our analysis on peer-to-peer aggregator apps and the impact on critic scores is available here, and in the latest edition of Harpers' magazine.

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