How Gwin works
A supermarket wine aisle is a lot of bottles and not much to go on. Gwin turns one photograph of the shelf into a list you can filter.
1. Photograph the shelf
Open the app in the wine aisle and take one photo of the shelf in front of you. Stand square to it, about an arm’s length away, with one bay of bottles in the frame and the front labels facing you. If the picture is too dark or too blurred to read, Gwin asks you to take it again, and that does not use one of your scans.
2. Gwin recognises the bottles
The photo is sent to our servers, where each bottle is found and its label is read. The bottles Gwin recognises come back as wines, each with its grape, region, price and what it goes with.
Gwin only shows a wine when it is confident that is the one on the shelf. A bottle it is not sure about is marked “Not in our list yet”, and one it cannot read is marked “We could not read this label”. A wrong wine shown with confidence would be worse than no answer, so Gwin does not guess.
3. Filter to a shortlist
You can narrow the shelf by:
- Colour and style. Red, white, rosé, sparkling and more.
- Grape. Malbec, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio and the rest.
- Region and country. From Rioja to Marlborough.
- Goes with. Find a bottle for the food you are cooking.
- Tastes of. Plum, lemon, vanilla and other flavours.
- Sweetness and body. Dry to sweet, light to full.
- Awards. Medals from named competitions, with a link to the result.
- Price. Bands from under £5 upwards.
- Vegan and organic. For when that matters to you.
Each filter shows how many bottles on your shelf match. You can put the list in the order of the shelf or in order of price.
4. Find it on the shelf
Switch from the list to the shelf view and your photo comes back with a box around every bottle. With a filter on, the bottles that match are highlighted and the rest are dimmed. Tap a box to see what the bottle is.
5. Open a wine
A wine’s page shows what Gwin knows about it: a short tasting note, the flavours to expect, the food it goes with, any medals it has won with a link to the result, and its price. From there you can see where the bottle is on your photo.
Picks, saved wines and ratings
Tell Gwin what you usually buy, or rate wines as you try them, and it marks some bottles “For you” with the reason. Save a wine with the bookmark, and rate it out of five once you have tried it. Your saved and rated wines are kept in My Wines, and every shelf you scan is kept in your scan history.
Who it is for
Gwin is for people aged 18 or over. The app asks you to confirm that before anything else. It does not sell wine and is independent of the supermarkets.