Aaldering The South African Dream 6

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Vivino The app that changed the world of wine Having trouble selecting the right wine to buy? Vivino is the world’s largest online wine marketplace and most frequently downloaded wine app, powered by a community of millions of wine lovers. Vivino’s unique wine shopping experience uses community data to suggest personalised wine recommendations, making the discovery and purchase of wine fun, accessible, and effortless for wine drinkers at all levels.

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njoy life through drinking wine or Long live the wine are just two interpretations of “Vivino”, the name of the wine app that heralded a new era in buying wine. How it all started In 2008, serial entrepreneur Heini Zachariassen was on his way to a dinner party in Copenhagen when he stopped at a supermarket to buy a bottle of wine. Choosing the right bottle from this wall full of wines proved intimidating and mystifying. “I was thinking, ‘What the heck do I buy?’” says Zachariassen. At that moment, the seeds were planted for creating an app that would make the world of wine more accessible, and a bottle of wine as easy to evaluate, understand, and purchase as a book or movie. In 2010, within two years of this epiphany, Zachariassen had teamed up with a former colleague, the product developer Theis Søndergaard, and together they launched Vivino.

“EVEN FOR WINE CONNOISSEURS, THE APP OFFERS A BOUNTY OF DATA AND RECOMMENDATIONS”

A hell of a success Aimed at acting as a “sommelier in your pocket”, Vivino was created to simplify the wine-buying process and make it less daunting. “The main driving force behind building the app was that original feeling of ignorance I had as I aimlessly stared at the wall of wine,” Zachariassen explains. Having previously worked for a cybersecurity software company, he was well versed in tech, and felt his lack of wine expertise would play to his advantage while creating an app for similarly novice consumers with an interest in wine and a thirst for finding out more. Wine explorer Recently, the app launched the Wine Explorer feature that allows users to search for a wine by price, style, taste profile, country, grape, and food pairing. The smartest feature of the Vivino app is the Label Scanner, which can bring up all the information you need about a bottle of wine by simply downloading a photo of its

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