Consult the sommelier in your pocket

       Shopping for wine is a lot like parenting a teenager. You feel stupid when you're in the middle of it,and when you finally emerge, you're desperately ready for a drink.
       There is, alas, no app for raising teenagers. But mobile software developers have begun aiming at oenophiles, and in so doing, they have established one of the more useful categories of wireless apps.
       Appropriately enough, choosing the right one can be puzzling and tedious.Some of the refined entries in the current vintage include Cor.kz, Wine Enthusiast Guide, Nat Decants Food & Wine Matcher and Pair It!. I'd give them a rating of 85,with an asterisk. They're fairly good now,and they should age nicely.
       Before digging into the details, though,consider the overall value of these services for a moment. Let's say you're at your favourite wine shop with about 15 minutes to spare, and you want a bottle that will make your dinner guests coo,without maxing out your credit card.
       The shop owner is helping someone near the Mouton Rothschild, and the other employees are 23-year-olds with extensive beer-stocking skills. Rather than choosing a random bottle or asking the beer guys, you can now just reach for the sommelier in your cell phone.
       From there you have a couple of options. Some apps, like Wine Enthusiast,let you find the most highly rated wines at specific price levels, so you can quickly browse the store - or, if you're in a restaurant, the wine list - for suitable matches.
       If you have Cor.kz or, to a lesser extent,Nat Decants, you can reverse the process,and look through the wine list or shelves until you find a promising label. Then it's a matter of doing a quick check on its rating.
       The second approach has limits, simply because it takes too long to type in,say,"2003 Hochheimer Koenigin Victoriaberg Riesling Beerenauslese," to say nothing of the time it might take to click through the ratings and then move onto another bottle.
       Smartphone mavens are already wondering why you can't just use the phone's camera to scan the bottle's bar code and have the app display the wine's rating? In the coming weeks, you'll be able to get fairly close to that bit of grape-soaked geekery, thanks to a new feature from Cor.kz.
       But first, more about the core features of this app, which will soon be available to BlackBerry users and owners of Android devices like T-Mobile's MyTouch 3G.
       Cor.kz stands on the shoulders of an Internet giant, cellartracker.com, which houses more than a million reviews by roughly 82,000 wine aficionados. Cor.kz can also help users manage their wine cellar inventory, but it is perhaps best used by those who just want to buy more intelligently.
       Type in the name of the wine you are considering - Del Dotto, say - and Cor.kz retrieves everything in CellarTracker's data base about the wine.
       This can be a blessing and a curse.Wines from Del Dotto, a small but muchbeloved vintner in Napa Valley, California, yield 581 tasting notes. If you type something more specific into your iPhone, like "2005 Del Dotto Cabernet,"Cor.kz returns 95 matches.
       Some of these results include a numerical rating. To save yourself wasted clicks, choose those listings. The rating represents the average from CellarTracker's reviewers, and those entries will also include detailed reviews and retail prices.