Discover the Fun Side of Wine with Wine Likes App! Pt. 1

Forrest Kelly00:00:00

Welcome. Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly

Jeff Gillis00:00:06

Hello, Jeff Gillis here with the creator of the Wine Likes app, the best.

Forrest Kelly00:00:11

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast What inspired you to create WineLikes?

Jeff Gillis00:00:16

Yeah, of course. I think like most people during COVID they wanted to do something.I was drinking wine and I have a lot of friends and I saw my kids, you know, learning, coding and playing and I'm like, I wonder if you could do the same with wine. And I'm not the best at taking tests. I have my WSET 2.You know, I'm not the best at with my nose smelling wine and advancing my career in my wine degree. But I'm like, I bet you there's a way for people to learn about wine while really making it fun instead of just sitting in a classroom setting.And why can't we try to gamify wine learning and wine tasting?And that's what I set out to do with the wine like that amongst other things, like having the social media component where you know, you can see what your friends are tasting sipping across the country or across the world.We are in 174 countries so we're just, we look, my friends and I who are all soms, we looked at all the other wine apps and said what would we really like? What is fun to us and how can we just improve upon the wonderful world of wine? Because as you know, it's a very wonderful world.I used to be a food and beverage director for a couple of five star hotels. I have my undergraduate degree in hotel restaurant tourism management. I used to work for the Dorchester Group which was the Beverly Hills Hotel.The Peninsula Group. I worked at the Peninsula Beverly Hills as well. I used to work in Napa Valley at the Barcelona and Yountville all as food and beverage directors.Stepped away from it because I enjoyed my weekends off or wanted my weekends off and wanted my nights off and actually went into biotech and I am now a consultant in biotech marketing. But I also now teach hospitality and adjunct professor at a community college. Plus I do the winelikes app as well.

Forrest Kelly00:02:18

You decided to do the app and then you said your your kids were were doing coding. So did they help out or did you. How did you take it from design idea into actual coding?

Jeff Gillis00:02:29

No, they are too young to help out but I was. There is one game on the wine Mics app that is inspired by my kids. We play Wordle a lot.So on the WineLikes app it is Winedle, which is wine enthusiastic words either five to seven letter words all dealing with wine. So that's how I did have my kids tested when it was ready. But I have no tech background so I did hire developers.So we have a team of developers who take my vision and then they take it and put it into an app.

Forrest Kelly00:03:03

Step one is downloading it.

Jeff Gillis00:03:04

Step one, downloading it. You do have to set up a profile because of were available in Europe and all over the world. We're 17 plus rated app.But really in America you have to be 21 and older to download the app. And then you set up a little profile. You can choose your picture if you want. And then there's takes you to four different sections.One is your wine wall. And the wine wall is basically Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook all rolled into one where you can see what other people are tasting.We have discussions there. You can post a discussion. If you don't like to post a. You can do that or you can go straight to wine pairings.If you're interested in making yourself a meal or if you're at a restaurant, you can easily look up a food item. We have about over right now, currently over about 1,000 food items and that we pick from like Food and wine magazine.Then if you're looking to cook, we have a little over 400 recipes that you can search through that the wine and food pairing feature or you can go to we have the wine. So you know, we're really trying to help novices find out if they like wine and what kind of wine they like and if you know, it's kind of gimmicky.Every wine app has, you know, what do you like? Do you like chocolate? Do you like iced tea versus juice? Do you like salt on your fries?So we have fun with that and we have about it will choose over depending on your answers. We have a little over 75 different varietals that might be. What do you like?What we're proud of is usually it says, okay, you like Merlot, Chardonnay or Pinot Noir.You know, we have all of the varietals in there pretty much like, okay, you might like Pinot Gris, you might not like Sauvignon Blanc, but you might like Pinot Gris because they're different and stuff like that. Or you can go straight to the games if you like playing games. Right now we have three games up there. One is the quizzes.Every Tuesday we pour a new quiz on the app. And what's fun is users like yourself can even come up with your own quizzes and submit your own quizzes.We have I mentioned before Wine Dole, which is our wordle game. It's a different level every day. The game changes every 24 hours with a different wine word.And then we have wine like Spingo and wine like Spingo is really fun because you get paid for drinking wine. So every month we give away up to $50 and every three months we give away up to $200.You just have to fill out your wine like spoil and some of it it's already automatic on the app. Some things we have to do in the background, but those are the three games.And we're working on another game for 2025 called Regions, which will be a fun, exciting game to help you learn.

Forrest Kelly00:05:53

Wine Regions,The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast Don't forget my favorite part. Oh please. Do you like and follow and you.Can like and follow us on our social media and join in our collaborations just like our website thebestwinepodcast.com on inst and X. You know where thebestwinepod thebestwinepod.