Current Venue

The list arrives. It's four pages, most of the producers mean nothing to you, and everyone at the table has stopped talking. You have about ninety seconds before someone says "shall we just get the house red," and that's how most wine decisions in restaurants actually get made.

Current Venue removes the time pressure. Sommy works out where you are, pulls up that specific place's wine list, and sorts it by what suits you.

It knows where you are

You don't type an address or hunt for the right branch. Sommy detects the venue you've walked into and switches into venue mode for it, so everything you see is filtered to what that place actually pours.

It handles wine shops as well as restaurants. Standing in a shop you don't know, the same thing happens: the inventory in front of you, ordered by how well it fits your palate rather than by what's on promotion.

[SCREENSHOT: Current Venue - the wine list for a detected restaurant, filtered and ranked to the user's taste]

What it does to the list

The list keeps its own shape. By-the-glass stays separate from bottles, and the sections stay as the restaurant wrote them, because "what can I get by the glass" is a different question from "what bottle are we sharing."

Every entry gets a match score against your taste and a short reason for it. Not a number floating on its own, but a line telling you why this one and not that one. You can also set a price range and rule out the half of the list you were never going to order from.

When something looks interesting and you want more than a score, Fit Check gives you the full read on that specific bottle.

When the list isn't on file

Plenty of places haven't been catalogued, and small restaurants change their list constantly. When Sommy doesn't have the list, photograph it. Vision reads a wine list from a photo and gives you the same ranked view, section by section.

That's the reliable fallback anywhere, and it's often faster than explaining the restaurant to someone.

When it helps, and when it doesn't

It earns its place on long lists full of unfamiliar names, which is exactly where confidence collapses and people default to the second-cheapest bottle. Our guide on how to read a wine list covers the same problem without the app.

It's less useful at a place with eight wines, where reading them is quicker than anything else. And a dark restaurant is the hardest environment for a photo, so if you know where you're going, setting up a Planned Visit beforehand avoids the problem entirely.

Do I have to check in or tell Sommy where I am?

No. Sommy works out the venue itself and offers it. You confirm, and you're in.

What if my restaurant's list isn't in Sommy?

Take a photo of it. You get the same ranked, sectioned view from the picture, so an uncatalogued list is a minor inconvenience rather than a dead end.

Does it only work in restaurants?

No. Wine shops work the same way, which is arguably where it saves you more, because a shop has far more bottles and nobody bringing you a list.