Running both Onlineorderdesk.com and BCWineries.net requires me to travel throughout the province to visit wineries. Tough gig, I know. I have been up and down the valley and the island quite a number of times but during my last trip I started thinking about the start of the wine tourism season and the number of visitors to our province's wine regions. I went home and decided to check out Wine Tripper - British Columbia Edition for my iPhone.

Once I started the app, I was presented with three menu items.

1. Region Map

2. Wineries

3. Your Wines

Region Map

When you click on the Region Map the program uses the GPS in the iPhone to locate and pin all the wineries around me. This is a very cool feature. If I have 30 minutes between meetings, I can pull up the app and find a winery close to me that I can pop into. This feature will be very convenient for those Corkaholics that don't get to travel the wine regions regularly to find out a new winery that may have started near where they are going to visit.

Wineries

Inside the Wineries area you can pull up a listing of all the BC wineries. I was presented with options to sort by Alphabetical, City, Area, Rating, Favorites and Proximity.

Alphabetical and City are self explanatory.

Area sorts the wineries by Thompson Okanagan, Vancouver Island, and Vancouver.

Rating allows me to display wineries based on how I've rated them. Would be a great feature to have it also display how all users rate them, then if I am new to an area and I want to visit only a 5 star rated winery I can quickly pull that up.

Favorites is again self explanatory.

The last one, Proximity, blew me out of the water. This made the cost of the program worth it (bottle refund on two and a half cases of empty wine bottles). Again using the GPS in my iPhone this menu item displays each winery with its distance from me at that very moment. Right now, it says that Calona Vineyards is 2KM from me and The View Winery & Camelot Vineyards are both 4km from me. Click on the winery and I was taken to the wineries page, click again on the address and I can see exactly where the winery is located on the map.

For me, a person that lives on my iPhone, I am extremely happy with this app. I highly recommend this to anyone that is going to be traveling between wineries this season. Good job, Jeff Pennal and team.

You can get the app in the App Store located here.