Berger: Don't pay too much for wine

We were dining out recently and the restaurant had a pretty good wine list. However, a few selections were from European places that I knew of, but about which I had only scant knowledge.

One of the wines that looked interesting was a red Rhône Valley wine called Vinsobres. It was priced at about $55. I had tasted a wine from this region of the Rhône years ago, and liked it, but wanted to know if this particular bottle was fairly priced.

I pulled out my trusty iPhone and, using an app I had recently installed, entered some data. In seconds, I found that this particular wine, from the Famille Perrin, was intended to sell for $22, and thus the $55 price on the wine list was a bit high - especially since the app I used said the average price for the wine was $20.

It is this aspect of modern technology that has created a lot of headaches for restaurateurs and has empowered wine lovers with information that previously was trade-secret stuff.

One of the tricks of the restaurant trade is to carry wines that are obscure, on the theory that a) most consumers won’t know a Picpoul from an Arneis, and b) they therefore won’t know how much the obscure-sounding wine should sell for. Which leads to higher margins than the wine ought to sell for.

Example: The 2011 Perrin Vinsobres designated “Les Cornuds,” at $20, sounds a lot pricier than it should. A consumer knowing the wine isn’t more than $22 at retail could assume the average price for it in a restaurant should be about $45 - not $55 - and might opt out of wine for the evening.

In most scenarios, the consumer who doesn’t use the Internet simply buys the wine and pays more than would be a normal markup. But in a growing number of cases, diners are using, at their tables, various wine apps, most of them free, to determine average retail pricing for wines about which they know little or nothing.

I have tried various apps and find them all somewhat helpful, though occasionally some are dumbed-down. Included are apps called Delectable, Winequest, Hellovino, Drync, Vivino and Plonk.

The app I found the easiest to use (without the need to answer questions about the kind of food I prefer, the kind of wine I prefer, or any other information some of the apps request) is Wine Searcher.

It is a truncated version of the popular website www.wine-searcher.com that has become the go-to site for wine collectors who already know a bit about wine and simply want to get further information about one, especially the availability of hard-to-find wines and the prices for obscure wines.

The site also works for popular wines, but the lower the price of the wine, the more the first few pages of searches are nearly identical, except for the locations where you can find such wines.

Say you ask to see the suggested retail price of 2013 La Crema Pinot Gris from Monterey County. You’d see that the lowest U.S. price is $14.98 at a shop in New Jersey and the highest is $19.99 in Mountain View. And that the average national price is $17.

The app has a nice feature - as do other apps: the ability to simply take a picture of the label and find out details of the wine.

When I took a picture of the Vinsobres, above, the iPhone instantly came up with the fact that the Total Wine store in Norwalk (Southern Calilfornia) had this wine for $14.99 and that the average score of the wine in various magazines was 83 points.

The other apps I have used seem to do some of the same things, but I have been using Wine Searcher online for years and find that the web view for consumers is the simplest - and the app follows along that same approach.

Next time you see an obscure wine, use the Internet to find out what it should sell for.

Sonoma County resident Dan Berger publishes “Vintage Experiences,” a weekly wine newsletter. Write to him at winenut@gmail.com