Snooth, one of the largest wine ratings and reviews sites on the web, recently launched a $4.99 iPhone app to satisfy the neediest of wine enthusiasts.

Snooth Wine Pro [iTunes link] incorporates image-based wine searching, which allows users to scan wine labels to learn more about or purchase a particular wine of interest. In fact, there's a whole slew of options once you've scanned a wine label, including the ability to:

See which nearby stores have the wine in stock.

Compare prices, and view maps and directions to nearby stores

Add the wine to your Wishlist or Virtual Cellar.

Purchase the wine online through the global Snooth retail network, which includes more than 11,000 merchants.

Post your review or read reviews from experts and other Snooth users.

Browse for similar wines by winery, region, or varietal.

The image recognition technology is powered by TinEye, a reverse-image search engine, and uses specialized digital image fingerprinting to find image matches. Snooth's Engagement Manager Jesse Chemtob explained, "Since most wine labels are on a curved surface, it can also find images that are slightly rotated, warped, cropped, blurred, have skewed colors, or those that are taken in poorly lit areas."







Snooth catalogs 2.2 million reviews and 1.2 million wines on the site, making it the world's largest wine database. Of those wines, 820,000 are searchable via the image recognition technology.

If you're not quite ready to make a whopping $4.99 purchase for an iPhone app, check out the free, ad-supported version [iTunes link] also launched last week in the iTunes Store. Chemtob noted that it was "totally rebuilt from the ground up" and includes all of the features of its premium version, except the oh-so-cool image-based wine search functionality. You can still use the location-based store search (with maps and directions), purchase wine, view your wines and reviews offline, and browse by color, price, region, and varietal. That's still a win for most wine lovers. Android and BlackBerry fans, jealous yet? I thought so. Chemtob said that Snooth is happy to launch apps on other mobile operating systems if the numbers are right: "Pending adoption, engagement, and user support we’d love to roll out to other devices and platforms in the near future."

For all of you would-be purchasers who are still wary of the price tag, check out Snooth's current contest. The company is giving away one brand new iPhone 4 loaded with Snooth Wine Pro and six promo codes to download the Snooth Wine Pro app for free. Enter by September 30 via Twitter or by signing up for Snooth and referring your friends.

Let us know what wine apps you're using to find, review and purchase wine in the comments below.