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Enology Wine Bar & Bistro in Saint James has a wine list worth working through over many visits, and guests have long asked the same questions at the table: what was that wine I loved last time, what should I eat with this, and what is on tonight. This November the bar gets its own app to answer all three. Enology is coming to the App Store and Google Play this month, free on both.
We are part of Enology, and we build and run enologywinebar.com, its online menu, its events calendar and the services behind this app. That made the brief simple: everything in the app had to come from the bar itself, live, and nothing in it could be generic.
Every pour, stamped
The heart of the app is the wine passport. A guest signs in with a mobile number, then stamps each wine as they taste it, every stamp drawn in its own color with the date it was poured. They rate it out of five glasses and keep their own tasting notes, and the cellar fills in as they go, with wax seals for finishing a chapter of the list, a country, or the North Fork wines.
A few details matter more than they look. The date on a stamp is the day at the bar, not the day on the phone, so a pour stamped on a Friday evening in Saint James never reads as Saturday. Prices never appear in the passport, because it is for tasting, not ordering. And a pour a guest loved can be shared as a card made for it, which carries the bar’s note on the wine and deliberately leaves the guest’s own private notes off.
The passport already runs on the web at passport.enologywinebar.com. The app is a native client of that same passport, so a guest’s stamps, ratings and notes are the same wherever they sign in.
The Somm
The feature we are proudest of is the Somm, a sommelier in your pocket, and you can try it on Enology’s website today. We wrote about how we built it. Ask what to eat with a wine, or what to pour with a dish, and it answers from the menu the kitchen is cooking that night. It can plan a whole evening too: three courses with a pour for each.
The Somm is written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, and we built it so it cannot invent anything. The live menu is the only source it works from. Each night’s menu goes to the model as a numbered list, the model answers by number, and the server maps every answer back to a real item and drops anything that does not match. The Somm can only recommend a dish the kitchen actually makes and a wine the bar actually pours.
Every pairing explains itself. It is an echo, where the two share a flavor, a contrast, where one cuts the other, or a wildcard, the pairing nobody orders that works. It names the one flavor that links them and gives a match score so a guest knows which to try first. And because the Somm pairs for flavor rather than checking ingredients, every answer reminds guests to tell their server about allergies or dietary needs.
Tonight at Enology
The first screen answers the question most people open a restaurant app to ask: is it open? Today shows whether the bar is open right now and until when, what is happening tonight, and what is coming up next. Reserving a table, calling, getting directions and ordering online are each one tap from there.
The menu carries every wine by the glass, half glass and bottle, the flights, the cocktails and every plate from the kitchen, with allergens marked and every wine showing how it is farmed. It is the same menu the bar edits for its website, so the app is always current, and any dish or wine is a tap away from asking the Somm what goes with it. Events lists the live music, wine classes and trivia nights, each with the details and a way to reserve.
Built for the room
We built Enology as a real native app on both platforms, not a website in a wrapper, so the list, the stamps and the seals are drawn natively and a stamp lands the moment it is tapped. Type scales with each phone’s text size setting, and the app comes in light and dark, or follows the phone.
Notifications are kept to announcements from the bar: event nights and new pours, sent rarely. The app does not ask for permission the moment it opens. It waits until a guest stamps their first wine, when there is a reason to say yes.
The menu, events and the Somm are open to everyone, with no account needed. Signing in is only for keeping a passport.
Coming this November
Enology arrives on the App Store and Google Play this month. Until then, the passport is live at passport.enologywinebar.com, and everything about the app is on Enology’s app page. Better yet, come in, pull up a chair at the bar on North Country Road, and start your cellar.
If your restaurant, bar or venue has something guests keep asking for, an app built around it can carry that experience home with them. Talk to us about what yours could be.
