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I'm looking to implement a wine database API into my app. What are the most extensive and comprehensive databases to look for? I know about Wine-searcher.com API. Has anyone any experience with it and the data it outputs? What other APIs should I take a look at?

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  • Application Programming Interface. Perhaps not everyone knows what an API is. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface This may be better suited to a programing stackexchange.
    – Alaska Man
    Jul 23, 2020 at 0:09
  • Thanks for the comment. Even though I'm asking for an API, this is not really a technical question, but a general one. Most people in Stack Overflow probably wouldn't know how to answer this specific question about a wine database.
    – OMA
    Jul 24, 2020 at 1:17

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Software Engineer here (with experience in the liquor industry)... So, this is a bit of a tricky question to answer and entirely depends on what kind of data you're looking to extract. There's a lot of different data that could be extracted from different resources.

  • Item name
  • Barcode
  • Price
  • Size
  • Description
  • Tasting notes
  • Region (it was created)
  • Alcohol percentage
  • Wine scores
  • Awards
  • Grape variety
  • Winery
  • User reviews (from whatever API you are using)
  • Etc. etc.

It should also be noted that the values are entirely different, based on the vintage of the wine that is selected. Simply going by barcode won't help, as many wineries use the same barcode across multiple vintages.

There then comes the question -- what price are you trying to display? Do you want to show which locations nearby you can buy the product and their prices? Or are you trying to display the wholesaler pricing? From my experience, wholesalers will generally withhold this kind of information.

As far as wine-searcher.com, their data seems pretty good for the most part but according to their API developers page, it doesn't include everything I mentioned above. Going through wine-searcher also means 2 different APIs (Price Check API & Marketplace API), and you'd have to pay for each.

A lot of the other so-called "open source wine databases" online aren't kept up-to-date and don't contain much information. You could try contacting those in charge of CellarTracker, but I'm not sure if they have an API for use to the public.

Your question is pretty open-ended, but I think the data you are looking for (in relation to wine-searcher) would be found here. But once again, you're going to have to pay based on the amount of queries you are doing per day.

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  • Thanks for your answer. I'm looking pretty much for all the data you mentioned except price and user reviews. Barcode wouldn't be needed for the most part, since I would want to get the info from the name and vintage anyway, as you suggested. Is Wine Searcher my only option then?
    – OMA
    Jul 24, 2020 at 1:14

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