Cork vs Oeni: two wine cellar apps, different priorities

Oeni and Cork overlap in a few places. Both track your cellar. Both tell you when your wines are ready. Both have a free tier and a paid upgrade around €5/month.

But they have different ideas about what a wine app should do after you've added your collection.

What Oeni does well

Oeni's main thing is playing sommelier. You tell it what you're eating or what the occasion is, and it recommends a wine from your cellar. It has over 5,000 food and wine pairings built in, so if you're making lamb shanks on a Wednesday and want to know what to open, Oeni has an opinion.

The drinking window tracking is solid. Oeni monitors aging phases and tells you which wines are ready now. It also does financial tracking: purchase prices, real-time market valuations, capital gains, monthly spending. If you care about what your cellar is worth, it covers that.

There's a database of 500,000+ wines you can search when adding wines. An Excel import option if you're coming from a spreadsheet. And it works on iOS, Android, and web.

Where Oeni and Cork diverge

Oeni is built around recommendations. "What should I drink tonight?" is the question it's trying to answer. The food pairings and occasion-based suggestions are the core of the experience.

Cork is built around a different question: "What do I actually like, and what am I learning about my own taste?"

That difference shapes everything else.

Oeni tells you what to pair with dinner. Cork tells you that you've been rating Pommard higher than any other appellation for the past three months, or that your scores drop on wines older than 2015. Oeni gives you advice. Cork gives you self-knowledge.

What Cork does that Oeni doesn't

The biggest gap is palate analytics. Cork builds a palate profile from your ratings, broken down by appellation, vintage, grape, and producer. These patterns show up automatically as you taste. You don't go looking for them. After a couple dozen tastings, you have a real map of your preferences that gets sharper over time. Oeni doesn't do anything like this.

Label scanning is the other big one. Cork uses AI vision to read any wine label from a phone photo. Point your camera at the label, and Cork extracts producer, vintage, region, appellation, grape, and color. Oeni has you searching a database of 500,000 wines instead. That sounds like a lot, but if your wine isn't in there, you're stuck. Small producers, unusual regions, anything slightly off the beaten path. Cork's AI reads whatever is on the label, so any wine with a label can be added.

Cork also has a social side that Oeni lacks. You can add friends, browse each other's cellars, tag who was at a tasting, and compare how you rated the same wine. If you enjoy wine with other people (and most of us do), that matters.

Where Oeni has the edge

Food pairings. Cork doesn't do this. If picking the right wine for dinner is something you think about a lot, Oeni is built for it.

Financial tracking is more developed in Oeni too. Real-time valuations, capital gains monitoring, spending analysis. Cork is adding pricing data soon, but right now Oeni is ahead on that.

How they compare

Both track your cellar with stock levels and drinking windows. Both work on phones and on the web.

For adding wines, Cork has AI label scanning. Oeni has database search and Excel import. Cork also has CellarTracker CSV import.

For tasting notes, Cork has a continuous rating slider, aroma chips, and notes that build into a palate profile. Oeni has basic tasting records but no palate analytics.

Oeni has 5,000+ food pairings and occasion-based recommendations. Cork doesn't do food pairings.

Cork has friends, shared tastings, and palate comparisons. Oeni is individual-only.

Oeni has real-time market valuations. Cork is adding pricing data soon.

Pricing differs. Oeni Plus is €4.99/month. Cork Plus is 2 CHF/month. Both have a free tier.

Which one fits?

If you want a sommelier in your pocket that tells you what to open for dinner and tracks what your cellar is worth, Oeni does that well.

If you want to scan labels fast, build up a record of what you've tasted, and actually see patterns in your own taste over time, Cork does that. The palate analytics and the social features are the things Oeni doesn't have, and they're what make Cork more useful the longer you use it.

You could use both, but they're close enough in price and scope that most people will pick one. Try them and see which question you find yourself asking more: "What should I open tonight?" or "What do I like?"