Bottle Raiders Wants To Be The Vivino For Premium Spirits

Bottle Raiders, an AI-powered app dubbed the Vivino for fine spirits, is touted to offer instant ... [+] access to expert reviews and ratings by scanning liquor bottle labels.

AI is increasingly turning up on all our apps and devices, and everyday there seems to be a new task ready for personal virtual assistants.

The latest assignment: Would you like to catalog your premium spirits just using the camera function on your phone? Now you might be able to with the debut of a new app from Bottle Raiders, a spirits review website founded by entrepreneur and media personality Dan Abrams. The app is now available for download on the Apple App and Google Play stores.

Pitched as a Vivino-like app for spirits (instead of wine, which is Vivino’s forte), the app leans on AI-powered image recognition technology to provide users with instant access to comprehensive reviews and ratings for a wide range of liquors. Those reviews are all linked back to Bottle Raiders and its global aggregator of fine liquor reviews. With the app, users can scan both the labels and barcodes of liquor bottles to access detailed ratings sourced from industry experts and trusted critics.

“What has been missing in the spirits app world is the ability to scan the label of a bottle and see the reviews. Vivino already conquered this with wine and user generated reviews, but there is nothing quite comparable in the spirits space, and rather than just user generated reviews, we are aggregating the experts,” Abrams tells Forbes. “We think of it as the intersection between tech and ratings, making the largest database of reviews easily accessible through broad scanning functionality across all spirits.”

Abrams originally launched Bottle Raiders in 2020 based on an inability to find a single place for a variety of spirits reviews.

“As a relatively new bourbon drinker, I found myself going to three or four different specialty websites to get any sort of comprehensive sense of how a bourbon was regarded by various critics,” Abrams recalls. “So we launched a website that aggregated these reviews and then assigns one average score—similar to Rotten Tomatoes for movies. Building off the success of the site, we recently purchased a fine spirits events company and have invested in building out this AI driven app to make our reviews/content more accessible to consumers and industry leaders alike.”

The AI-image recognition technology behind Bottle Raiders is designed to enhance the user experience by quickly analyzing the visual data from the bottles, including text and design elements, to match them with the app's extensive database. This feature allows users to avoid the often cumbersome task of manually searching for a spirit's review.

"Liquor bottles often have very different shapes and label styles, so our AI technology was designed to specifically match up the style and text of what's on the label to our database,” Abrams explains. “Through our business subscription, these venues can scan their bottles into the app so that users can search what is available nearby. We see this as a great marketing asset for brands, liquor store and bar owners who want to attract a passionate clientele.”

In addition to its scanning feature, the app encourages users to save their own tasting notes, view fellow user ratings and stay updated on spirits news and trends. It also offers a proprietary “Raided Score,” which averages all available reviews into a single, easy-to-understand rating. Abrams says this score aims to provide a balanced assessment by converting different critics’ ratings into a standardized scale.

"Fine spirits have more savvy consumers than ever, and yet it can still be intimidating to figure out which products are worth buying," Abrams says.

Abrams admits that developing the app’s AI-powered scanning feature posed certain challenges, particularly in ensuring the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the database.

"The AI is only as good as the database of reviews it can reference," he notes. “If a bottle is missing from our database, the scanner will not pick it up and with the explosion of fine liquor brands, inevitably we will have missed some.”

To narrow this gap, in the months leading up to the launch, Abrams says the Bottle Raiders team was “scouring liquor stores around the country, taking note of any bottles missing from the database.”

“We're now at the point where we have thousands of aggregated spirit reviews that cover the vast majority of what someone would see in a liquor store or read about in reviews,” Abrams says. “With that said, this will be a never ending project where we will constantly be augmenting our database, adding new releases and bottles.”

Looking ahead, Abrams envisions Bottle Raiders becoming a significant player in the fine-spirits industry, not just through its app and website but also through in-person experiences made possible through recent acquisitions like the Whiskey Washback and Arte Agave tasting festivals.

“Whether the entry point to our company is through our original videos, written content, events or ratings, our multi-platform approach is building out a community of enthusiasts,” Abrams says. “And since we don't just want the community to be online, the acquisition of a highly successful experiential events business was an important step for us.”

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