Scan a barcode or label from Discover

The scanner on the Discover tab now handles both barcodes (UPC/EAN) and full wine labels. Snap a label to find the wine, or scan a barcode to jump straight to the bottle detail. If we don’t recognize what we see, tap Add it and we’ll save the scan so the next person finds it faster.

We had two scanner experiences in the app and they didn’t quite talk to each other. There was a barcode scanner, and there was a label scanner, but moving fluidly between them — “scan this bottle for me, whatever’s easiest” — wasn’t a thing. Most bottles have both a label you can read and a barcode somewhere on the back. Now you open Discover, scan whichever is closer to the camera, and the app figures out which one it got.

Tap the scan icon in the Discover header. Point it at a barcode or a label. If it’s a barcode, we look it up by UPC against our wine-vintage database; if it’s a label, we run the smart label scanner with the new candidate picker. Either way, you end up at the same wine detail page.

Barcodes on wine bottles are interesting — the same UPC sometimes covers multiple vintages from the same producer (the bottle gets a new label every year, but the barcode under the back label is shared). When a UPC scan matches a wine, we surface the right libation and let you pick the vintage if multiple years share the code.

The no-match path matters as much as the match path. If we don’t have the bottle, tap Add it on the no-match screen and we pre-fill what we got from the scan as a starting point for adding the wine to the database. That seeds it for everyone — your scan becomes the basis for someone else’s auto-match next week.