Your Wine Bottle Had Its Own App. Where Did It Go?

The animation was never on the bottle. It lived in Living Wine Labels, a free app Treasury Wine Estates built for 19 Crimes and several of its other labels. The company has since retired most of those experiences, and the app no longer turns up in a US App Store search. The printed label still works fine.

What the app actually did

Point a phone at a 19 Crimes bottle and the convict staring out of the label would start talking, telling you in character what he had been transported to Australia for. It launched in 2017 and ran on image recognition: the app carried a set of reference pictures, matched the label in your camera against one of them, and played the video attached to that match.

Both halves of that matter. The app only ever knew the labels its owner had loaded into it, and the videos were advertising, written and cast and paid for by the brand. By the maker’s own count it passed five million downloads, which for a piece of bottle marketing is a real achievement, but a download is not a reason to keep the servers on forever.

Why it went away

Treasury Wine Estates retired the augmented reality experiences for Matua, Beringer, Lindeman’s, Squealing Pig, Wolf Blass and Gentleman’s Collection, on the reasoning that augmented reality had matured. The 19 Crimes experience outlasted the others, helped along by the Snoop Dogg bottles. Searching the US App Store for it today, though, turns up scanner apps and retailers rather than the app itself.

That is the ordinary life cycle of a brand app. It is a campaign with a budget line, not a utility, and campaigns end. Anything you stored in one leaves with it.

Three different things get called a wine app

They look similar on a shelf and behave nothing alike.

Kind	What it can read	Who it is built for
Brand app	One company’s own labels	That company’s marketing
Scanner app	Any bottle in its catalogue	You, across brands
Regulatory e-label	A QR code on EU bottles	Disclosure, by law

The third one is the newcomer and the least understood. Wine bottled in the EU since December 2023 carries a code leading to ingredients and nutrition, which is a legal disclosure rather than a pitch. We pulled that apart in what the QR code on your wine bottle tells you.

What to open instead

• Something that reads any label, not one brand’s. Scanner apps match a photo against a catalogue, so they keep working when you switch producers, countries or price brackets.
• Something that admits when it does not know. A thin catalogue is normal, and a confident wrong match is worse than a shrug. That is most of why an app cannot find your wine.
• Something that outlives a marketing calendar. If your notes on the bottles you liked sit inside a campaign, they leave when it does.

The talking label was a good piece of theatre. It was never information, and it was never yours.

AboutWine reads the bottle in your hand and explains what it is, rather than handing you a number. Download it on the App Store.

Frequently asked questions

Is the animation gone from the bottle itself?

There was never anything on the bottle to lose. The label is printed paper, and it still reads exactly as it always did. The portrait only moved inside the app, which held the video and played it over your camera view once it recognised the picture. Take the app away and you have an ordinary label with a good illustration on it.

Do other wine brands still make apps like this?

A few do, usually around a launch or a limited release, and the pattern is always the same. One company builds an app that recognises its own bottles and nobody else's. That is fine while the campaign is funded, and it is the reason these apps tend to arrive quickly and leave quietly a couple of years later.

Will a normal wine app play the video for me?

No, and it is not a gap worth complaining about. A scanner app reads the label to work out which wine you are holding, then tells you about the wine. The brand video is content the brand owns and hosts. Different job, different owner, and only one of the two is still there when the marketing budget moves on.