Today, the wine world was abuzz with news that VinTank, the wine industry’s leading social-media monitoring platform, had partnered with Delectable, the mobile wine app.

If you’re in the wine industry, you should be familiar with VinTank. As Alder Yarrow eloquently explained last year, “Any winery in the world that does not have a free account on this service, and does not spend at least an hour or two every week using it, is dumber than a bag of hammers.”

VinTank’s software enables wineries to “listen” for mentions of their brands on various social media platforms — and then engage, in real-time, with their customers. (Until today’s announcement, the VinTank platform monitored Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare.) Vintank captures about 1 million conversations about wine each day. It’s an incredible tool.

With mobile apps, though, VinTank’s founder and chief strategy officer, Paul Mabray, has long been unimpressed. On several occasions (most recently, in April 2012), Paul took a comprehensive look at wine apps – and just couldn’t find any worth supporting.

So that’s what jumped out to me about this story. The iTunes store has hundreds of wine apps. Why Delectable? Why now?

“We chose Delectable for three key reasons,” explained Mabray, while detailing the partnership with me.

“They aligned with our vision for connecting wineries and consumers; they really understand wine and the key use case for a wine consumer — recording your experience; and they understood social as an app better than any other app in history.

“What I mean,” he went onto say, “is that they’ve woven social tools throughout the app — friends, feeds, etc. — but especially organizing influencers to help consumers follow them and be influenced by their suggestions.”

VinTank knows tech – just check out the bio of the firm’s chief technology officer, James Jory.

So this endorsement of Delectable strikes me as a very big deal. Just as CellarTracker left other cellar management platforms in the dust a few years ago, it looks like Delectable is starting to pull away from its competitors in the wine app space.