DSBPI was in Las Vegas and used an amazing Tablet PC application at the restaurant Aureole (at Mandalay Bay) which excited us about the potential for this technology.

Aureole has over 9,000 bottles of wine in its 42-foot high, glass enclosed wine cellar. When we asked for a wine list, we received a tablet PC connected wirelessly to a local network and running a piece of custom software that was both incredibly easy to use and perhaps the only way to effectively capture the breadth of the collection. We were able to search wines by type (red, white, Pinot, Merlot, etc.) country/region, food pairings, featured wines, producer name and so forth. The tool also has a streaming video feed from the wine cellar itself where you can watch the attendant rappel down the glass tower ala Mission Impossible with your bottle in hand.

The software enables you to bookmark wines as you go through the list and then view a "shopping cart" of your selections to be discussed with the sommelier. We imagine that from the sommelier's perspective, keeping his inventory updated on the Tablet saves hours of work.

Everyone at our table was in love with the HP device (very light, excellent handwriting recognition when searching for instance "Sea Smoke Pinot Noir") and those previously skeptical of the Tablet PC concept ("When would I use it?") were brainstorming new applications.

Note: A fun thing to do with the wine list is to sort by price so you can ogle the $38,000 bottles.