(Forbes) - One day about seven years ago, Danish entrepreneur Heini Zachariassen found himself standing in front of an enormous wine shelf at his local supermarket and feeling, as he recalls, “stupid.” He wanted to buy a bottle of wine, but he had no idea what was considered good. All he had to go on was how fancy the labels looked.

Fresh off the success of selling a cybersecurity company to McAfee, Zachariassen had found a problem he could maybe solve with a new startup. So in 2010 he co-founded Vivino. It was one of 600 other wine apps cluttering Apple’s App Store, but it’s since prevailed to become the biggest of the lot: with 17 million registered users and 47 million ratings.

Zachariassen’s philosophy: if you can get a rating for books on Amazon and movies on IMDB, you should be able to get reviews for wine too. Vivino hopes go beyond becoming a source of recommendations, to evolving into a fully-fledged digital marketplace for wine.

To get that vision going, now six years into its growth, the company is partnering with Marsh, a supermarket chain in Ohio and India – its first such partnership. Like many partnerships between offline and digital players, the currency being exchanged is data, not money.

Most supermarkets don’t display ratings for wine because the two most established ratings sources, the newsletter by international wine maven Robert Parker and the magazine Wine Spectator, only rate a small subset of wines that often aren’t widely on sale in your average grocery store.