Webware

We first covered wine review site and social network Snooth in July (Whine about Wine with Snooth). Since then, the site has been improved quite a bit. Its most interesting feature, from a Web 2.0 perspective, is its unusually useful search engine. Snooth parses nearly natural-language search queries about wines and breaks them into wine-specific components, like type (white, red, etc.), varietal (Merlot, Cabernet, Shiraz), region, vintage, and user tags. It knows that "cab" is a synonym for "Cabernet Sauvignon," under varietal and that "BBQ" and "barbecue" refer to the same user tag.

Talk like a wino. Snooth gets it.

It adds up to a very smooth experience, and the site's social network features round it out. You can find people who like the same wines you like, for example, and track their rating and purchasing of new bottles. And, as before, the site will recommend wines to you based on collaborative filtering: you tell it what you like, and it finds wines with similar user-rated qualities.

The company recently closed a $1M round of angel funding, adding to its previous funding of about $300,000. CEO Philip James says the site now has 2 million wine reviews, which is double what it had when we last looked at it. Most of the reviews come from Snooth's commerce partners, which is also where the company makes its money: every time a user clicks through to a retailer link, Snooth gets a referral fee.

In the past couple of years Woot.com has grown from a five-days-a-week deals site to a veritable three-store conglomerate that features a new deal every day, and a wine and T-shirt spinoffs. Today they announced their partnership with Yahoo, as part of Yahoo Shopping for a new co-branded site called Sellout.Woot. The site will serve up a completely different offering than the standard Woot store, and carry with it a small amount of Yahoo branding.

The only way to access the site is via Yahoo Shopping's front page, in what Yahoo is calling the "Deal of the Day." Like the current Woot setup, deals will get refreshed at midnight EST. You can point your browser to Sellout.Woot.com for the time being, although when the site truly goes "live" you'll be re-directed to the front door of Yahoo Shopping. There's also a widget for your MyYahoo page that will update alongside the site's RSS feed.

Since it's just a partnership, Yahoo users will still need to register with Woot to buy the item--there is no cross sharing of user accounts between the two companies. This is a big win for Woot, although current Woot users are likely to feel a twinge of angst at possibility of deals selling out faster with a larger crowd of users that make their way onto Woot's other sales properties.

[via Digg]

The front door of Yahoo Shopping now features the 'Deal of the Day' from the folks at Woot.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Snooth is a wine review and recommendation service that launched early last month. The idea is simple--provide a few simple ratings of wines you like or dislike, and Snooth will serve up ones it thinks you'll enjoy. It runs on a similar system to the one you find on Netflix, with one to five star ratings, and a bevy of user reviews. The system currently has a listing of over 1.5 million wines, and if you can't find one you've had or liked in the past, you can simply add it.

In addition to showing user rants and raves, Snooth pulls professional reviews from online publications, which it pools into separate ratings. Each wine's page also features the option to buy it from one of the partnered wine dealers, which will jump you off Snooth's site, and onto their online store. In most cases, I found that the deals on the partner sites weren't that much better than the prices at my local wine dealer, but it's nice to have that option.

There's also a friends system, with user profiles that let you see what your Snooth buddies have been rating on the site, and an RSS feed in case you feel like keeping tabs in your favorite feed reader.

One of the only problems I ran into with Snooth was its segmentation of wine years. Since many a connoisseur will tell you that a lot can happen to a wine from year to year, it's important to attribute a review of a wine to the correct year, which Snooth handles by making different product pages for each vintage. This is handy, but it simultaneously scatters the reviews. Now take someone who has had a mass market wine like Yellow Tail's Shiraz once or twice a year for the past three years. The wine might have tasted similar all three times, but they're not likely to go in and write three different reviews--especially if the experience was nearly identical each time. To justify that, it would make a lot more sense for each wine to get its own page, and have an option to filter the reviews and commerce links by year.

There is a workaround to this, by sorting via vintage in Snooth's search filters, but it's still no easy task to browse other vintages and reviews from any old product page.

I like Snooth. I think it's simple to use, and does its job. After just five ratings you start getting recommendations, which is handy. As for actually purchasing wine online, I think I'll stick to my favorite.

Related:
An eBay for wine collectors
Embrace your inner wine snob

Rate wines you've had and get recommendations for wines Snooth thinks you'll like.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Half Moon Bay, Calif.--The best wines in the world aren't at Trader Joe's, it turns out. They are in some collector's cellar.

"The better the quality of the wine, the harder it is to get," said Stephen Bachmann, CEO of Vinfolio, a wine trading/collecting site at the Think Tomorrow Today conference taking place in Half Moon Bay, California this week. "The best wines that get released end up in the cellars of collectors. Private cellars have more supplies of these wines than the trade does."

Vinfolio essentially acts like an eBay for oenophiles, who turn out to be just as crazy and compulsive as collectors in other fields. Wine owners list the contents of their cellars on the service. They can then sell, buy or trade with other collectors. If you start out as a California collector, but have switched to French wines, you can start selling the old bottles to pay for the new habit.

Vinfolio gives away its desktop software but takes a cut on transactions.

The company also provides data on estimated prices for your wines, current auctions and other information on the wine world. In other words, the dizzying array of data that makes rotisserie baseball addictive to its adherents is now part of wine collecting.

Subscribers are expected to grow to 21,000 people in 2007. Revenues will likely reach $17 million this year. The company is only three years old. In 2005, revenues came to $2.4 million. The average wine traded on the site sells for $100 to $125 with some bottles selling for several thousand.

It's a classy hobby too. When was the last time you were excited about being invited into someone's Pez cellar?

Bottletalk

(Credit: Bottletalk)

If you're unsure what to bring to your neighbor's smorgasbord, Bottletalk might help you find a wine fine enough for the occasion. This wine-rating community lets you set up a profile, add and rate wines, and network with fellow members. Descriptive tags identify flavors such as citrus or tobacco, and most of the members seem to know a bit about what they're sipping. One member describes a certain Spanish Rioja as a "Very correct wine, but poor in creativity."

Robert Parker I'm not. I added a Two-Buck Chuck Chardonnay to my list of wines just to be, well, incorrect. Sold by the case at Trader Joe's, where it's formally known as Charles Shaw, Two-Buck Chuck is ubiquitous at budget cocktail parties, and, given the price, it isn't vinegar. But I'm a little nervous that people on Bottletalk will flag that shwag for removal (although there's no obvious option on the site to do so). To be fair, I added some more respectable Sauvignon Blancs as well. Bottletalk's least expensive category is $10 and lower. I'd like to break it down a bit more. How about a "cheap wines with dignity" section for people who don't want to splurge on a bottle they end up disliking?

Bottlenotes

(Credit: Bottlenotes)

Similar to Bottletalk, Bottlenotes lets you create a virtual wine cellar of favorites. This online wine club offers more to do than Bottletalk does, such as creating a Personal Taste Profile, but it doesn't put member picks and relationships at the front and center.

WineLog

(Credit: WineLog)

WineLog appears to have both more members and more wines than Bottletalk and Bottlenotes. As you rate wines over time, WineLog suggests vintages that seem to fit your tastes. You can even send your selections to a mobile phone, export them to a spreadsheet, or view them in a print-ready list. Unfortunately, once I loaded the My Wine Log section, I couldn't figure out how to add wines to it; I had to browse wines to find an Add Wine link.

I'm surprised there aren't more rating sites for oenophiles already, especially given the proliferation of wine blogs, wikis, and podcasts shown off at the recent Wine 2.0 conference. I doubt the world really needs more social networking services, but these not-necessarily-professional wine recommendation services could make my party shopping less stressful. I'm inviting some friends who live around the country to join Bottletalk so that we can share our similar tastes. They're probably most likely to use Bottletalk even though it has fewer features than WineLog. The design and simplicity of Bottletalk, which remains in beta testing, make it easy to use.

Cork'd

(Credit: Cork'd)

Update: Through comments to this post, I just learned about Cork'd, a great wine-rating site that launched in the spring. Cork'd enables you to rate wines, add them to your virtual cellar or shopping list, make recommendations to drinking buddies--and like Bottletalk and WineLog, subscribe to updates via RSS. Unlike Bottletalk, searches can fine-tune prices and flavors, such as Sauvignon Blancs from New Zealand for between $11 and $20. Looking for grapefruit within those results yielded nothing, although a search for only the grapefruit tag brought up 10 bottles.

If you plan to buy wine online in the United States, WineLog and Cork'd are the better bets, because Bottletalk links to a British merchant site. To make purchases, both WineLog and Cork'd connect to WineZap. WineZap lets you rate wines on a scale from 1 to 100, but it demands long reviews and lacks tagging. Somehow I find myself rating more wines with Bottletalk. Maybe that's because most of its pages display rated bottles, which tempts you to add your own.