Wine Web 2.0
update, Spring 2008 - This page hasn’t been updated in a long time (kinda like the site itself). Life has been busy and disorganized for several months and I haven’t had the time to continue to evaluate the services listed below. I’ve spent a little more time with each off them and none of them give me exactly what I want. There are a few new contenders, notably Snooth which has a fast, clean interface but limited features, and the Open Wine Consortium, which has the potential to become the Facebook of the wine world. I’m still exploring many of the sites listed here but the two that I find myself returning to most often are CellarTracker (which I reluctantly have to admit has no competitor when it comes to tasting note comparisons) and the new OWC.
This page started out as a three separate blog posts but I decided to make it a static page so: 1) it will always be readily available for viewing and ongoing comments; and 2) I can easily continue to update it as I spend more time with the sites reviewed.
For whatever reason, some of us wine nerds like to obsessively track our wine experiences and we have extensive listings of wines purchased, tasted, rated, stored and commented on. For me, theses tendencies also include the urge to share my experiences and listings with the world. I suppose it may be somewhat narcissistic and I am certain that it’s at least a little bit compulsive. I also know it’s not uncommon because otherwise we wouldn’t have so many wine blogs and resources available online. I use Filemaker Pro to track the wines I buy and taste and I use my Wordpress blog to publish some of that information but the two programs are mutually exclusive. What would be better is an online database that I can access from anywhere that also easily integrates with my blog. What would be even better is a multi-user site that also includes the ability to interact with other wine-o’s by sharing tasting notes and ratings, commenting on each other’s content and having more in-depth conversations in a public forum.
With that in mind I have been searching the web for Wine Web 2.0 applications. I don’t expect to find my ideal app but if I did it would look like this:
- A comprehensive and consolidated database of wines that is easy to add to and search.
- The ability to read multiple tasting notes for a single wine.
- The ability to easily add my own tasting notes and/or rating to any wine already listed.
- A library or archive of articles and/or blog posts that I can contribute to or comment on.
- A discussion forum with links to all of the above.
- The ability to publish my tasting notes, wine listing or blog articles publicly so that non-members can also view them.
- The site shouldn’t be too blatantly commercial.
(I know many others would have including pricing and/or buying information but those are less important to me. I do need to know how much a wine costs, even if it’s a range, but I prefer to buy from my usual local sources or direct from the winery when local is not an option.)
Gleefully, I discovered many more community wine sites than I expected. Sadly, no one of them is perfect and most are sorely lacking. Below is a listing with some very brief first impressions. On most of of the sites a simple search or just a few minutes browsing was enough to turn me away. I started out by doing a search for a popular mass market winery, “Cline.” On many of the sites, the initial search results, coupled with my immediate impressions of the interface and usability, was enough to turn me away. The sites that managed to draw me in for a more extensive look naturally ended up getting more attention.
TastyDrop.com
Very attractive interface. An empty blog. Search results included a single wine not by Cline. Presumably, the one result was because the tasting note included the word “inclined.” Bye bye.
MyWineCritic.com
Maudlin interface. Forum with two topics and two posts. No search box available on the home page so I clicked on the “Regions” menu link which brought up a list of regions. I selected “United States” and the result was “There are currently no wines listed in this category.” Are they kidding? Buh Bye!
WineDiary.com
Decent but uninspired interface. No Cline wines listed. I click on the “Region” link and get 92 search results with wines listed from all over the world. Clicking on other links (Vintage, Producer, Rating, etc.) also shows 92 wines listed. Apparently, all the links do is change the order of the listing of a mere 92 wines. See ya.
Woochi Wine Encyclopedia
Awkward and occasionally confusing interface. Search shows 1 Winery listing with partial street address and an incorrect web site url, 3 individual Cline wines listed but no details about any of them. Browsing by region is cumbersome and after four links I get no results from Sonoma California. Wouldn’t wanna be ya!
WARPA!
In terms of text style and page layout the site is simple and readable but I have no idea what it is or how it works. There is no apparent search capability except a link to the aforementioned Woochi. This is a thoroughly confusing site with piss poor navigation although it may be a result of Mac/broswer incompatibility — some pages have minimal navigation links while others have some improperly displaying tabs. There are some obvious language difficulties for this english speaker — browsing by styles one comes across some odd terms such as “Melted in balance” and “dry oxidatif.” Most of the wine tasting events and groups listed are in Belgium. Moving on.
Vinolin.com
Although it has user registration this is more of a wine blog aggregator. It may be good for searching wine blogs but that’s not what I was looking for. Gone.
Cork’d
Presumably they mean “corked” as in “closed with” rather than the more obvious meaning of tainted… Very decent interface but the simplicity is almost too much so. I hate the generic bottle icon they use for all wine listings but that’s really a minor personal complaint. There’s a site blog with very little and infrequently updated content. Many Cline wines listed but a lot of duplicates and most have no rating or notes. No forum. Has potential but it ain’t there yet and that’s too late. Still looking.
BottleCount.com
Mostly just a place to list the contents of your wine cellar. It’s got a general forum but no significant interactive features, really. Ho hum.
WineDemocracy.com
Very cool, simple interface. Wine listings are easily and quickly searched (by producer) but the search results are almost useless. You can’t click directly on a wine name for more information. I searched for a well known winery, Cline Cellars and found 33 wines listed. Many listed wines had no ratings or notes, one had 5 ratings and several had 1-3 ratings. Oddly, you cannot click on a wine name for more information but each listing includes icon/links titled VIEW, WRITE and ADD. Clicking VIEW on a wine with 5 ratings shows a page that doesn’t show any more information than the very brief listing except price. The words “Composite Details” are visible but nothing more. Clicking on WRITE brings up the option to fill out a pre-designed tasting form or add a simple text comment. Clicking ADD allows you to save quantity, source, price, purchase date and a note to your own cellar. There are the beginnings of a forum but not much. I like the simplicity of this site so much that I was hoping it would be more useful. No blog(s) or articles. So long.
OpenBottles.com
Lovely interface despite the fact that the tab links don’t display properly. A search for “Cline” reveals lots of wine listings but zero ratings or comments. Browsing by Wineries shows a mere 10 recently rated wineries with no apparent way to view more. A minimal site blog (no user blogs) and no forums. I’m outta there.
update - Sagi, from openbottles.com has posted a response in the comments to this post.
WineFetch.com
Very nice, simple, attractive, fast loading interface. Very fast search results and with lots of Cline wines found (I didn’t count and the total wasn’t included). I especially like that a price range is included in the listing: listed wines can be purchased from multiple sources at a variety of prices. Very nice feature, indeed. Another helpful feature is the ability to create shortcut links to your favorite sources. Searching and browsing by multiple methods (tags, varietal, region) are fast and easy. You can also create wine alerts but I haven’t seen how that works yet. It has a cellar tracking feature which is something I haven’t addressed yet because this is not a feature need. I want to track wines I have tasted and rated — I do have about a hundred wines in my basement but I don’t need help keeping track of them. There are a few minor negatives: their blog hasn’t been updated since September (!), my ratings on a wine wasn’t saved the first few times I tried (it eventually took so I’m not sure what the problem was), there don’t appear to be a lot of users yet and for some odd reason they have a cheese pairing section that just bugs me by being there. I suppose matching wine to cheese is hard enough that many people might appreciate it but to me it begs the question, why stop with cheese?
I think this site is a serious contender IF they can attract enough users to create a sense of community and I’d like to see some blog activity. I don’t think any kind of community oriented web site can exist without some substantial interactivity — not just between users but also between users and their hosts. I wish Steve Goodman and WineFetch.com well and I will continue to explore the site.
logabottle.com
Pleasant, usable interface. Good listing of Cline wines but slow-ish loading search results. I hate that a search for “unti” (as in Unti Vineyards) gets results including “until” — searches are based on strings rather than whole words which, in some cases, makes searching useless. There doesn’t seem to be an way to view more than one person’s notes on a given wine. When I add a wine to my log I have the opportunity to fill out an extensive form (only 5 fields are required) but I see no way to find out what others might have written about this wine. They’ve got a google map feature which by default, as soon as I added a wine to my log, appears with a pointer to the location of the wine’s source. This adds nothing to my experience except slowness. The Wine News feature is ok but I don’t need it since none of it is original content. I already get the bulk of my wine news through various web site and blog subscriptions in an rss reader and I don’t need a site that aggregates news. They have a blog but it’s not easily found and hasn’t been updated in 3 months. Each user has a discussion board but I wish each wine had one or that there were some general public forums. Overall, a lot of interesting features but they just don’t gel with my expectations or needs.
update - The Wine News feature on their home page is a bit of a turnoff. It has the look and feel of the site so if you don’t look closely you might think you’re clicking on links to internal blog articles when you’re really being sent to other sites. That’s not so bad by itself and to their credit they do indicate as much by including a Source reference with each blurb but the implementation is misleading. Basically, when you click on the title of a news article you’re taken to another logabottle.com page that has nothing more than a link to the original article and the opportunity to add a comment. I’m sorry but if I want to comment on an article I’ll do it on the original site that authored the article, if allowed. This feels a little bit like hijacking content.
WineLog.net
Very nice look. Simple, colorful in a red kind of way. The home page features blog articles by a few different people. At first, I thought this included blog articles from users like me but after spending more time I don’t see a way to have a blog of my own — too bad. Still, it’s nice that they have multiple blog authors regularly posting (I haven’t read much so can’t speak to the usefulness or appeal of the articles). The first really impressive feature is this: when I entered the word “cline” in the search box, almost immediately, a drop-down menu appeared with four or five specific Cline wines listed. I could search for my original term or select one of the more narrow searches. Nice. Even better: When adding a wine to their database as soon as you start typing a list of potential matches that are already in the database appears. They have a wine recommendation feature, which I like, but I haven’t tested how accurate it is. With only two wines in my log I was already receiving recommendations — presumably, the more wines in my log, the better the recommendations. I love that I can see other users ratings and comments about wines in my log. Unfortunately, I don’t see any forums. If they added user forums and the ability for users to have their own personal blogs hosted this would be a hard site to beat for features.
As I add wines to my log, I notice that anyone can edit a wine listing in the master database. I like the feature but I wonder if it will be subject to abuse. I was able to easily add some detail to a wine that was listed but it would be just as easy for any other user to undo my changes.
update
The more I use this site the more I like it’s interface. It’s more graphics heavy than I usually like but it’s fast loading and there is a clean simplicity to the overall look. The few ads that managed to sneak past my adblocking software were reasonably sized and placed so as not to offend. I wish the comment text was larger but that’s something I’m seeing so often that I think it says something about the condition of my aging eyes.
I wish they had more — and more frequent — blog articles.
Many wines have a Buy Now button and they link to many different retail sites. It’s a nice feature but would be even better if it worked more along the lines of wine-searcher.com or winezap.com with multiple sources for each bottle.
I love the five star rating system and how easily it works. It’s much like Netflx’s movie rating. Any time you see a wine listed, whether it’s on someone else’s log or in search results there are five stars visible. The star colors are white for unrated wines, red for average ratings and yellow for my own rating (which can be updated at any time).
I was confused by the appearance of both “Comments” and “Loggers’ Notes” for each wine and it took a trip to the FAQ page to clear it up. Comments are always public, may be added by anyone whether a member or not and cannot be edited. Members and visitors can also add multiple comments to any wine. Loggers’ Notes are different in that only members can have them, they can only have one note per wine and supposedly notes can be made private but I didn’t see how. Notes can be edited or deleted.
There’s another user comment feature (on the bottom right of a users wine log page) that is similar to the MySpace comment feature which I’ve always thought was problematic. It’s not really possible to have a dialogue since there’s no threading — it’s just one long list of unrelated comments (in theory, that is… I haven’t actually seen it used for more than one or two comments). In this case it’s also hard to find.
I think their overall implementation of comments and notes is convoluted and potentially redundant. I’m not sure what a better implementation would look like but what I want to do is 1) keep track of my private tasting notes, 2) publish public tasting notes or longer articles on more general wine subjects, 3) add comments to other users published articles.
I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it is I’m looking for in a wine community site but I think the site that figures out how to incorporate more substantial inter-user activity will have a serious advantage over everything else out there right now.
CellarTracker
This is the behemoth of wine sites as far as community tasting notes and ratings go. The interface, while somewhat improved since I first looked at it a couple years ago is still quite homely. It’s wine database is vast and the number of users was 28,750 on my last look - that dwarfs most of the other wine sites combined. No other site returns so many search results on not only Cline wines but even some of my favorite hard to find wines (from Unti and Meeker to name two). This is the hands down clear winner in terms of volume but I wish it were more attractive and included more than just tasting notes and cellar tracking.
Summary
The one feature that is lacking in most of these wine sites is an easy and convenient way to incorporate tasting notes and wine data into published blog posts and articles. I’m torn between three: WineFetch.com, WineLog.net and CellarTracker. No one of them does everything I want. The first two come closest in terms of features but the last has the more substantial volume of users, information and eyeballs (presumably).
Since many of these sites will be continually changing and updating I will continue to monitor them and will update this page with additional observations.
I hope I didn’t miss any other significant wine sites — if so, I hope someone will alert me in the comments. I also hope that people who use (or are associated with) any of these sites will add comments. If you previously added a comment to one of the original posts feel free to duplicate them here and I will respond in kind.
3 Responses to “Wine Web 2.0”
Posted by: Wine Web 2.0 Roundup Update: A closer look at Winelog.net | Winefoolery - 03/04/2007
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Posted by: Betsey - 05/25/2007
Hi Erwin,
I apologize for sending this through the comments, but I don’t see your contact info anywhere on the website. I’d like to know if you are interested in beta-testing a new wine web 2.0 website that is launching in a few weeks. If so, please contact me for more details.
Betsey
Posted by: Erwin Dink - 05/25/2007
I just signed up and will look it over when my login info arrives.
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