Partnership Update

posted by philip in Snooth, Partnerships

I’ve mentioned many of our partners in individual posts over the weeks, but I wanted to give a summary post detailing our progress.

We have data from over 150 sources, although much of it is in the queue to be loaded in, we’ll still launch with data from over 50 sources as well as the ability for you to link directly to Wine.com, K&L and Sam’s to make a purchase. Here’s a few of the companies we have data from:

• stores including Zachy’s, Astor, Vinfolio, Wine Messenger, JJ Buckley;
• Inertia Beverage Group (which represents over 300 winery brands);
• critics and bloggers including Jose Penin (of the Spanish Penin Guide), Robin Garr (of the Wine Lovers Page);
• wine UPC specialist Gregg London;
• importers including Baron Francois, Diageo, Southern;
• tasting note sites including CellarTracker;
• wine awards including Critics Challenge, International Wine and Spirits Competition, Finger Lakes Wine Awards, San Diego Wine Awards.

By my count thats 21, so there are quite a few I’ve missed out. My apologies to those people/companies that aren’t mentioned but this wasn’t supposed to be a complete list. We’ll be live in just a few days, so users will then be able to see for themselves what data we have.

Welcome and Farewell Betsey

posted by betsey in Snooth

Since today is my last day consulting to Snooth, I wanted to take this opportunity to write a blog post. Snooth has come a long way since I started and I’m excited to see how things progress over the next few months!

I thought I’d use this post to answer a question I am frequently asked: “I live in Manhattan. There is a wine store on my corner. I don’t buy wine online. So…why would I use Snooth?”

Snooth is great for people who want to buy wine online, but it is also a useful tool for people who never have any intention of buying wine online. Here are some reasons why:

Reason #1

Your local wine store doesn’t keep track of what you’ve bought in the past. Have you ever found yourself saying “What was that wine I bought that I really liked…?” and having no way to find out? Maybe you look for that little scrap of paper you wrote it down on, but even in your Manhattan shoebox apartment that can get lost!

Snooth can help here, because every time you drink a wine and want to remember it, you can keep track of it in your Snooth ratings. You’ll also have a better idea when new vintages of the same the wine become available, so you know to look for them.

Reason #2

Your local wine store doesn’t know what your friends like. I remember going to a house party not so long ago and bringing along a wine that the host had said they liked quite some time back and he was totally impressed that I remembered.

Snooth’s friends section – this isn’t up yet but is coming soon – will have a section that will allow you to see what your friends like. This way you can always show up with the perfect wine! And wouldn’t it be great if all your friends always brought you wine that you like?

Reason #3

Let’s be fair, the wine expert at your local store knows a lot about wine, but his recommendations are typically only as good as the information you feed him/her about what you like. The average wine drinker like myself doesn’t always know how to fully express what we like or don’t like. As a result we often end up sticking to particular regions or varietals (or brands) that we know, when there may be others out there that we would love, if only we had a chance to experience them!

Snooth helps solve this problem by determining what you would like based on what you’ve liked/dislike in the past and eliminating the need for you to communicate what you like and dislike in wine terms. It uses this information to recommend wines for you from a broad selection of options, potentially finding wines you’ll like that you never would have considered otherwise. And once you receive a recommendation you can see what other users as well as professional critics say about the wine, so you have plenty of research available to help you make an informed decision.

The bottom line: Snooth isn’t trying to replace your local wine store (in fact, you may find Snooth in your local wine store someday). Snooth just wants to help you make better decisions about wines you buy so that you get the best wine for you!

Wine gets its Second Life

posted by philip in Wine Industry

Second Life, the popular 3D virtual world, is becoming a haven for forward thinking companies to set up virtual shop. Ford, IBM and American Apparel all have in-game islands where they can tout their wares. Generally, these serve as brand building excercises or as a way to advertise to a younger, more ‘plugged-in’ demographic. But wine? Whats the point of a virtual vineyard?
The guys at Capozzi Winery will be the people who define this for us. As the first real world winery to create one in Second Life, they are in the process of building the Capozzi Winery Island.

Josh Hermsmeyer, Capozzi Winery says “My personal goal is to create architecture that extends and complement the rich experience and craft of winemaking, exploring the terroir of a virtual world”.

The images I’ve seen so far look fantastic and I want wait to see what the end result will bring.

I’m going to speak on a panel with Josh in a few weeks so will see if I can get some more information off of him regarding this.

Ratings and Recommendings

posted by philip in Snooth

We’ve just revamped a couple of the pages - the recommendations and the ratings page. Mark and Clint have been working hard on these and they’re basically done. A few more tweaks over the next few days and they will be squared away. We’ll keep working on refining the algorithms that generate the recommendations themselves, but this is basically ready for launch. Next week we’re going to add some search functionality, which will allow you to refine your results after the initial search, and then, after some clean up, we’re going to launch.

It wont stop there - we have to build the social networking functionality, create the personalized home page, as well as our continual effort on enriching the data and improving the algorithms.

We’re just excited to be this close. Have a good (long) weekend.

Chilling bad wine

posted by philip in Wine

This one’s pretty simple, but it’s a good trick to keep up your sleeve. Quite simply, the warmer a liquid (ie. wine) is, the more volatile (ie. its smell) it is. Because the majority of taste actually comes from smell (try pinching your nose and tasting wine) a warmer wine has more taste. In fact this is such a common issue that there’s an industry term for a wine served too cold - “dumb”.

If you have a cheap/old or simply bad bottle of wine and want to see if its at all drinkable, try chilling it slightly if its a red (too cold and the tannins become vicious) or chilling it to a regular fridge’s temperature if its a white. It might still be undrinkable, but you’ll have muted the taste as much as possible and you might end up with something refreshing.

This technique works best with whites - you can get them really cold and they become very crisp and refreshing.

It’s a trade off - room temperature allows you to enjoy the nuances of a wine, whereas cold wine is refreshing but the chill mutes all but the most basic of flavors.

Est Est Est

posted by philip in Wine

Mark and I were cleaning up wine regions the other day and came across a region called: Est! Est!! Est!!! di Montefiascone - gets my vote for best place name ever!

The origin of the name is an interesting story itself: In the year 1000, the cupbearer of Bishop Johan Defuk, of the Roman Empire, followed an expedition that marched on the town of Montefiascone. Martin, the cupbearer, walked one day ahead of the Bishop and was tasked with finding the inns with the best wines. The signal that an inn was worthy of the Bishop was the word “Est”, which was chalked on the inns door.

After tasting the wines of Montefiascone, Martin felt that the standard signal didn’t convey the quality of the wines and so he wrote “Est! Est!! Est!!!”, exclamation points and all. In fact the prelate was so enamored with the wines that he stayed in the town for three days, and then once his mission was completed, settled and remained there until his death.

I’ve not tried these wines myself but click here to see the few that we have available.

Being talked about

posted by philip in Snooth

We’ve made contact with hundreds of companies in the wine space - retailers, importers, distributors, wineries, wine software companies etc. However, for all our success there are always a few companies we reach out to that we’ve gotten nowhere with. Perhaps they’re busy, or perhaps they don’t care. Either way, its frustrating.

There’s nothing new here - every company faces the same. However, and this is where it gets interesting. Every time I’ve blogged about someone they’ve gotten in touch with me. Either our blog has better readership than I’d dared to hope for, or more likely, everyone sits around ‘googling’ themselves.

So…if you see your name on the Snooth blog in the coming days, drop us a line and introduce yourself. Even if we don’t blog about you, introduce yourself anyway - with over 1.25 million ratings and the largest wine database around, I’m sure there’s something we can talk about.

Keeping busy

posted by philip in Snooth

In response to many questions, here’s an update on what’s been keeping us busy these last few weeks.

We’re about two weeks away from launch and Mark’s been busy building out the recommendation portion of the site - we put an early version in place late Friday. We’re still tweaking it to make sure the recommendations are somewhat bounded - we can’t go recommending $1,000 wines to everyone, even if they’d probably find them tasty.

Mark also finished integrating the basic merchant functionality late last week. It’s now possible to search for and link to several leading retailers (Wine.com, Sam’s and K&L) to buy the wine. There are tens of retailers and wineries in the queue and thats whats been keeping Betsey and myself busy.

Between us we’ve been contacting potential partners and negotiating the details - Betsey’s focussed on the retailers and the wine awards, while I’ve gone after the critics and the ‘others’. There’s a lot of upfront work for each partner - after agreeing to the partnership, we have to work with them to get the data feed ready, it then needs to get standardized, checked and put into the queue to be loaded into the database. After that the wines are matched against existing records before any new wines are actually created. This all needs to be done programatically, as every day we get sent a new feed.

There’s currently a backlog of retailers waiting to be loaded in, but we’re moving through it as fast as we can.

Meanwhile, Clint has been working on the new page templates for the merchant page (done), and is currently working on the recommendation and friends pages.

In between and around this, we are all testing the site extensively, fixing incorrect data, cleaning wine records and fixing minor bugs as we go.

Smarter than the average cork

posted by philip in Wine Industry

Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chips, small electronic tags applied to products, have been seen as the successor to bar codes for years. They are more expensive and so the retail industry has been slow to adopt until major retailers (Walmart etc.) began applying pressure to at least have them on expensive, easily stolen items, like razor blades.

The benefits of having RFID can be seen the entire length of the supply chain - for stores it’s easier to track theft and inventory levels, for suppliers its easier to figure out where an item is stored, and for consumers these chips can store massive amounts of useful data.

This is where SmartCorq fits in. SmartCorq is a cork with an embedded RFID chip. This could be loaded with information about a wine’s provenance, harvest, flavor profile and even suggested food pairings. A consumer could swipe a hand held scanner across the neck of the bottle and read the information, or it could simply be printed along with a receipt at the time of purchase. At only 50 cents to a dollar more expensive than the average cork, this is something that could work very well with high end wines - both for researching a wine in store, and at home in the cellar.

Mired in data

posted by philip in Snooth

As we get closer to launch I’m excited to be able to talk more about the site.

We spent a lot of time these last few weeks cleaning up the data. We’d passed 350,000 wines and 1.2 million ratings and we had a backlog of retailers’ feeds to integrate. It was clear we needed to step back and take the time to consolidate some of these records.

It has taken us several weeks and hundreds of hours of tweaking and testing, but we finally have an algorithm that we’re proud of. We ran it yesterday and it caught and merged around 40,000 wines. We’ll continue to refine it over time, but the bulk of the work has been done.

What this means is that if one retailer calls a wine “Bodega Benegas 2005 Chardonnay Reserve” and another retailer calls it “05 Benegas Chard Reserva” you wont see both records next to each other when you search. They are the same wine and there should just be one record. If you click to buy it, you’ll then be given the choice of retailers. This allows us to consolidate reviews and to provide a better SnoothRank as we continue to gather more information about each wine.

Of course, any of our Beta testers can probably still find numerous examples of wine’s that should be merged, but that we’ve missed. We’re still refining the algorithm, but in the meantime email me and I’ll fix it.