Cappin’ Crunch

posted by mark in Snooth

It’s always a mixed blessing to watch the website grow. As more people see us and come back I’m obviously happy. We’re building the website for this exact purpose.

But I do get that sinking feeling when I see a sharp increase in traffic. Every system will break under some amount of load, with varying degrees of engineer horror. You might simply notice a slowdown in performance. As a user this is easy to cope with given some patience and maybe a glass of wine to calm the nerves. If things go horribly wrong and database queries begin to back up they might never complete (especially with liberal use of the browser stop or back button) — at the risk of getting too technical, this can lead to data loss and the pulling of hair.

Fortunately we’ve done load testing on Snooth and we know it’s going to be okay, but there’s still that slight dizziness that comes with the occasional article at Techcrunch… Will we hold under the surge? Well, we did this time, but I’m still thinking about performance and scalability. You deserve a smooth Snooth!

Retail Therapy?

posted by Annie in Wine

I used to think I’d never meet a bottle of wine I didn’t like. Because, after all, whats not to like? Sure, not all wines are created equal, but they all have their charms. Or at least thats what you’d think…

After a long day of work on a cloudy fall day, nothing sounds better to me than picking up some wine on the way home and sipping a glass, feet up, while watching Hollywood gossip shows. This past week, midway through the daily Britney Spears update, I took a sip of possibly the most vile glass of uncorked wine I’ve ever tasted. The bottle looked nice, and I was pretty confident that I couldn’t go wrong with a decent quality Hunter Valley Chardonnay. It had none of the nutty and fruity bold flavors I was expecting. Instead, it had a bland wilted-herb nose with a bitter aftertaste. I was instantly disappointed. Aside from the fact that I had missed Britney’s latest shenanigans during my unfortunate sip, I had wasted a perfectly good $9 on this monstrosity of a chardonnay. What now?

My normal reaction, “exchange it for something better,” only works when talking about tank tops and sweatshirts. I needed a Plan B. I could always drink a good wine first, and then once sufficiently “happy,” slip myself a glass of *this*. I could pawn it off on a houseguest - but then they might think I have bad wine taste and never trust me again. I could pour it down the drain, but I would feel guilty for throwing out someone’s hard work and also that $9. The only thought that came to mind was cooking with it. I decided there would be a lot of pan sauce and tossed pastas in my immediate future. Turns out, I created a rather tasty chicken with a mushroom wine sauce that evening.

Now that I saved the day with my frying pan(and caught up with Britney Spears on the internet), I felt much better. But what happens next time I make a poor decision? Will I sentence myself to wine sauce for the rest of my life? What do you do? And also, why does Britney Spears like to make faces at the paparazzi so much?

New Funding

posted by philip in Snooth

We announced yesterday that we raised a new round of $1 million. The official press release is in the preceding post (chronologically, but below this one in blog order!). This is a big event for us and we’ll celebrate in due course.

What can you, our users, expect? Well, we’ll be staffing up, becoming more professional and generally growing up. We’re hiring a lot more developers and the odd business person, so you can look forward to the rate of development picking up. We’re going to continue to develop the site, adding new features, cleaning the data and integrating new merchants.

Some specifics you can look forward to: the much touted ‘group pages’ will be coming soon and we’re going to be integrating a lot of non-US based retailers, starting with Western Europe. Lots of small things as well of course…

Thanks for your loyalty and patience, who knows we may even take down the ‘beta’ on our logo soon.

Snooth Announces $1 Million in Angel Funding

posted by philip in Snooth, Press

New York, NY - November 27, 2007

World’s most comprehensive wine review site plans international expansion

Snooth, the worlds most comprehensive wine review site, today announced $1 million in angel funding from the company’s initial backers, as well as a new group of international investors. This is the company’s second round, following an initial $300,000 raised in December 2006.

The new funds will be used to scale the development team, integrate the current backlog of merchants that have already partnered with Snooth, and add new retailers worldwide.

Launched in June 2007, Snooth is a highly interactive, social database of the world’s wine, offering both casual and expert wine drinkers the ability to search, obtain personalized recommendations, browse ratings and reviews, as well as seamlessly buy from a network of over 1,000 merchants.

Users have the ability to search by their own personal preferences (bold, peppery, fruity, etc), by a specific meal-pairing, price, or by region or producer. Snooth’s recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become.

“Snooth is a powerful tool that helps average wine drinkers and connoisseurs alike find better wine experiences,” said site founder Philip James. “The site’s detailed search options and social recommendations allow users to quickly cut through the clutter to find the perfect wine for their individual preferences.”

Snooth has also been introducing new functionality, allowing for a deeper and more interactive user experience. For example, the “My Wines” feature allows users to build and manage their personal wine collection, maintain wish lists, track reviews and keep detailed notes about their personal impressions. The company has also debuted charts that illustrate how a specific wine’s rating changes over time and breaks down by level of popularity.

About Snooth:

Snooth is a revolutionary web-based social shopping experience that is simplifying how people select, interact with and purchase their favorite wines.

Snooth is the world’s most comprehensive wine database, featuring over 1.9 million reviews for over 300,000 wines. It offers both casual and aspiring wine drinkers personalized wine recommendations, ratings & reviews, as well as a wine information search tool that seamlessly connects users to the websites of over 1,000 merchants and wineries and critics including wine.com, Sam’s Wines and Spirits, K&L Wine Merchants, Beverage Media and Inertia Beverage Group.

Snooth launched in June 2007.

Please visit www.snooth.com for more information.

Contact

media@snooth.com
(646) 723-4328

What Does That Thing Do?

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

A couple quick updates from tech today. First off, you may have noticed the 3 ‘a’s hanging out at the upper right of the page. Those tools fiddle with the font size on the page — making it bigger should be a snap if you find it a tad too small.

Until recently the tools were not sticky. That is, if you navigated off the page where you used them, the text snapped back to the default smaller size. Not so anymore! We’ll be only too happy to remember your preferred size.

Secondly, if you know for a fact you are not interested in one of the wines we have recommended for you, now you can tell Snooth that you are not interested in that recommendation and we’ll clear it out for you with a fresh set of recs. You can do this using the menu icon next to the wine name on your recommendations page. That menu contains a collection of useful links for interacting with a wine.

Make sure you wishlist any of the recommendations you’d like to keep around before you do this though — they might all change depending on how active your fellow Snooth users have been. You can also “bookmark” the wine by adding it to your “My Wines” page.

Not sure how to add to “My Wines”? Try this button on the wine details page!

The Point of the Punt

posted by Scott in Wine, Guest Bloggers

The punt is the dimple on the bottom of most wine bottles. Its precise origin is unknown and it’s modern day purpose debated. Despite its seeming trivialness, the punt has been semi-scientifically proven to indicate the value of a wine, at least in the UK. Given that the price of a bottle of red = (Dimple depth in mm + £3.49) / 4.3144, you might want to bring a ruler and calculator to any holiday parties where you plan on impressing your friends with how accurately you can “guess” the price what you’re drinking. Then again, it would be undoubtedly easier, and much less socially awkward, to ask how much the bottle cost and forget about the punt altogether.

Scott Rosenbaum is director of operations for the International Wine Center and wine buyer for the retailer DrinkUpNY.

Thanksgiving + Wine = Good

posted by Annie in Snooth, Wine

Ah, Thanksgiving - another day of socially acceptable gluttony has ended. I must admit, I look forward to the stuffing and cranberry sauce for most of the year. This time around, however, the wine was a force to be reckoned with.

Since I’m the resident wino in my family, I usually have the pleasure of choosing the wines we pair with our meals. After researching and thinking carefully about each dish, I picked out a grouping of wines I thought would be appreciated - a dry rose from the south of France, a Sardinian red, a Chinon, plus a few more.

The holiday was barely underway, (well, we were already halfway through the vegetable platter and the football games) when someone asked me an interesting wine question that I was not prepared to answer. “Annie, what wine can you recommend that goes well with taco dip, cheese and crackers, *and* spinach dip??” I giggled slightly, although purely out of nervousness. Truth is, I had no idea what goes well with all those things. Choosing a pairing for taco dip hadn’t been on my mind pre-holiday. But, how do we really know what will pair well with our Thanksgiving meals? So much of Thanksgiving is enjoying a spread of many different flavors across many dishes. (and in my family when I say many, I mean many) Is it really possible to choose a wine that can blend nicely with butternut squash soup, tangy cranberry relish, and turkey dressed in buttery gravy?

I decided that you can’t - well maybe you shouldn’t. The rose went nicely with the famed taco dip, an Australian red brought out the saltiness in the spinach dip, and the Chinon matched my buttery gravy perfectly. Every wine found a great pairing in the meal, which to me, made everything work. In the end, the wines enhanced my enjoyment of all my favorite Thanksgiving dishes, as well as allowing me to sample many different wines and pairings all under the guise of one meal. One wine with 27 dishes would have been boring.

Anyway, thank God for leftover stuffing - and leftover wine.

So this stag walked into a bar…

posted by alesha in Wine Industry

Recently I got to thinking… What’s the proper protocol for ordering wine on a date?

Here’s what precipitated this… Last week I had dinner at City Crab with my date- let’s call him Tom- who knew little (read: nothing) about wine. Seemed like the only thing he did know was that wine was made from grapes. As we sat down the waiter appeared, asking if we wanted the wine list. We did. He then handed it to Tom (why did he just automatically hand the list to the guy?), who gazed at me shyly and pleaded, “I must admit… I don’t really drink wine- would you pick one for us?”

I welcomed Tom’s honesty and selected a Stag’s Leap 2003 Sauvignon Blanc. I like to drink Sauvignon Blanc with seafood and, since Tom’s from California, I figured he’d appreciate a wine from his home state. When the waiter returned, and before I had a chance to order, he turned to Tom. “Have you decided on a wine?” the waiter asked him. I felt invisible! The waiter had just assumed that Tom knew more than me and that ordering was a man’s job.

Worst of all, Tom couldn’t understand why I was upset. I told him that I felt the waiter had overlooked me. I felt like a girl in a boys’ club. I understand that sometimes men do the ordering, but Tom’s thinking troubled me. He told me he saw nothing wrong with the waiter’s actions “because the guy usually pays anyway.” (!!!)

Then he proceeded to tell me that I was overreacting and making a big deal out of nothing.

It all boils down to this. Does the one who pays also earn the right to control the ordering of the wine and food? If so, then where does that leave me, and the multitude of other women who feel uncomfortable pretending to be helpless around men (at least when it comes to the wine lists)?

When ordering wine, are women to let the guys do the ordering, or should we assert ourselves? If my date admits to knowing nothing about wine, should I just sit there and smile serenely while he struggles with the selection? It just doesn’t make sense. It is quite a conundrum and I’d like to hear from all of you- have you been in this situation and how have you dealt with it?

A Little Holiday Cleaning…

posted by Clint in Website Updates, Snooth

You might have noticed it’s been rather quiet on the update front the past few weeks. In the holiday spirit, you might even say “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” But fret not, as the waiting has all been for good reason!

We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes to make your entire Snooth experience more enjoyable and that starts with the website: making sure it looks and acts the way its supposed to.

Today, we began rolling out a whole slew of subtle but important improvements to the site’s interface. Some are obvious, such as finally adding a search field to your home page (not sure what took so long)! But we’ve also added made a lot of very simple enhancements to make browsing the site easier and more intuitive. Your inbox now has a home in the main control panel at the top of the page, so you can easily access your messages anytime. There are a lot more contextual notes and labels throughout the site, the pop-up bubbles are cleaner and easier to work with, and most of all we did a serious Spring Fall cleanup to fix all kinds of little visual nits. The font-size tools work the way they’re supposed to, text is spaced better and easier to read, text links (for things like exporting and linking to a page) are slowly being replaced by more descriptive buttons, and a whole host of other little improvements we’re really excited about.

Of course, as is always the case, its an ongoing battle so please don’t hesitate to contact us if you see anything that looks broken, out-of-place, or buggy (in particular you folks using Internet Explorer!). And in the meantime, stay tuned for the second round of great new enhancements over the next few weeks. Rumor has it there’s a new sidebar module for related wines, a snazzy new footer that’s actually useful, and maybe even some other tricks up our sleeves… or at least, that’s what I heard through the Grapevine.

And most of all, a Happy Thanksgiving from your friends at Snooth!

Red and White all over

posted by philip in Wine

The title comes from an awful joke, where the punchline is a sunburned penguin (black and white, but red all over), but what caught me eye recently is that White wine is still the most popular in the US.

I really like white wine (I drink a lot of red too), but I used to get fed up as people looked down on me with a ‘white wine is for beginners’ attitude. Pfft! Baby formula is for beginners perhaps, but White wine? Come on. White Burgundy is white wine (Chardonnay in fact) and there’s no more complicated region than Burgundy. I could write an entire post called “Why is Burgundy so complex?”, but luckily the venerable Robin Garr already has. In less time than you can say Napoleon’s Tricorne Hat, here’s why its THE connoisseurs region: back in the days of yore, unlike most of France, where land would pass to the eldest male, in Burgundy, the land was divided among all the children. Fast forward several hundred years and what were once a few large baronies, are now thousands of tiny plots, each with subtle variations in soil types and production methods, resulting in a nearly infinite variety of wines. [Note: Burgundy also makes excellent reds (Pinot Noir), but thats another post].

Its true that its not Burgundy consumption that is keeping White above Red in consumption, but rather cheap, basic whites. However, after trying Charles Shaw’s 2 Buck Chuck Chardonnay, its hard to argue that even the cheapest wine needs to be bad.

Us White fans can’t gloat too much, as the actual figure are very close: “Even after 17 consecutive years of consumption growth for red wine in the United States, Americans still prefer whites: Americans are expected to buy 120 million 9-liter cases in 2007. That figure narrowly beats out reds, a projected 118 million cases sold by year-end. Blush and rosé wines lag far behind, at only 31 million cases.”