We’re all really excited about the significant changes the site has seen over the last 3 weeks. This culminated yesterday with the launch of what we internally called “Snooth Groups”. “Groups” is one of those innocuous internally used words thats fails to do this project justice and its the culmination of several months work.
In a nutshell Groups provides a profile homepage for every winery, store, grape and region in the world (if anythings missing, please let us know and we’ll add it). There are around 50,000 pages in total.
One of the things we’ve prided ourselves on is not launching blank pages and then just sitting back waiting for you, our users, to do the hard work of filling everything in. To help get the ball rolling we’ve partnered with Appellation America and we’ll be displaying their AVA and grape descriptions. We’ve also partnered with Global Wine Stocks (publicly available winery and store data) and Global Wines and Spirits (winery data as supplied by the wineries directly) to help fill out the content. Finally, we’ve been mining the Snooth database of reviews and wines to come up with some brand new ways of looking at this information.
So, what does this all mean? In a nutshell, every winery, region, grape or store now has their own dedicated page on Snooth, where you can check out their basic details (address, maps, images phone number and so on), you can get an at-a-glance graphical overview of the price points a retailer sells at, the grapes a region produces or how the average score for a winery trends over time.
Pictures tell it best, so take a look at the following:
>Each region has a series of charts, this one shows how the average rating for Napa wines has varied over time:
>Another of the region charts is the Varietal Composition - the chart here shows which grapes are grown in California
>In addition to their own custom charts, every store and winery has a section with the basic details: phone, email, website and their ‘about us’ text. This makes it easy to track down and contact any store or winery you are looking for - see the Larkmead example below:
> The group pages are really supposed to be your first port of call to learn about a specific topic, and one of the ways we do that is by pulling in relevant information from across the site. The image below shows the feed for the Robert Mondavi Winery page - here you are able to keep tabs on the most recent reviews of Mondavi wines, talk posts that mention the winery, or the family as well as direct comments, reviews and testimonials that people have left here. The group owner (in this case the winery themselves) can also leave comments, post events and stay in touch with their fans.
> In addition to the images, charts, feeds and so on, grapes have a few additional charts, like this one (shown below) - this is the histogram showing the price distribution of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. The other chart here would show you apie chart of which countries grow Cabernet and how much…
> Once you’ve found some groups you like, you can ‘follow’ the group. This means that your homepage grapevine - the main feed on your logged in homepage - will then keep you updated with the groups activites.
There’s a lot to explore here, so browse around and check out a few of your favorite regions, grapes and wineries - just search for them in the regular search box and you’ll see the links to the group pages.
PS. We’re not done here. When we launch something, its stage 1 on a long road. This is certainly the most massive undertaking we’ve taken since launch, but we’re very excited by the possibilities in front of us. We look forward to hearing your comments and feedback.
