Snooth announces 250,000th Registered User

posted by philip in Snooth, Press

Snooth registered user base growing by 500% per year

New York, NY (November 16, 2009) — Snooth, the world’s largest wine site, today announced that it had added its 250,000th registered user.

This milestone comes a few months after Snooth announced its 100,000th registered user earlier this year. Over the last twelve months Snooth’s registered user base has grown over 500%, with a 300% growth in overall traffic over the same time period, to todays figure of over 1 million users per month. The number of registered users, those who sign up to have a profile on Snooth, is currently growing at a rate of over 15% every month.

“In March this year we were excited to announce our 100,000th member, so its a real pleasure to welcome our 250,000th member just a few months later,” said Philip James, CEO of Snooth. “We’re adding around 1,000 members daily and with each passing day their actions and contributions to the site enrich the experience for every other user.”

Since its inception in June 2007, Snooth has grown to be the world’s largest wine site, with over 1 million users per month, 1 million wines and prices from 11,000 merchants and wineries worldwide. The site currently handles over 5 million searches per month and has over 250,000 registered users.

About Snooth

Snooth is the world’s largest wine site, with over 1 million monthly users. Launched in June 2007, Snooth is a free, highly interactive, social database of the world’s wines, offering both casual and expert wine drinkers the ability to search, obtain personalized recommendations, interact with fellow wine lovers, as well as seamlessly buy from a global network of over 11,000 merchants.

Designed to be easy to use, 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’s massive database of 1 million wines and 2 million reviews, powers many third-party wine applications, reaching a total audience of over 5 million users per month, and functions as a central repository of wine data. Snooth is also available on-the-go through its mobile or iPhone applications.

Snooth was awarded the Model of Excellence by InfoCommerce in 2008, and is the recipient of multiple medals from the Wine 2.0 trade organization. Snooth has garnered much press within the tech, wine and food spaces from publications including Forbes, Oprah, Techcrunch, Mashable, the Guardian, and many others.

Snooth’s team is comprised of experts in data management, user experience, and wine. Snooth’s advisors and investors include past and current management of Blue Fly, Price Grabber, Experian, Quigo, Inertia Beverage Group, and Global Wines and Spirits amongst others.

Please visit http://www.snooth.com for more information on the largest wine site in the world

Amazon quits the wine industry

posted by philip in Snooth

Today marks a sad day for the wine industry: Amazon Wine, yet to launch, may now never see the light of day. I’m sure many retailers, wholesalers and even some wineries are breathing a collective sigh of relief at this news, for Amazon, with its history of pricing, service and operations, threatened many a wine business.

For you and I, as wine consumers, this is bad news. Its also bad news for Snooth, as a company that is fighting the good fight to help demystify the arcane and convoluted world of wine. While Amazon may have ultimately become a competitor of Snooth, they stood the best chance of any company out there of shining a light in all the dark nooks and crannies of the industry. Hopefully putting an end to shady and illegal practices such as bait and switch, selling a wine that the store doesn’t yet have in inventory, using shipping as a profit center, dual pricing and so many more.

Many of us hoped that Amazon would use its might to force these issues, and others, into the spotlight, forcing new regulation, opening up consumer choice and making the wine industry a better place for all of us. Sadly, these hopes have just been shelved for the next few years.

This story is breaking now, and you’ll be able to keep up with it via Wine Industry Insight and Wine Business amongst others.

What we’re reading

posted by philip in Snooth

We added a small new feature the other day. Now, on all the new article pages, there is a module that will list and link to articles and blog posts from around the web that we’re reading over at Snooth HQ. We read a lot about wine and the wine industry each day, this makes it easy to see the best of what we’ve encountered:

Providing service, even when its not necessary

posted by philip in Snooth

Continuing my posts about the Quebec liquor board, SAQ, and following on from this recent post, I’m taking a look at the consumer facing operations of SAQ, particularly their collector services.

SAQ splits their products into two broad lines, every day wines sold in their stores, and collector wines, which are sold through direct relations with the buyers. As before, their focus on the consumer surprised and delighted me.

They offer their latest acquisitions through a large format magazine (looks like the Wine Spectator) called Le Courrier Vinicole. Each issue has detailed information on the production, aging, terroir and tasting notes for each wine - see an example here. In addition things like drink dates as well as the number available in the province on Quebec are covered. If you’ve bought from them in the past year they’ll send you a copy each year free of charge. If you haven’t,  you can phone up and they’ll send one to you. Once you’re ready, just pick up the phone an place your order.

If you are looking for something different or older, SAQ has a subterranean cellar with 75,000 bottles dating from as far back as the 1800’s to the present day. Again, just pick up the phone and one of their trained sommeliers or wine professionals will help you put together a selection. If you have a wine collection that you need to sell, they’ll help you with that too. And, of course, you’ll need somewhere to store all these wines. Again, SAQ’s there with locked temperature controlled cabinets (in multiple locations in Montreal and Quebec city) that you can rent for a very reasonable $1 per bottle per year (it’s around $12 per bottle per year in NYC). Want somewhere to drink the wine? Well, the main cellars are located in a converted revolutionary period prison, and they’ll let you uncork your wines in the eerie ambience of a converted cell, or if you like daylight, they’ll rent you the formers Govenors Mansion for an event.

Above: Remains of the wall mounted rings that the prisoners were manacled to

They also organize vino tourism holidays -  a recent one to Bordeaux involved organized trips to d’Yquem, Lafite Rothschild, Lynch Bages, Beau-Sejour, Haut-Brion and so on. I’m fairly confident you’d be royally received when under the umbrella of such a large purchaser.

They also have a museum, but then so do all state run wine monopolies…oh wait, thats not right!

Above: Very rare bootleg still from the late 1800’s

I know I’m starting to sound like their marketing brochures here (very glossy), but I really thought I’d died and gone to…well, to some mythical place that combined the passion and romance of Europe, with the operational and business focus that the US has.

My thanks to Jessica Harnois, Sommelier of SAQ’s Signature Services division for being my guide.

Update: The storage is a little over $2 per bottle per year, not the $1 as I mistakenly reported.

Slaking the thirst of a nation

posted by philip in Snooth

I was in Montreal last week and was fortunate enough to spend some time with the Société des Alcools du Québec (SAQ), see their facilities and meet some of their staff. Before I go any further, I need to state that I have never seen a government monopoly behave with such care, obsession and interest in serving its customers. SAQ is a behemoth. They are one of the worlds largest purchasers of wine, top three, maybe number one or two, and yet, they act more openly and nimbly than many startups I know. The complexity of their operations was riveting and I’m really glad to have their permission to share this with you.

SAQ is the government monopoly that serves as importer, distributor and retailer of beer, wine and spirits for the province of Quebec, Canada. With sales of $3 billion, they are a global force on the wine market, and because they buy as a single entity they are one of the three largest purchasers of wines globally. They import 10,000 containers of wine per year, manage a fleet of hundreds of trucks and delivery vans, and operate almost 500 retail stores.

$3 billion dollars of wine works out to approximately 16,000,000 cases of wine, all of which passes through their two distribution centers, which total 1,000,000 square feet. To put this in context, the mighty Zappos has a mere 800,000 square feet of distribution space.

Seeing 50 million bottles of wine stacked 35 feet high (above image) was awe inspiring.

What really intrigued me, was not just the scale of the operations, but also the knock on benefits of (benevolently) controlling the entire market from import to final sale. SAQ has huge buying power, so the end prices are reasonable. They have the clout to make sure that their containers are stored low down on the ships, so the wines are less affected by weather. Because importing is centralized, and SAQ offers a 1 year guarantee on all purchases (really!) they are able to have a chemical lab where they inspect bottles from each lot, and test them for sulfite levels, presence of toxins such as methanol, or most commonly the presence of yeast and sugar, which could lead to an undesired secondary fermentation. Its only after passing these inspections that they feel comfortable offering such a promise.

I wish I had a better picture of the labs, but felt a little awkward taking photos inside a government building. However, as someone who studied Chemistry to a graduate degree level, and who worked in several chemical labs, let me say that they had some slick machinery: filtration, titration, automated chemical analysis machines, reaction booths and so on. Every contaminated bottle is labeled and stored, available for inspection in case the case is reopened.

Next time I’ll talk about their consumer facing operations - in particular the fact that they have an entire division which is focused on collector services. For, while the backend operations were impressive, they are also necessary, the consumer operations were where they differentiated themselves in my mind.

Building a (wine) community online

posted by philip in Snooth

I was on the keynote panel at the annual Wine Industry Technology Symposium in Napa about a week ago, and finally have time to post the slides. My fellow panelists included Adon Kumar from Wine Searcher, Stephen Gilberg of WineTwits, and was chaired by Julie Brosterman CEO & Founder of Women & Wine.

I’m hoping all the panelists will post their slides, and will chase down the organizers as there was one presentation (that of Dave Morin of Facebook) that I particularly want.

Its always nice to get out to Napa in the summer, and I really enjoy speaking at WITS (I spoke just after snooth launched in 2007). The slides are below, please let me know if anything is unclear.

View more presentations from snooth.

Wine Influencers of Tomorrow

posted by philip in Snooth

Courtney Cochran recently wrote a piece for Appellation America entitled “Wine Influencers of Tomorrow” - you can read the entire article here (subscription required).

With permission I’m excerpting a snippet in which Courtney interviewed me for the piece, where she calls me “The New Peter Granoff”. Peter was the founder of Virtual Vineyards, the worlds first online wine retailer. Virtual Vineyards had a turbulent life, blew through tens of millions of dollars and was a retailer, but other than that I like the comparison, Peter was an early adopter and tried to change the way people bought wine. He believed that information was king and that the small winemaker was an important part of the industry that big box stores and distributors were overlooking.

The quote I gave sums up our goal here at Snooth:

Philip James: The New Peter Granoff   

“James’ Snooth.com – which he founded as recently as 2007 – has quickly risen to the position of most-trafficked wine website in the world, with more than one million wines in its database. Not sure what Snooth does?  James says that Snooth is looking to mirror the offline purchasing cycle a consumer goes through in buying a bottle of wine, albeit with the applications and advantages (like robust user reviews and links to some 10,000 stores worldwide) available thanks to Internet and its social tools… Accordingly, James’ predictions for the future are robust; as he put it to me, “Our mission is simple, but the road is long - to provide wine lovers worldwide access to every piece of information in existence on every bottle of wine ever produced.”  And what a fabulous mission that is.”

The full article is here. (Subscription required).

Spotlight: Camel Valley Winery

posted by philip in Snooth

I’d heard of Camel Valley Winery’s reputation (award winning sparklers) since I first moved out of Cornwall over a decade ago. I was glad after all this time to get the chance to visit and meet Bob and Sam Lindo, the father and son winemaking team.

Camel Valley was started in 1989 with 8,000 vines. They added 4,000 vines in 2002 and another 12,000 in 2005. However, even with 20k vines under management, they still get 2/3rds of their grapes from other vineyards around the UK – this gives them some defense against a poor harvest and allows them to choose the ripest grapes from around the country. Total production is around 90,000 bottles.

They grow an eclectic mix of hardy, cool climate, early ripening grapes, including Bacchus, Triomphe, Dornfelder, Rondo, Pinot Noir, Dornfelder, Seyval, Huxel and Reissersteiner. When I asked how they figured out why these grapes would work well in the English climate, Sam said that they are all commonly grown in Germany, which is one of the Northernmost wine regions in the world.

South facing Seyval at Camel Valley Winery

I also asked when they first realized that the region could produce good Sparkling wines, and Sam told me that they used to make still (acidic) wines, and one year the harvest was particularly lean, the grapes under ripe, and not destined for greatness, so they decided to go ‘bubbly’, and haven’t looked back. Champagne and sparkling wines are known for their high acidity and make extremely tart, puckering, still wines, so it makes perfect sense.

The cool climate means that the grapes take a long time to ripen, and in some cases, although the grapes reach “ripeness”, they are never “ripe” by warmer regions standards (ie. no phenolic ripeness). The long hang times mean that the grapes are picked in October, and give a meager 2 tonnes per acre yield. That’s comparable to Burgundy Grand Cru, and typical vineyards harvest 6-8 tonnes per acre for table wines.

Grape clusters beginning to form

My favorite wines of the day were:

- Camel Valley Valley Rosé 2008, £22 ($37):
“Pinot Noir and Dornfelder. Light straw and cherry aromas. Good, rich, mouth feel, with a sweet cherry taste (7% residual sugar). The sugar isn’t as noticeable as you’d expect given the acidity, but it keeps the wine smooth. Subtle pine flavors and a candy floss finish.”

- Camel Valley Atlantic Dry Quality Wine 2008, £9 ($15)
“Made with Huxel and Reissersteiner. Green apples and cinamon dominate. Great oily texture and firm acidity - green apples and crisp. Secondary fruit flavors of banana and apple crumble. Rhubarb crumble on the finish. 4% residual sugar, but barely noticeable.”

The State of English Wine

posted by philip in Snooth

Over the past decade the UK has been developing a reputation for its sparkling wines. Over here in the US, people tend to snort at the thought of British wine, at first, but then after considering the relative latitudes and the weather to that of Champagne start to see its potential. Throw global warming into the mix and suddenly the UK seems a sure bet for the next great region.

In reality the terroir is not the same, the soils tend to be different and the weather is too. What I learned was that the UK does best when embracing its own style, and not merely emulating that of its more famous neighbors.

For all the noise over British sparkling wines a few things were apparent:

- Firstly, wine in the UK is still a niche industry. With a nationwide annual production of around 2.5 million bottles, it would take decades to for each British citizen to enjoy just a single bottle.

- Secondly, and this follows from the above, retail and restaurant support/presence is meager. With such low production I can understand why the large supermarket chains are unable to sell local wines, but I struggled endlessly to find a single store that sold British wine (final thanks went to Sainsbury’s, but the experience was hardly pleasant, as we found the bottle after 30 minutes of searching the shelves), and the only restaurant I went to that had British wines had a French Sommelier who tried to advise me against buying local!

- Thirdly, if you’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity to try British sparkling wine, you may be very impressed. Try a white, they are interesting, pair well with food and some are very good. However, skip the reds. A major generalization, of course, but the ones I tried were disjointed, green, very woody and not to my liking. The UK simply does not have the weather for the grapes o achieve sufficient ripeness to produce good reds.

Some of my favorites:

> Camel Valley Ltd Brut Cornwall 2006, £19 ($30)
“Camel’s flagship sparkler. Made with Seyval, this sparkling wine exhibits firm acidity and a fine bead, which swells into an excellent mousse of bubbles in the mouth. There’s a slight almond character which plays well with the peach and biscuit notes. Smooth mid-palate with a light summery strawberry finish. Light hay on the nose. Very nice.”

> Chapel Down Sainsbury’s English Sparkling Wine Rose NV, £30 ($47)
“British sparkling wine - almost as rare as a 4 leafed clover. Obviously i had to try it…Pale salmon color, large bubbles, light berry and yeasty nose, low acid but not flabby. Nice fruits with a medium finish. Also, an interesting selection of grapes.”

When good things break

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

Over the last few days there have been several articles over how the technology blog, Mashable, has taken the number 1 spot from Techcrunch. Both sites now have approximately 2 million monthly readers, plus many more follow their news via email, twitter and other networks.

We’ve experienced first hand close to 10 times what an article from either of these giants can do to our daily traffic patterns. And, over the last few years we’ve added monitoring, cronitoring, redundancy, failover and other safety systems designed to handle these bursts. But last night, we screwed up.

Mashable wrote about our iPhone app, which, because it was brand new, and hosted on a different set of servers, did not have all the fail safes in place. As a result the index server that powers the search results for the iPhone crashed. We noticed the error at 6.50am Eastern time this morning, woke everyone up, and by 7.20am the server, and the service was back up. This affected the API server and the iPhone search results only.

We’re busy today adding the redundancy and failover solutions to the API and iPhone servers that keep the main Snooth.com site working smoothly. Apologies to anyone who was affected by the iPhone outage.

So far the feedback to the iPhone app has been great, one twitterer claiming that it made “an iPhone worth having”.

Here’s a sample of other chatter about the app:

UPDATE: The Mashable story is being highly Digg’d on Digg.com (a news site with 30M users per month). You can see the article and vote for it here. Please support Snooth and help us get to the home page.