A group of us are trying to start a wine review site; we're not selling wine or anything. What we would like is to be able to go to a web site and lookup wines and what people have to say about them without paying any memberships or having any bias reviews from wine producers or wineries.
Visit
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and let us know what you think of the site. If you have any comments, good or bad, they're all appreciated; ultimately you might be able to use this site to find good wine.
No offense, but this is a site with virtually no content. Why would someone check this site rather than established sites (without paid memberships, there are dozens) where there are already thousands of reviews? I mean, one can use Google groups to find reviews on thousands of wines here. Cellartracker has about a half-million notes. I could name another dozen sites. As others note, the few wines listed have some factual mistakes.
I would concur with Dale's comments. The internet needs another amateur wine site like it needs another spammer. There are already dozens of well established sites out there that are very similar to yours and plenty of free reviews available through Google etc.. Most of them get little or no traffic and most have very amateurish reviews of grocery store wines. There's very little content on your site and lot's of mistakes. FYI, your price point searcher is a little helter skelter with the prices in no particular order....a bit confusing and it cuts off way to low.
In addition to the criticism you've already received, I'll add the following. The problem to me with peer review of wine is that my tastes may be totally at odds with those of the person providing the review, in which case why should I trust their recommendation? As a for instance, to someone who likes heavy, sweet wines that to me would pass for pancake syrup, my love of a high acid, dry wine would be worse than useless since they'd find it tart and shrill to their tastes. This isn't just hypothetical, either, as it crops up all the time when I look at reviews on cellartracker's site.
What would be a great innovation is for someone to use a scoring system to match reviewers with readers, i.e. to only show me the reviews of people with tastes similar to my own. To do this, you'd have to develop a scoring system to determine similarity of tastes and a parallel scoring system to define similarity of wines. Then, you could use simple math to find wines that someone should like or reviews that someone would find useful and informative.
Thanks for the comments. I was not aware of cellartracker, it's looks like a great website. I'll definately will use it in the future. It's pretty much what we were trying to do.
We will work on an algorythm to see if it would be possible to match user tastes to reviews, that would be very interresting.
Interesting idea. Closest thing to that I can think of is Netflix's "you might like", but that's based on a lot less titles than what would be involved in wine, once you think of various vintages. And of course unlike DVDs, there is meaningful bottle variation. You'd really need to have tried dozens of the same wines. Would need a huge clientele. MAYBE Cellartracker could do it. But half the fun for me is participating in a community, learning whose tastes are similar (although often only in certain regions), learning who to listen to.
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