New wine Reviewed Mon Wed Friday

Or, even better, put them here on AFW where we can see them the same day.

Try reading a few "reviews" on Grapefoot. Read some TNs here. Which do you trust more?

The site is a free community site, there is no paid reviews here... This site is not designed to sell wine nor is it designed to take over for a wine forum. There is no forum on the site because people already have their groups they discuss wine with. Rather grapefoot.com is about offering personal reviews by the public. Why does everyone think that the site is trying to sell wine or the reviews are not genuine?

If you are not sure take a chance; create an account and write a review on a wine. I'll add it to the calendar for reviews to the front page. If you think there is something funky or some sort of advertising call me out. Show me where and how we are doing something not trust worthy...

If you feel the reviews are not trustworthy because they are not very good, well that's because these are not wine experts but people trying wine and posting their thoughts. Feel free to improve the quality of reviews on the site with your experienced objective view point.

To go with that I am have some people over to my place on Monday to review some New World Pinot's. I have a foxtrot a Sea Smoke and a friend is bringing a Oregon Pinot over. I can't find a Washington State Pinot around here (BC) so if someone has one out there do a review on it on the site and I will incorporate it into the site.

To answer your question directly... I have read reviews on your site, and decided that the language used in many of them sounds like that of a salesperson. Maybe they are written like that because that is simply the style of the person concerned, but they do not ring true. Read the language used here and on other forums when describing wines

- it is different. I think the person responsible for a lot of such posts might be you, actually, but I cannot access the site now to check.

Regardless, I think you have a bit of a cheek coming here and encouraging people to post TNs elsewhere.

If the below is true, then you're not offering anything that this newsgroup doesn't offer - and this is already established with a number of participants whose preferences and language are already understood.

First off, Steve you should know as a new site I don't get a huge volume of traffic to the site as of yet and since you have taken the time to post a resume about your self it was pretty easy to follow you around on the site to see if you really did check out the site and no just taking a shot at the site and me because your having a bad day. 3 pages You looked at exactly 3 pages. The site has over 2000 pages. So you may have looked at someones review you think doesn't ring true but in the end wine is all subjective to personal preference. It's actually the reason why I built the site. You see my job for the past

4.5 years is to help with the development of one of the biggest legal news sites on the web. While I do enjoy the challenge of it, the subject matter can leave a bad taste in my mouth for all the terrible things that happen to good people. So I figure I would find a cathartic release by building a fun website. I got tired of wandering through beer and wine stores or government liquor stores and not know what to choose. So I discussed the idea with some friends and the idea of a wine site was born. But not a site like all the others where people are looking to sell wine off the site and will be pumping you with sale emails of specials. Rather I wanted to build a community wine site, a real one. So while it is not yet complete with all the features I envision we are getting there. As of right now we have 2 types of member accounts. The first is for the general public. The person can add and review wines, if they can prove they have sommelier training their reviews get weighted far greater than those with no formal training (me, I have no training). The second type of account is for the wineries. This account allows the wineries to add only their own wines, update their wineries information and contribute to the wine wiki section of the site. Having the wineries share their experiences and knowledge is really important for my vision of the site.

The big thing I want to accomplish with the site is to attempt a personal wine genome project and while it will not be a real genome project it could make life better for everyone. The idea is after you have reviewed enough wines the software gets a rudimentary understanding of what you like and what you don't and then starts to recommend wines to you based on your tasting notes and the rating of the wine. In the end this solves the thing I hated, not knowing what to buy in a store and rolling the dice to see if the new wine I grabbed off the self is good or not.

Think of grapefoot.com as wikipedia.org like site for the world, It's about enriching the experience for everyone rather than just selling what ever product makes money.

Now I am going to say that it was wrong for me to just up and post in your forum with out going to the time to explain who I am and what the site is about. Again there is no place on the site for users or members to discuss the wine so you should not see the site as a threat to any wine forums anywhere. I did this for 2 reasons the first is so people have to put in a review and the second reason is maintain the site identity as a community wine site. To me the community is not one site its a bunch of sites and forums linked back and forth in over discussion.

Now in my earlier post from last week I said I was hosting a Pinot Tasting night and we did. The first review went up today for a old world pinot. The reviews might be more to your speed as 3 of the seven people there were 2nd level sommeliers and they wrote some reviews on the wine. (There was only 3 laptops so we took turns writing reviews. We had 5, Pinots this is the first of 5).

I will only post back here if invited back, it's not my intention to interfere with your group, rather I wanted to share my site with passionate wine lovers.

Cheers and thanks for taking the time to read this.

Kristoff Grapefoot.com founder

Kristoff, I had a fleeting view around a few pages, and since I am in New Zealand, I searched to see what was reviewed.

And what did I find "The Little Penguin" range of wines - from Australia (not impressed with the geographic skills of the poster)

Next, who on earth simply duplicated what was on someone else's website, or the back label of a bottle.

I quote Monkey Bay 2005; 2006 & 2007 - exactly the same blurb "The wine is delightfully fresh and lively. Overflowing with ripe, sweet flavours of grapefruit and lemon.......blah....blah....blah"

You may have 2,000 pages, but where is there anything of real substance.

I do wish you well, but my feelings are that you are a long, long way from being the wiki of wine.

st.helier

I don't know who that person was Kristoff, but it certainly wasn't me.

I've been to the site a number of times now and here's the thing: I don't get it. It is hard to navigate and it seems quite commercial. I don't like the little tasting icons, it would be easier if you just used the words since I have to run the cursor over the icons to know what they mean anyway. The descriptions of the wines seem to be from shelf talkers or the back labels then if someone post notes on the wines, the notes are displayed under the marketing portion. Often the notes just seem to mimic the marketing jargon in the description or they are so vague as to be worthless. Naomi writes that 2005 Banfi Le Rime is "The nicest white I've ever had, and usually I'm not a white drinker!" This is not a review. The vineyard for the Pommard on the homepage is listed as Domaine Moillard. Domaine Moillard is the maker, the wine is Pommard and the vineyard is "Les Epenots". You seem to confuse "wine" with "vineyard". A producer generally makes and distributes a wine and a vineyard is where the grapes are grown. I'm surprised that your "experts wouldn't catch something as rudimentary as this. I was browsing and found "Ravenswood 2005 Zinfandel" and not until I read the description of the wine did I know which Ravenswood zin it was. Ravenswood makes about 30 different zins, this one is the Teldeschi vineyard. Again a very rudimentary issue. It's stuff like this that seems a bit off that makes me wonder what the catch is.

First off, Thank you for catching the mix up with the country tied to Little Penguin

The Goal for the wines was to actually have all the wine information as it appears on the bottle as the base entry point for the community to review the wine. The review from each person is the content that makes visiting the site worth while. At this point I do not have alot of reviews. 62 reviews so far, I refuse to add commercial reviews so at this point it's a slow daily build. Grapefoot has only been around for a couple of months and most of my spare time has been working on removing the main bugs of the site. Now that most of the worst bugs have been killed I am working on bringing awareness to the community so that people can come and review the wines that exist on the site or add a wine and then add their review.

I guess what I find annoying about some of the wine magazines and wine sites is the lack of info on the wine it's self. It's also important to develop a base line for the tasting notes in a wine. The public view point on the tasting notes compared to the wineries and the Primary Common Tasting Notes will be used in the personal wine genome project.

The other reason for having the bottle info for each vintage on the site, a person looking at a wine can look back over every vintage and see how the tasting notes by the winery has changed, the mix of varietals may have changed depending on the wine etc.

The Wiki section is currently only the "all about wine" section of the site. I am being selective to who gets first access to the section as I believe the section will need proper community over sight to stop false or incorrect information from being posted. Truthfully I need 10 or so volunteers from all over the world with a strong back ground in wine.

I'm going to add a response to Bi!!'s questions below

The reason why I decided to go with icons over text for the tasting notes is to make sure everyone has a set choice of tasting notes to choose from. This again is for the personal wine genome project. If everyone can add random tastes from out side a frame work the harder it is to build a wine suggestion syndrome. The tasting notes I have currently are not the only ones that will be on the site. In fact I find there are a couple that are duplicates and they need to be removed and other ones I've missed need to be added. If you have recommendations for missing tasting note I am all ears. I am hoping that with icons that people that use the site frequently will be able to scan a page and know what all the tastes are, a picture being worth a thousand words and all that, but even I had some hard times figuring out what all the icons are for the first few days. In the end I may try and figure out a way to add text below the icons...

Your point on the vineyard and winery is quite correct and I am thing we will change the "Vineyard" to "Winery" on the site.

Finally I guess I'll close with I really appreciate the feed back from all of you. This website is a bit of personal growth life enriching project as I really do not have a wine background rather I am just a guy who always enjoyed wine even as a teenager so when I decided to build this site I did it as a personal challenge to learn something new. Most of my knowledge in life is either experience or self taught and not a lot of class room knowledge. It was the same when I got involved in the legal news site. Now I have some pretty extensive legal knowledge for the US and Canada. Not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination nor world I ever want to be.

The pay off to me is I hope to travel the world and visit some of my current and future favorite wineries.

Cheers

Kristoff

Bi!! I answered your question + comments in a reply to St.Helier

Thanks for the reply. FWIW, shelf talkers and label descriptors written by the winery may be the worst way to make an informed decision about a wine. They are generally written by marketing folk who could care less what the wine really tastes like and I have yet to read one that ever has anything negative to say so they are hardly an unbiased place to start. My advice would be to drop that aspect all together since it's basically just bullshit.

"Bi!!" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@q77g2000hsh.googlegroups.com:

I agree, I do in store wine tastings and am always given a marketing blurb, rarely does the sine in the bottle even vaguely resemble the product described. Sometimes marketing will even skip the low level one and tell you about the big brothers instead, even more useless.

Bi!!

I know that most of the content on the wine is written by a marketing company and I am trying to remedy that by giving the wineries direct access to their wine and the information on it. My end goal would be to have a winery add general notes and information to the wine entry on a yearly basis... While you can not see it if a winery signs up to the site they are given access to the "vineyard" page (soon to be the "Winery page") this allows them to talk about the yearly goings on at the winery when best to visit etc. They winery also gets access to all the wine entries on the site. That is the wine entry only not your reviews, ratings or tasting notes as you enter them as a user.

hopefully by giving the wineries the ability to share their knowledge and passion about wine from their experience and vantage point some of them will do it and then others might join in. I know for some of the wineries it's just a business but for others it is a way of life and I hope they will take a moment to share that with the rest of us. I really think they might if given an easy way to enter information to the site. The way I setup the site to add info is as easy as posting in this forum.

Say I forgot to ask above when you mentioned the mouse overs and icons, "did you see that you can mouse over the varietals?"

I am writing this on my sisters mac laptop so if there are more grammar and spelling mistakes than usual I am sorry, the keyboard has left me out of sorts.

Cheers K

Hmmm. Cant access your site at the moment.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@i12g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

How is this to remdey the problem? In all but a few cases the wineries are operated by large companies who hire marketers to write the stuff, and why wouldn't they want to put the expensive copy down imagine trading "opulent, full bodied with chocolate and currants" for "thin but decent body with good QPR vague varietal chacater on nose with green finish?"

While I laud your fervor I can only reply that giving the wine makers input on the site only let's the mice guard the cheese. You simply cannot trust that any winery will put anything on the site that it anything other than marketing drivel. If you want true validity to your site then don't allow any winery access at all. I can't understand what your motive would be for allowing a winery access to your site unless you want them to pay you for the advertising in which case you lose all objectivity and just become another shill for the wine industry to sell wine, good bad or otherwise.

Hi Kristoff, its a nice site. Hope you continue to improve it over time and get the postings.

I really do not share most of my tasting notes so I won't be posting but I look forward to seeing your site progress.

Noticable I did not see a few of my favorite wines. If they are there it is likely I did not filter properly.

Bi!!

I believe the winery's should have access to the site for a couple of reasons.

One and currently the most important, is with the wineries having access they can add wine to the site that is not yet there. This is a long term fun project for me and some friends and adding wine to the site is pretty quick there is some much out there it will take forever. Its much easier to have the wineries add their own wine, sure they get some free publicity for it but no more than if a person wandered the aisle at a liquor store.

Two I look at all the reviews online and in magazines and it bothers me not to have all the info about the wine, I like knowing what is on the bottle and what is in the bottle. It does not mean I believe all the writing on the bottle but to me its like everything else. If I am gonna go buy a car I want to see all the stats on the car and then to get a good view point on the car I am going to read not one review but many, probably at least 5 - 8 before I go for a test drive. I think it's the same for anything, buying hardware to computers and technology or what have you.

Three but later will be the number one reason. I find that reading just one review even a positive one will equate to a similar experience. So the idea of the grapefoot.com is that each review is weighted to the persons experience. So a 3rd level sommelier review is worth more than a 2nd and much more than a 1st. The Novice, expert and Master are all much lower than a 1st level sommelier. Now if 10 or 15 people with Novice, expert or Master level rate a wine, say the yellow one with a Kangaroo since that seems to be more popular than oxygen these days they will create a base line for the wine say a 4 out of 5. If a couple of level 1 or 2 sommeliers come along and add their thoughts to the wine with a much lower rating the overall level of the wine will drop... Significantly like maybe 1.5 or 2. Now how does this equate back to the winery having the ability to add their wine? Well it will not matter what the wineries say it only matters how the public feel about the wine since ratings only happen when the public rates a wine. Simply having the wine on the site does not give the wine a positive recommendation.

I have created a test fake winery account for you and anyone else on the site to create and add wines so you can see how this works. I figure why take my word for it. Currently I only have 2 wineries that have signed up and only one of them has added wine. I think the other just wants to see why I have their winery and wine on the site. Starling lane and black widow both are small boutique wineries that are run by the family. It will be a long time I think before any of the big mass marketing wineries even consider using the site.

Username: Test winery account Password: test