Thinkingwine.com

You might like to consider this:

Ah. I've just noticed you do acknowledge your source at least.

It would be more impressive if Bordeaux was not listed as a grape variety — the entry for Ch. Pipeau names the varieties as Bordeaux, rather than, of course, 80% Merlot, 10% Cabernet Franc and 10% Cabernet Sauvignon! Even the latter information should sensibly be accompanied by the statement that how the vineyard is planted may not reflect any particular year‘s assemblage. Moreover, clicking on wine by region for Bordeaux, you will find Goats do Roam listed as well — surely they do not roam as far as Bordeaux from South Africa, if so, no wonder the Doe is Bored.

Altogether I think I‘ll stick with Jancis Robinson‘s Purple Pages where for a modest annual subscritopn you get accurate information from those who really know their wine.

Tim Hartley

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.

No offense taken. This site is starting up and we are still developping it but it's good to hear feedback.

Hey TIm,

Thanks for the comments. Seems you Really know about wine.

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.

Mark Lipton

No - but it‘s great fun working on getting to know a little more on a subject so vast that you could spend a lifetime on any one area and not know it perfectly for it changes with each vintage!

Tim

Hi Mark,

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.

Thanks for taking time to look at the site.

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.