Techcrunch posted on the launch of Winelog and initiated a good conversation on the wine web 2.0 and Corkd.com. I have been both in the wine business and the tech business (and I drink way too much wine) in my career. Wine is the perfect topic for a social service and I have been thinking about it for a while now. I am glad to see a bunch of good looking services launch.
However, there is one key missing component of these services - a standard database of products. Wine is unique in that there are literally hundreds of thousands of wines. Many have defined subtleties such as apellation and vineyard designations. Furthermore, you also have a new wine come out every year, so multiple vintages of the same wine. The result is that if you don't have a very structured database, it is very hard to search, discover, and comment on the millions of wines in a consistent way. Without database rigor, these services will fail, or at least only serve the most casual consumer (one that might not care what that the 2003 is much different or better than the 2004 for instance).
What people may not realize is that there already exists a very robust and strong wine web service with all these features and more. It's called Cellartracker.com. Cellartracker is a little closer to web 1.5 (for those who care about that), but it is damn good. Eric Levine has built a solid service on the back of structured, detailed database. There are overhundreds of thousands of wines in Eric's system, and more importantly, over 2 million user bottles and 100,000 user generated reviews. This service is the lifeblood of over 15,000 users (like me) who manage their wine purchases, inventory, and consumption. My cellar is can be found here.
I hope sites like Corkd and Winelog will be successful. However, my prediction is that they won't ever be able to get to the scale and depth of offering that Cellartracker has achieved. If Eric can continue to improve the service and add more of a "people lens" for person to person community, Cellartracker will be the dominant wine community on the web for some time to come.
Hi Todd, thanks for the kind words about CellarTracker! These new sites are certainly inspirational and give me a lot of food for thought about directions to take CellarTracker over the coming months.
Indeed, a large, shared catalog does seem to be critical, and reaching 200,000 wines on CellarTracker took a lot of blood and sweat on the part of thousands of users--plus a LOT of editorial oversight to keep things clean and dupe free.
Anyway, back to the grindstone for me!
Posted by: Eric LeVine | May 29, 2006 at 08:16 PM