A treemap is a effective way of looking at multiple products with various characteristics (sound like anything familiar?). It's a mosaic of rectangles where the size, color, and location of each rectangle means something. Most on-line examples are interactive (i.e. when you mouse over the rectangles you get additional information about that data point).
Here's one for the complex data flow of the stock market: SmartMoney.com's Map of the Market (go play with it now).
Why mention a geeky thing like treemaps on a blog devoted to winery Web sites? Take a look at this treemap representing the attributes 33 different coffees: Peet's Coffee Selector. It's powered by The Hive Group's Honeycomb software.
Coffee is the new wine, they say. Perhaps wineries can take a page from Peet's book. Admittedly, this type of presentation is more appropriate to wineries with a broad variety of wines.
Further reading:
A Directory of Treemaps from Jeremy Wagstaff who wrote the Wall St. Journal Online article that started all this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114617262390737926.html (subscription required, alas).
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