Social Wine Discovery with Adegga

In the comments to a recent post, I received a comment from André Ribeirinho.  Since I'm interested in the backgrounds of people who read and comment on my posts, I followed his link to www.adegga.com, which is currently a closed-beta test for a "social wine discovery" site (but, as I recommend for any site-in-progress, they do have a way to let you express your interest in knowing when the site goes live).

Fortunately, they have a blog which gives a little more insight into what they mean by "social wine discovery" (discovering new wines based on other people's choices), and a peek inside adegga showing how the site actually works/looks.  It's interesting to note a shift in their tagline from "social wine shopping" to "social wine discovery" over the course of time.

André does a good 30-second elevator pitch:

At adegga we are building a place where users can share their passion for wine with friends. A place where conversation around wines can take place and where all users can take valuable information from that. Allowing them to learn and shop wine in a better way.

How does this differ from sites like Corkd ("the simple way to review and share wine")?  It remains to be seen.  Vinography's Alder provides a list of why community tasting note sites will fail:

1. lack of a comprehensive wine database
2. variable quality of user-generated quality (Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap)
3. lack of incentive to participate
4. lack of critcal mass of reviewers (members)

André sees answers to those problems:

1. Creating a universal identifier for each wine, along with improved search/match
2. May not be an issue for Adegga's intended audience (friends writing for friends)
3. Better tools for sharing and participation (I agree here)
4. Taggers, not just Reviewers (this is his weakest rebuttal)

(I recommend you read his full post).  Alder himself noted the conditions for success:

So here's what they need to do: solve three of these four problems.

noting that #4 may be unsolvable.

Alder also rants at length about CellarTracker's shortcomings mentions "cellar tracking" as one benefit these sites can provide their members, and it wouldn't surprise me if André and his team are thinking about a Basecamp-style "simple is better" approach to the  issue of keeping track of your bottle stash, given his response to Alder.

I've signed up to find out when adegga goes live, so I'll let you know what I think when the site goes live.  Are any of my readers involved with the private beta test?  If so, leave a comment.

Comments

[rick gregory]

Hmm I was going to mention Cellartracker... It's by far the largest enthusiast generated database of wines out there and one of my favorite features is that I can get an RSS feed of tasting notes on the wines I have in my cellar. Some of these are useless ("tasted. 89 points") BUT what most critics of user generated notes miss is that the value is not in any one note, but in the evolving picture over time of a wine.

For example, many people have opened the 1995 and 1998 Beaucastel Chat. du Pape I have... I've been able to get an impression of the wine over time from multiple people and to tell that over the last few years it's gone from not ready to just starting to open up.

Critics are fine, but they rarely revisit a wine, so this is a valuable thing to those of us who lay down bottles.

BUT - Cellartracker gave people a reason to participate - tracking of their inventory. I'm not sure how another site will do this if it doesn't similarly motivate people to make the effort of inputting a wine that is not in the database (and those WILL exist) or of reviewing wines that are there.

[André Riberinho]

Hi Michael,
thanks for the coverage!

I've been following your blog for a while, reading about your view on winery websites. For me the report is a valuable tool.

One of the things that I haven't explained is that wineries have a important role to play on adegga. We know that not many wineries are willing to engage in a conversation with their clients ( how can this be! ) but we giving the ones that do want, a place for them to be a part of the community actively.

Regarding the 4 points that Alder wrote I'll update the information on our view of those points with a blog post in a couple of days.

Thank you,
André