We did a site update today… tried to make it a bit tighter. We also got our Tastevine banner up, which just links to our splash page. Go ahead and sign up for the email newsletter if interested.

We’re going live with the site this coming Monday the 28th. It should be pretty cool. We’ve got 100,000+ wines with about a million tags, as well as thousands of recipes, so you can start playing around with as many search ideas as you can think of to find a wine or recipe that you’re looking for.


We’re also going to have TasteID user profiles where you sign up, rate the top wines for each of 12 varietals, and thereby personalize your Tastevine experience allowing you to get more customized recommendations based on your specific taste profile. This will be a really useful feature for you winos out there looking to discover a new wine that’s just right for you as well as those novices just getting into wine and looking to enhance their taste experience.

The food and recipes won’t have as advanced a rating system to start, but when you find a wine, there will be generally recommended recipes and foods for that wine. The key is to start using, contributing, and rating, which makes the system more valuable to everyone.

Once people have started to rate the same things, Tastevine will provide you with recommendations by matching you with your ‘taste budds’, who will be other members that have similar taste profiles. This gets around the problem of getting recommendations from one critic or reviewer who’s trying to appeal to all. Instead you get matched up to others like yourself. Hopefully, this will build a strong element of trust in the community fueled technology.

We’re really excited about this and look forward to everyone’s feedback.

Our vision at TasteVine, true and honest, devoid of any marketing spin, is to focus the lens through which people view wine. You see, the thing is that America is still steeped in post-prohibition law and the impact of the woman’s temperance movement still leaves its mark on the industry. When Parker emerged in 1980 he was a true pioneer. Americans at the time were drinking spirits and beer, and the section for wine in grocery stores was limited to jug wine, standard varieties from large producers and not much else. Parker created the Wine Advocate, began getting circulation and developed his point system which would go on to be his legacy, and suddenly a culture routed in thousands of years of Asian and European history was being controlled by a newcomer from Maryland. This is quite phenomenal, because Parker existed in a vacuum, in that his system, although staggeringly consistent is entirely self-referential and suddenly consumers and buyers were making their decisions based on what someone else thought. And this is where the way America began to view wine became distorted.

TasteVine’s one goal is to remove the Yellowtail-goggles or Parker-vision that has caused every recent wine to either be thought of in terms of its point score or compared to Yellow-tail in sales volume. With a fresh perspective, young and worldly minds, enthusiasm and passion, we’ve started this company in order to be the first people to create a service that caters to your taste, and recognises that your tastes might change as your knowledge and passion grows and that a wine recommendation is completely subjective.

Literally and figuratively we’ve developed a ‘tasteful technology’ that customizes itself to you. None of us claim to be experts in wine, we’re just passionate, and we would not presume to pass judgement on what constitutes good or bad, because we know that the person who knows what you like most: is you.

Last month, MySpace launched their UK website, and though their user registrations may be on the decrease, there is not doubt that they are the most influential Web 2.0 community in the world. To our young generation, one sees the limitless potential of communities fused with huge threat for saturation, as businesses scramble to try and find if they can benefit off of the prevalence of MySpace.The way MySpace has used music to link friends and promote new bands is rather visionary. Music in the 90’s became so commercial, and one couldn’t help but feel that large corporations were losing touch with the everyday consumer. However, now MySpace offers a forum and fan base to Indie Bands, and freedom of expression combined with creative license is thriving as bands are able to connect with their listeners in a personal and meaningful way that was never before possible on such a global scale.In regard to mass production and decrease in quality, one can see a similar trend in wine. Suddenly all Cabs have to be ‘BIG REDS’ and everyone wants high alcohol, and as soon as one tries to peddle a cab more aligned to the herbaceous Medoc style, wine buyers shy away.Wine, like friendship or music is about finding unity in diversity and multiplicity. We don’t want our friends to be the same as everyone else, nor do we listen to music that is repetitive and unsurprising, so why should we expect anything less of our wines?Wine is often the social liquid that can unify a gathering of friends in a great setting with excellent music in the background. Just as MySpace allows fans to include their favorite music in their group, as well as allowing bands to have direct contact with their friends, there is a definite gap in the market that would allow vineyards to have their own profiles, which users would be able to affiliate with. Just as MySpace allows bands to maintain blogs and post news, so too could this new community allow winemakers to connect with the greater public, receive feedback, post information on tastings and even have video blogs where they show the certain vintages being blended, tasted, crushed, bottled, labeled and released.In such a way, one would be able to support the diversity in wine and save it from becoming a homogenous, unidentifiable, mass produced commodity. Is there any company or organization creative enough or bold enough to take on this task?

I think there is… The Tastevine.