The Adegga team is feeling quite proud this week as one of our co-founders, André Ribeirinho (me*), has just been awarded as Wine Personality of the Year in Portugal by the DN based on the work that we’ve been doing in the last 3 years with Adegga and the AVIN.
Wine journalist Aníbal Coutinho wrote the newspaper article and ended it with a somewhat powerful message:
If you’re a wine producer or professional in the wine area and you’ve haven’t understood why I gave André Ribeirinho the award, make sure you’re not turning your back to the future of your business.
That certainly made us proud! Getting your work recognized is always good, but getting you’re worked praised like that is simply amazing!
An award is always a good time to look back so here’s a small recap of what we’ve done in the last 3 years.
Adegga
We launched Adegga publicly almost 3 years ago as one of the first social wine communities on the Web. After 3 years Adegga still maintains its original goal of helping people track the wines that are drinking (to help remember later) and to share that experience with their friends.
Adegga now has over 100.000 unique visitors every month and includes over 10.000 tasting notes written by its members. Adegga is available in 6 different languages translated by some of our members. This is the real power behind Adegga, the Community!
We believe that together we, as consumers, are changing the wine world by creating a new wine recommendation era where trust and conversation are more important than status.
More recently we started working together with wine producers who can use Adegga to gather their online fans, talk about their wines or launch a new wine. Cortes de Cima and Quevedo are two of wine producers already doing it.
At the end of 2009 we organized the first ever Adegga Wine Market which was a tremendous success bringing together over 150 peoples and 15 wine producers who’ve enjoyed tasting and talking about wine together in an unusual set full of nice sofas and music. We’re already planning the next one.
AVIN, an ISBN for Wine
One of the projects that has been keeping us awake at night is the AVIN. We created the AVIN to solve the problem of having one wine being identified by several different names. We believe that like with books, every wine should have a unique number. This will help consumers get more information out of each bottle of wine and help them make smarter decisions.
One year ago we created the concept of
Dynamic Wine Labels allowing anyone with a camera-enabled mobile phone to read the label and access wine reviews, wine prices and a lot more information from anywhere. Now, over
1 million wine labels have been printed with a Dynamic Wine Label including an AVIN and a QRCode. Please visit the AVIN website for more information on this specific project and to learn how to get your own
AVIN.
European Wine Bloggers conference
In 2009 we also gave a lot of time to another project. Together with Gabriella and Ryan Opaz and Robert McIntosh we helped organize the European Wine Bloggers conference in Lisbon. The conference was a major success, gathering over 160 people including wine producers, wine bloggers and wine writers from around the World. The 2010 edition will be announced soon and we’ll certainly be a part of it.
So were are we heading?
The last 3 years were nothing short of amazing! We expect 2010 to be another great year as we have so many exciting things almost ready to be announced (including a redesign!).
- We want Adegga to be even more social so we’ll be connecting even more with Facebook and Twitter.
- We also want Adegga to be open so we’ve developed an API and we’re currently testing it before launching.
- We’ve been also getting a lot of requests for a mobile application so we’ll be releasing an iPhone and an Android application.
Follow us everywhere
To keep in touch make sure you follow us on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook or subscribe our RSS. As always, you know our email so tell us about your ideas, bugs or just say hi!
* not too sound too much schizophrenic but André Ribeirinho and the author of this text are the same person. Me. 
