WBW was up again. This month hosted by Dr. Debs of Good Wine Under $20. She’s quick and the round-up post is also up already. This month’s theme was White Rhone Varietals.

We didn’t get a change to participate like last time but we can still be of great help because we didn’t drink any white Rhone varietal but we did spend some time around WBW #46!

First, we loved Dr Debs idea of making her round-up post using a nice tag cloud to give a different perceptive on flavors, colors and feelings that tasters associated with this wines. The result is impressive.

We decided to help by changing Dr Debs TagCloud little bit so that the tags link directly to all wine blogs posts that use that tag. So clicking on Citrus will return results from searching 400 wine blogs for Citrus.

Here’s the modified tag cloud:

But there’s more! Here’s a link to all the wine blogs that posted about the wine blogging wednesday.

And an extra little add on (ok the last). Blog posts that are tagged with a specific grape! Grenache Blanc, Roussanne, Viognier, Marsanne, Picpoul and Ugni Blanc

If you’re a wine blogger and your blog is nowhere to be found on our Wine Blog Search Engine let us know (on the comments or andre [at] adegga.com) and we’ll add it.

We’ve just added the option to check wine prices in different currencies. We’ve had support for Euros since the start but now you can also check prices in UK Pounds and US Dollars.

To change to your preferred currency look for the Where to buy box on the side of any wine, click Change currency and you’re set!

Prices in different currencies may very a little since we’re converting them based on current currency exchange rates.

To see this in action check the Nederburg Chardonnay-Viognier 2007, a refreshing white wine that also has a nice (recommended) blog post made by Andrew over at Spittoon.

We have been a little quite. Mostly because we’ve been working on improving Adegga and preparing some new things.

During the last couple of weeks we have split our time between small tweaks, architecture and design of some bigger things (topic for another post) and of course drinking wine (with Portugal playing like this we have lots of reasons to celebrate).

So what did we change? We did a bunch of little changes that make Adegga more interesting and easier to use:

• New online wine shops: 15 to be exact, from around the world. With this we now have more prices on more wines so we decided to show the prices box on the sidebar of every wine page.
  
• New Wine search: search results are now ordered by rating by default., there’s an option to display or hide wine labels on results and another option to select the number of search results per page (20, 40 or 60).
• Search a wine using the AVIN: if you found an AVIN around the web (for example on the tags here or here) you can enter it on the wine search box and you’ll go directly to that wine.*
  
• User homepage redesign: this is the page you see when you login. It now shows you how many wines you have in your cellar, on your wishlist and many you’ve tasted. The redesign also cleaned some unused options.
  
• Faster blogs posts: we have improved the speed and readability of the list of blog posts for every wine wine. They now load much faster and are easier to read.
• Bigger profile pictures (avatars): to see an example check the user page. This makes it much easier to see who’s adding a tasting note or making a comment.**
• New favicon: as an indication to where Adegga design is going we have released our cool new favicon!.
  

* you can also search by AVIN using Adegga’s integrated search bar on Firefox or any other browser.
** We’ll be changing this in more places so this is a good time to update your profile picture.

We recently redesigned our wine page to include blogs posts about each wine. However we we’re still designing what kind of related information would be useful to include.

We’ve added that now. On every wine page you can now see other wines from the same producer and also other wines from the same region*.

Here’s an example of how it looks like on a wine:
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*we try to me as precise as we can. If we know the exact appellation of a wine we’ll only show results of wines from that appellation.

We’ve added simple little way to search wines and wine blogs on Adegga directly from your browser!

To add this search just follow this 3 simple steps:

1. Visit Adegga.com.
2. Check the top right corner of your browser. Click on Add “Adegga.com - Search Wines” or Add “Adegga.com - Search blogs” to add Adegga search engine.
3. Enjoy!

Here’s an example screenshot from Firefox:

If you need help configuring this on your browser leave a comment below and we’ll help you out.

Like we mentioned a few weeks ago, this month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday is hosted by Tim over at Winecast.net and the theme is Old World Riesling (which means wines made with Riesling from Germany, Austria or Alsace).

We’re were all looking forward for this tasting as we had a natural impulse to compare it with our own Vinho Verde. The tasting didn’t disappoing and it made learn a bit more about the grape and the regions from where we choose to drink.

The wines
We thought that buying a Riesling in Portugal was going to be an easy task but only after doing some digging we were finally able to get 2 bottles of Riesling: a Schloss Gobelsburg Riesling Urgestein 2006 and Weingut Magdalenenhof Rüdesheimer Burgweg Riesling Kabinett Halbtrocken 2006

 

The Schloss Gobelsburg Riesling Urgestein 2006 is from the wine region of Kamptal which is the biggest wine region in Austria and one of the most well known for Rieslings in that country.

The Rüdesheimer Burgweg Riesling Kabinett Halbtrocken 2006 (which must be one of the longest wine names ever) is made in Germany more precisely in Rheingau where main grape variety is the Riesling.

The tasting
We met for the tasting and as always we had a great time together discussing and enjoying the wines. Each of use made their own notes which are (of course) on Adegga. Here’s what each of use thought of these 2 wines.

Schloss Gobelsburg Riesling Urgestein 2006

Emídio Santos: Clean with hay yellow color. Fresh with citric aromas (lime, apple). Underlying mineral and a delicate fragrances of wood. On the palate good acidity with citric aromas and a mineral touch. Good structure with a long lasting finish. (16 in 20) (view note)

André Cid: Eye - yellow hay on the Nose - tones of peach, “nespra”, lemon and melon on the Mouth - not so profound. (14 in 20) (view note)

André Ribeirinho: A wine with a yellow-almost-white color. On the nose lots of mineral aromas. A live wine that on the palate provided evolving sense of fruit. Lemon is always present and some banana and peach coming after the initial tasting. A very interesting wine for end of the day glass of white wine. (13 in 20) (view note)

Rüdesheimer Burgweg Riesling Kabinett Halbtrocken 2006

Emídio Santos: Clean pale yellow colour. Weak nose, denoting some sweetness, apple aroma with honey traces. Smooth mouth with some acidity. Very short finish. (10 in 20) (view note)

André Ribeirinho: Light yellow color. A sense of sweetness in the wine. Very very shy on the nose and on the palate. (10 in 20) (view note)

André Cid: Eye - Clear almost white Nose - citrus Mouth - sweet (10.5 in 20) (view note)

Finally
We all liked the first wine and were happy to taste all the different fruits. However at €14 we agreed that it is bit expensive for this type of wine. The second wine didn’t excite any of us. After a day (on a second tasting) Emídio found it to be a bit more interesting but nevertheless nothing special.

If you want to see other wine tasted under this tag check the wbw45 tag page.

Interesting to how see how the tags wbw, wine blogging wednesday and wbw45 have been used a lot in the last 24 hours in the wine blogosphere showing that many wine bloggers have been publishing their entries in the last couple of hours. Here’s a screenshot from a very interesting feature we’ll be launching soon that allows us to see exactly this:

The next Wine Blogging Wednesday (#46) will be hosted by Dr. Debs of Good Wine Under $20.

We have shown some screenshots but we haven’t said much about what is project all about. Here’s a short explanation of Adegga.

What is Adegga?
Adegga is an online service that helps you discover and choose wine by sharing your opinions with people you trust.

Adegga lets you build a personalized Watchlist so that you can keep track of what people on your list are choosing and tasting. You can add friends, wine bloggers, producer and just about anyone else. You can also add wine producers and wine shops to your personalized Watchlist so that you keep track of when a producer releases a new wine or a wine shop makes a promotion.

Adegga also helps you organize your wines. You can keep track of wines you taste, make a wishlist or organize your home cellar.

Screenshot details: (a) Wine notes from Your Watchlist (b) Wine Browse by type
So what can you do with Adegga?
Here’s a short list of situations where you can use Adegga.

• See which wines you have in your cellar.
• Read what people you trust think about a specific wine you want to try.
• Lookup up prices for a wine you’re thinking of buying.
• See which wines you’ve tasted to check if you have tried a wine before.
• Check your Wishlist before your next visit to the wine shop.
• Check if someone you trust has a specific bottle of wine.
• Review that amazing wine shop you’ve just bought wine from.
• See what promotions your favorite wine shop is running this week.
• Read what wine bloggers are saying about a wine (soon).

There’s more that you can do on Adegga and there’s more that we want you to be able to do.

The closed beta has been great on new features. We have seen a growing number of wines in people’s cellars and tasted wines lists. However, the more wines people add the more difficult it is to look at their wine lists. So we started thinking that there should be a better way to look at all those wines.

Overview
The first time you access a list of wines it looks like a soulless list of items and you don’t really know where to start looking. There’s too much information and it’s not organized. So we’ve created a new way to visualize wines on Cellars and Tasted Wines lists and allow filtering based on it.

We called it Overview. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like.

You can filter wine lists by clicking on each item and, if you click in 2 different options (a country and a vintage for example), you’ll get all wines from that country and that vintage.

Search
Many times however, we know the exact name of a wine. So now you can also search user’s cellars and tasted wines lists using the new search feature.

We have been in closed beta mode for almost a month now (since reboot). If you have subscribed to be notified when we launch don’t despair! In a few weeks we’ll start sending invites so that you can start using adegga too!

There are a few people using the site right now (some using the moo invite cards) and providing amazing feedback. We have been fixing bugs and making some developments based on that feedback.

However, there are many other people that have sent us emails asking to “peek inside” adegga. For those of you that are curious about what we are doing, here’s a couple of screenshots with descriptions of some of the features of the project.

Watchlist
When you’re using adegga you can add people, that you trust or would like to follow, to your Watchlist. (More on this on another post).

Cellar
You can catalog the wines you own. Tag, rate and write notes to organize the wines so that you can find them easily later.

Tasted Wines
Track which wines you’ve been trying. This way we never forget what was that amazing bottle you had last year.

Profile
There’s a profile page for each user. These pages are full of interesting information (and we’re adding more) that gives you an overview of each person. Besides the normal stuff, like a picture and some links, there’s a short stat on the number of wines the owns, tasted or wishes, there’s a user tag cloud and much more.

Shared wines
If you’re logged in, then any profile you visit will personalized information. You’ll be able to know which wines you share with that person and which wines you both want. Is this cool or what ?

There’s much more to show like the Wine page, the Producer profile or the Wine Shops area. I’ll posting about these pages in the next few days.

We wanted to create a set of invite cards to use as invitations for the social wine discovery project that we have been developing - adegga.

This a description of how we thought and created these cards using imagination, wine and the services of a great company called Moo.

Step one: Opened a good bottle of red wine.

Step two: We thought about making 200 invite cards with a unique invitation code on each one.

We already knew and loved these little cards by Moo. They are eye-catching and small enough to be on a pocket or wallet. A Moo card can have pictures on the front and up to six lines of text on the back.

We thought we could use them with each invite code on the back, but we didn’t want to put each code manually on the back of each card. There was certainly a way of doing it without having to much work.

Step three: First bottle is over. On to the Porto! : )

Step four: Choosing 10 images was next. Why 10?

• With 10 images you can do 10 sets of cards
• You can only make a maximum of 100 moo cards at a time
• 20 sets gives us the 200 cards we want

It is advisable to resize photos to a smaller size cropping a little bit bigger than what you want so that moo can cut exactly where you want. You should also get them all on landscape format so that you don’t have to rotate them on moo.

Step five: Generate 100 invite codes (we used MySQL and PHP) and save them to a file.

Step six: Half of Port bottle was reached and it is time to tell how we got the code on the moo card without having to write the text manually on each one.There are six lines of text on the back of each card. Some can be filled with image properties. We decided that the picture name was the property we wanted to use (it’s the easiest).Now we need to copy and rename 100 pictures to put unique codes as the image’s name. There’s a non-geek way and a geek way (scripting) to do this. We did it the non-geek way and used google spreadsheet (example file here):

• Column A - original filename (10 for each image)
• Column B – each invite code
• Column C - use Concatenate Function and do something like this:
  =CONCATENATE(”cp “, A2, ” /tmp/adegga_mic/”, B2, “.jpg”)

Remember to create the /tmp/adegga_mic/ folder first.

Step seven: Now you need to upload all your new photos.

We used our Flickr account. We tried using the Mac tool but only the Windows Uploadr did actually remove the file extension (.jpg) from the name of the file.

Step eight: Further personalize your card. We choosed to add our site address (adegga.com) and add the cute little invite icon that moo provides.

Step nine: No more Port, the bottle is empty. Order the cards and wait (they say 10 days but it actually took less - 6 days).

Step ten: Start giving the away your new unique moo invite cards! We did it at Reboot 9 and people love them.