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.

In the last couple of months a number of wine related websites that bring a web 2.0 perspective (whatever that is) to the wine world has been launched. Among others Corkd, LogABottle, Winelog.Net, TastyDrop and OpenBottles.

Alder from Vinography has posted his view on Why Community Tasting Note Sites Will Fail. Alder considers that these websites all have the same fundamental problems and these will probably make them fail. In resume Alder points out that:

#1: In order to be really useful, you gotta have a hell of a lot of wines in the system
#2: We users are stupid and we don’t know how to write.
#3: There is not enough incentive or reason to use the system regularly
#4: There just aren’t enough wine lovers to go around

David Wheeler replies to Alder’s post and explains that in his view some sites might prevail but for different reasons.

I agree with David in the idea that Corkd has been developed mainly to allow people to share wine reviews and recommendation with their friends. Nevertheless, even if it solve some of Alder’s points, it’s not a good solution because is presents other problems.

I would like make my own view and I’ll use Alder’s points as a guideline.

1 - In order to be really useful, you gotta have a hell of a lot of wines in the system

I agree with Alder that a good wine database is a major starting point for any wine site. Users from wine sites can benefit from the fact that “Barca-Velha 1995″ or “Barca Velha 95″ means the same thing as “Barca Velha 1995″. Not just because of reviews (that are aggregated under the same wine) but because by refering to the same object other information can be agregated that might be useful. Think wine prices for example. Using corkd and the “Barca Velha” example, two friends could be reviewing the same wine and if introduced in the system diferently they would be considered two different wines.

David says that “it’s not a site that’s about reviewing wines, it’s about sharing with your friends.” I say that if Social Networking is about sharing objects (photos, books, wine), then users must clearly be addressing the same object for it to be shared.

Like Alder said, the answer to this problem (and also the one we’re developing on adegga) relies on a comprehensive database of wine for users to refer to. Even if, in the beginning, it contains some mistakes (and we’re making our best to avoid them). Asking users to report wine details errors (like name, region, grapes) and make sugestions on how to fix them is much easier than making them insert all the content from scratch.

2: We users are stupid and we don’t know how to write.

I agree with David in that Corkd users might only be interested in getting just their friends reviews and ratings. This is good for quality. The main audience of a review will only be the user’s friends. For example a review from a guy that I know in real life to be an excellent wine connoisseur saying just “I love this wine” might be much more valuable to me (that know him) than a fancy review from someone I’ve never met.

We’re all friends at adegga, so we know how much value is in a friend’s opinion wherever he may have said it. We’ll be addressing this problem using a special feature. We’ll talk about this one soon.

3: There is not enough incentive or reason to use the system regularly

Wines are not photos, they are more like books. Users upload pictures (lots of them) on a regular basis and check them even more regularly. All these because they want to share or manage their photos. Wines are not photos but I can think of a couple of reasons for users to comeback (even if less regularly) to a wine site. For example, user wants to know what his friends have been buying to keep track of new wines (social networking), user has bought a new wine bottle and wants to add it to his cellar (cellar managment) or user wants to buy a new bottle of wine (price and availability).

At adegga we have a focus on users so we’ll provide them with the tools that they need to accomplish their goals.

4: There just aren’t enough wine lovers to go around

There aren’t enough wine lovers to make a wine reviewing site a success because only a small portion of users will actually make reviews. But the value is not only on the reivew. I think there’s a lot more useful information than can help users get value from the site other than just reviews. There’s information that every type of wine lover can contribute much more easily that reviews. Think about tags ( drink, wait, sweet, chocolat, cheap, expensive) or ownership (if a friend owns a wine it means something).

Web Cellar Management
I agree with Alder and David that CellarTracker is one of the ugliest user interfaces I’ve seen. Nevertheless it solves some of the problems that Alder talks about by having and authoritative database and allowing users to suggest corrections. And being a cellar management software it gains from the fact that users return to it each time they buy a new bottle and want to update their cellar. Even with that UI, CellarTracker has around 16,500 registered users that I think are mainly heavy collectors of wine that manage many many bottles.

CellarTracker is big and for many people maybe a bit too big. We at adegga think that there’s space for a much simpler (and usable) alternative to cellar management.

At adegga we are buiding 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.

Stay tuned.

ps: I think that both posts from Alder and David (and their commnets) make for an interesting conversation around the subject of the new breed of wine sites. The feedback is priceless and I want to thank both of them for sharing their opinion.

The Bazaarblog has some very interesting numbers on how users value reviews.

* 63% of users prefer sites with ratings and reviews (eVoc Insights)
* 48% of shoppers seek reviews before making a purchase decision (eVoc Insights)
* Conversion of customers buying a single product nearly doubled after the product received a five-star review, going from .44% to 1.04%. (Marketing Experiments / Shopping.com experiment)
* 59% of users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews. (BizRate)

This are all interesting numbers. But the most relevant is:

* Users who contribute product reviews visit a site 9 times more often than average users, and they remain twice as loyal and buy twice as often. (McKinsey)

What makes users comeback is the desire to be part of a community. In doing this they are add something invaluable to the conversation!

When users subscribe to a social network based service they usually have the ability to customize the profile. Having a profile picture is probably one of the most important things the user can add because not only allows other users to recognize them but also serves as a personality thing.

Being so important is interesting to see how different is the user reaction to different default pictures. On radar an interesting post on the Face-off of Flickr and 43Things faces. Apparently users tend to more easily change a picture they don’t feel confortable with, like the expressionless face at flickr.

    
I think this is what Scoble calls Anti-marketing design. People feel more confortable using sites that are not perfect. Sites that they feel the sites are were made by humans. And bad design sites success stories are all over the place: ebay, craigslist, myspace.

Personally, I believe in things like flickr and etsy that combine both simplicity in design and usability. Thankfully they’re also success stories or I wouldn’t have and argument to defent against.

A simple logo-and-tagline-and-alert-subscription-and-vintage-port-mentioning welcome page is online.

Once you’re there enter your email on the box if you’d like to be notified when we launch.