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Snooth Announces Release of Analytics for Retailers and Wineries

Sun, 17 Nov 2008 17:35:21 GMT

posted by Natalya

New York, NY (November 14, 2008) - Snooth, the world’s largest and most comprehensive wine site announces the launch of Snooth Analytics. The new feature provides Snooth’s retailer and winery partners with an in-depth look at who is searching for their wines and how their prices compare to competitors’. With this and the upcoming launch of Snooth’s Group Pages, the company finishes the release of its Partnership Hub, the self-service interface that allows wine businesses to manage their presence on Snooth and submit inventory data so Snooth can redirect users directly to their online shopping cart.

The Snooth Analytics package provides never-before-available data on user behavior in an online wine environment. As part of the analytics tool, retailers and wineries can view data on the number of wines available, search results and detailed page view counts, clicks and conversion data, as well as a breakdown of the completeness of their wine listings on Snooth. Wineries are even shown how many of their wines are available on Snooth through retail channels versus direct from the winery.

In addition, three detailed reports are available - Interest, Change, and Price Analysis. Each report presents a winery’s or retailer’s data from a unique perspective. Interest analysis displays locations of user interest in a winery’s or retailer’s products down to the city level, letting the business know where to invest marketing resources. Change analysis reports what new cities and regions have been recently added to the Interest list. Last, price analysis compares a winery or retailer’s wine prices with those of the competition based on categories of type, origin, price point, and color. The entire Analytics package is available for free to any winery or retailer that claims their information on Snooth’s Partnership Hub.

“Snooth serves millions of user queries a month; most of them targeted by geography. We’re really excited to be able to make this unique repository of data freely available to our winery and merchant partners by offering them these industry leading analytics on consumer purchase behavior from across the globe” comments Philip James, Snooth’s founder.

About Snooth:

Launched in June 2007, Snooth is a highly interactive, social database of the world’s wines, offering both casual and expert wine drinkers the ability to search, obtain personalized recommendations, interact with fellow wine lovers, as well as seamlessly buy from a global network of over 11,000 merchants.

Users have the ability to search by their own personal preferences (bold, peppery, fruity, etc), by a specific meal-pairing, price, or by region or producer. Snooth’s recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become.

Please visit http://www.snooth.com for more information.

Contact

media@snooth.com
(646) 723-4328

Drinking French for $15 or Less

Mon, 18 Nov 2008 00:28:00 GMT

posted by davidmcduff
For my two cents – or three fins, as the case may be – there’s no country in the wine world today that offers as much as France does in the under $15 per bottle category. With the holidays looming large and the economy pretty much in the toilet, trying to get the most bang for the least buck is nothing to at which to shirk. Such incentives, along with my passion for les vins de France, were the inspiration for the seminar I’ll be leading – French Under $15 – at Tria Fermentation School tomorrow night.

Not surprisingly, there will be an emphasis on whites and reds from the Loire Valley and the Southern Rhône along with reds from the greater Southwest. And I even managed to sneak in a Burgundy. Class has been sold out for ages but here’s what I’ll be pouring, just in case you’d like to follow along in mind, spirit or body. Feel free to hit the comments with your preferred lineup.

Vin Mousseux de Qualité “Armance B” Brut, Ampelidae NV
A traditional method sparkling wine from just outside of Poitiers in the southwestern Loire.
Muscadet Sèvre et Maine Sur Lie “Vieilles Vignes,” Château les Fromenteaux 2006
Classic Muscadet, crisp, minerally and mouthwatering, produced by Pierre Luneau-Papin on behalf of his daughter who owns Fromenteaux, which is situated in Le Landreau.
Côtes du Luberon “Le Châtaignier” Blanc, Domaine de la Citadelle 2007
A typical white Rhône blend from a lovely little estate situated at the base of the hill below the citadel-crowned village of Ménerbes.
Bourgogne Passetoutgrain, Domaine Diconne 2005
Yep, 2005 red Burgundy for less than $15 does exist, with the help of Gamay of course. And it’s good.
Vin de Pays des Coteaux de l’Ardèche “Vin de Pétanque,” Mas de Libian 2007
Funky, juicy Grenache, farmed biodynamically by young vigneronne Hélène Thibon, with a little help from her horse Nestor.
Fronton “Le Classique,” Domaine Le Roc 2006
A surprisingly elegant, medium-bodied expression of Negrette, the local specialty in Fronton (formerly the Côtes d Frontonnais), located just north of Toulouse.
Madiran “Tradition,” Château Viella 2006
An excellent value from the heart of the Southwest. A blend of Tannat and Cabernet Franc, loaded with texture and brambly aromas.

---------- Original content published at McDuff's Food & Wine Trail. All work copyright David McDuff and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NC-ND Works 3.0 Unported License.

Groups : Snooth’s biggest announcement this year

Wed, 13 Nov 2008 18:04:20 GMT

posted by Natalya

We’re all really excited about the significant changes the site has seen over the last 3 weeks. This culminated yesterday with the launch of what we internally called “Snooth Groups”. “Groups” is one of those innocuous internally used words thats fails to do this project justice and its the culmination of several months work.

In a nutshell Groups provides a profile homepage for every winery, store, grape and region in the world (if anythings missing, please let us know and we’ll add it). There are around 50,000 pages in total.

One of the things we’ve prided ourselves on is not launching blank pages and then just sitting back waiting for you, our users, to do the hard work of filling everything in. To help get the ball rolling we’ve partnered with Appellation America and we’ll be displaying their AVA and grape descriptions. We’ve also partnered with Global Wine Stocks (publicly available winery and store data) and Global Wines and Spirits (winery data as supplied by the wineries directly) to help fill out the content. Finally, we’ve been mining the Snooth database of reviews and wines to come up with some brand new ways of looking at this information.

So, what does this all mean? In a nutshell, every winery, region, grape or store now has their own dedicated page on Snooth, where you can check out their basic details (address, maps, images phone number and so on), you can get an at-a-glance graphical overview of the price points a retailer sells at, the grapes a region produces or how the average score for a winery trends over time.

Pictures tell it best, so take a look at the following:

>Each region has a series of charts, this one shows how the average rating for Napa wines has varied over time:

>Another of the region charts is the Varietal Composition - the chart here shows which grapes are grown in California

>In addition to their own custom charts, every store and winery has a section with the basic details: phone, email, website and their ‘about us’ text. This makes it easy to track down and contact any store or winery you are looking for - see the Larkmead example below:

> The group pages are really supposed to be your first port of call to learn about a specific topic, and one of the ways we do that is by pulling in relevant information from across the site. The image below shows the feed for the Robert Mondavi Winery page - here you are able to keep tabs on the most recent reviews of Mondavi wines, talk posts that mention the winery, or the family as well as direct comments, reviews and testimonials that people have left here. The group owner (in this case the winery themselves) can also leave comments, post events and stay in touch with their fans.

> In addition to the images, charts, feeds and so on, grapes have a few additional charts, like this one (shown below) - this is the histogram showing the price distribution of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. The other chart here would show you apie chart of which countries grow Cabernet and how much…

> Once you’ve found some groups you like, you can ‘follow’ the group. This means that your homepage grapevine - the main feed on your logged in homepage - will then keep you updated with the groups activites.

There’s a lot to explore here, so browse around and check out a few of your favorite regions, grapes and wineries - just search for them in the regular search box and you’ll see the links to the group pages.

PS. We’re not done here. When we launch something, its stage 1 on a long road. This is certainly the most massive undertaking we’ve taken since launch, but we’re very excited by the possibilities in front of us. We look forward to hearing your comments and feedback.

Happy birthday, Wine Curmudgeon II

Sun, 17 Nov 2008 12:58:51 GMT

posted by WineCurmudgeon

The empties are in the recycling bin, the guests have been sent home, and the birthday party is over.

A few more thoughts about what you read and enjoyed – and didn’t enjoy – during the past 12 months.

• The best-read white wine review was the Rosemount Diamond Label sauvignon blanc, which was the 12th most popular post. I think this speaks to Rosemount’s popularity, as well as to how popular Australian wine is. It was a fine wine, but I did taste better.

• The most popular non-wine post was my homage to the Asus EEE 900 computer. Who knew wine people liked computers so much?

• My favorite post was A day in the life of a wine writer, which detailed my epic battle to survive a wine lunch, two tastings, and a wine class. You liked it too – it made the top 15.

• The Texas wineries series made the top 20. I’ll have one or two more up in the next couple of weeks. Several regional wine posts did quite well, including the Norton grape and Time magazine entries.

• Also in the top 20, and not surprising: Alternatives to bottles, like wine boxes, cans, and the like.

• You didn’t much care for sparkling wine, so I see I have my work cut out for me. The best-read bubbly review was Segua Viudas, which didn’t break the top 100.

• The Rosemount was the only white wine review in the top 25, though my riesling post did make it.

• And I’m very disappointed that you have all but rejected rose. Sigh. Go here. Read some reviews. Try some. It’s not all sweet, pink wine.

• The worst-read blog post? A review of an Italian white, Iname Soave. I think this may have more to do with when the post appeared – the week after New Year’s – than the quality of the wine.

Technorati Tags: Wine Curmudgeon,wine blogs,top posts

Rhone Valley "Everyday" Wines

Wed, 13 Nov 2008 23:59:00 GMT

posted by pleasuresofthepalate
If you've never tried any wines from France's Rhone Valley, now is a great time to do so. According to wine experts, growing conditions over the last several years (2005, in particular) have been outstanding in the region. While the Rhone is known for producing some really outstanding (and expensive!) Hermitage and Chateauneuf du Pape, we should not forget about some of the other regions that can produce some very good wines meant to be enjoyed every day - wines from the Cotes du Rhone, Cotes du Ventoux, Gigondas and other regions that don't quite have the prestige of the big-name regions. These wines often come at more affordable prices and, in a good growing year, can represent real value.

Some of our favorites include:

M. Chapoutier Belleruche Cotes du Rhone - 2005 or 2006
La Vieille Ferme Rouge Cotes du Ventoux - 2005 or 2006
Louis Bernard Le Garrigon Cotes du Rhone 2005

All of these wines are under $15 per bottle and exhibit the spicy, earthy qualities that make Rhone valley red wines special. While these wines are packed with rich flavor, their relatively low alcohol content make them extremely food-friendly. The next time you are making a roast chicken or pork stew, pick up a bottle of Rhone Valley wine and transport yourself to a rustic French farmhouse for a real taste of the French countryside.