Monday Discovery: Able Grape

I’m not posting this as a tried and tested recommendation but rather as an interesting concept to play around with and explore.  Able Grape is a dedicated wine search engine that is relatively new but could end up being very helpful for those seeking fast and specific information regarding wine.  I often use Wikipedia or try my luck with Google when I’m not willing or able to break open the reference books.  This works for the most part, but there are many times when I’m trying to get information on a very small specific region (take Savenierres for example), and I just cannot easily find good info through regular searches.  Having a dedicated site for wine seems like it could solve that problem, but let’s not forget that the number one job of a search engine is to bring you quality relevant results.

That’s how Google came to dominace and I hope that’s what we’ll see from Able Grape.  I like that they will exclude retailers from much of their results.  I find looking up a specific wine or winemaker usually yields one or two articles and dozens of retailers.  That’s helpful if I need to price wines, and that’s about it.  Also it seems they are looking to get users very invovled with feedback that goes into tweeking the engine (I’m not usually a sucker for contests, but offering a ‘64 Gaja for the best feedback works for me).  Still my one concern is whether they have the right programmers on the backend to properly implement such changes and truly make the site a valuable resource.  I certainly hope so, because this is something I can use.

~ by Ben Bell on August 25, 2008.