Why Build a Cave?

OK, lots of other reasons I've espoused before, but none of them come closer to the truth of why Larry & I have set out to do this, as this wonderful story that came across my RSS feeds today:

In a small valley not far out of town, there are dozens of underground wine cellars where vintners store and sell the local wine, Egri Bikaver, also known as “Bull’s Blood.” As the evening winds on and the cellars close, visitors concentrate themselves more and more tightly into the remaining open cellars. The wine and proximity make for good conversation and new friendships.

It's about the stories told, friendships found, and conversations had around a great place, and great wines.

We're very passionate about these stories, and look forward to sharing in them with our clients, and the friends we'll make along the way as well.

Wine Social Networks? Hardly.

Just for "fun," I went ahead and signed up for accounts at pretty much all the "major" wine 2.0 websites the last couple of weeks and have noted some strikingly absent features at all of them that just astounds me.

For starters, a social network of any value has to enable people to browse other people's profiles and befriend them/communicate with them easily.

Second, the members of a social network have to be able to have conversations about whatever niche their social network fills.

So here's my list of wine-centric "web 2.0" sites:

Cork'd
Features: Wine tasting notes entry, cellar tracking, searching wines and tasting notes.
(innovative element: wine library tv is great.)

Snooth
Features: "Personalized Wine Recommendations"

Bottlenotes
Features: Tasting notes, cellar tracking, recommendations & wine club sales.

Bottletalk
Features: Tasting notes, wine sales, cellar tracking, same old same old - EXCEPT you can kind of browse members. I was momentarily encouraged by the name "BottleTALK" thinking it might be a place you could actually discuss wines or regions, etc, but I would be wrong.

Not a single one of these sites have an easy way (or any way unless I was missing it) to easily carry on conversations in the space.

At any rate, highly discouraging.

Now, before I run off and set up a smokin' social network of our own (which honestly is not part of our core business) using KickApps fantastic white-label platform (I worked a bit with these guys over a year ago putting together social network demo's for television shows we were producing - great product and easy to launch an awesome service on), Larry Lee tells me "Hey, you can do that on WineZap."

Really?

Isn't WineZap for "Finding, Pricing & Comparing" wines? Yep.

And there's our (new) friend Michael Stajer, doing it right, again.

Right at the top of the page is a menu option that says "TALK" - and Talk you can! That link immediately puts you in a place to start a new conversation about wines. You can do videos, join and start your own subgroups, etc.

THIS is a wine social network, and a well-done one at that (right on Michael!). It just blows me away that the sites claiming to be the new "Wine 2.0" social networks are totally missing the boat, and WineZap's e-commerce site is hitting all the right notes.

Want to find, AND TALK about wines? Go to WineZap NOW and sign up!