Scrugy, the Internet’s largest and most discerning search engine dedicated to wine, eclipsed the 4 million page mark today. That’s right, Scrugy now allows you to search over 4.2 million pages from nearly 5,000 wine related sites.

Winery websites, wine blogs, wine podcasts, wine communities, wine associations, tasting notes, industry pundits… you’ll find them all and more on Scrugy.

One of the nice touches on Scrugy is the ability to listen to a podcast right from the user interface. So if there’s a podcast description that gets your attention, just click on the listen icon in the post details on Scrugy. A small window will popup and the show will automatically start playing. Move the player to the side and continue browsing while you listen.

Even if you’re already hooked up in iTunes with your favorite podcasts syncing to your iPod, this Scrugy feature is a great way to discover new wine podcasts or to give a quick listen to a podcast right on your computer.

Scrugy now offers aggregated outbound feeds for each of the categories that it maintains as well as a “super” feed that covers all categories. Each feed includes the 20 most recent posts from all sites within the category.

So if you already use an aggregator such as My Yahoo, Google, BlogBridge, or Netvibes to monitor your feed subscriptions, add one or all of the Scrugy feeds to get your daily wine fix in one convenient dose. And if you join Scrugy and setup your My Scrugy page with your favorite wine feeds, Scrugy will give you a feed aggregating just those sites too.

Just look for the feed logo on the homepage next to each category name for the RSS subscription link. On your My Scrugy page, look for the “subscribe” link on your Subscriptions tab.

A quick announcement about a small, but very cool, feature that was released on Scrugy earlier today.

With the new aggregation services enhancements, Scrugy has been tracking several blogs authored by winery owners and winemakers in the Winery Blogs category. However, until today those blogs weren’t connected to the detail pages for the wineries they belonged to. Now there is a two-way link between the feed for the winery and the winery page. This means that on the “New Releases” page you will see a link to the winery detail page for the winery associated with a post and on the winery detail page you will see a new tab called “Blog” that lists the latest posts from the winery’s blog(s).

Check out the following winery detail pages for just a few examples.

• Anne Amie
• Goosecross Cellars
• Twisted Oak Winery

So why do I think this is such a cool enhancement? Put simply, it allows winery bloggers to impact the content on the detail page for their winery on Scrugy without having to submit changes to or update Scrugy in any way. All they have to do is create a post on their blog and Scrugy will pick it up and integrate it on their detail page. Isn’t RSS a beautiful thing?

What do you think? Let me know.

I am pleased to announce the launch of the blog for Scrugy, the fastest and easiest way to learn about and find anything related to wine. We are very excited about the impending launch of the latest round of enhancements to the Scrugy platform and will use this blog to talk about new features, planned features, and anything related to wine and Scrugy.

Your feedback is very important to us and hope that this blog will serve as another great tool for interacting with you, the users of Scrugy.