Earlier this week I asked if others in the wine 2.0 community would be interested in collaborating on defining and describing how we can start representing wine information using structured web concepts. Namely, adopting existing microformats where appropriate and helping to shape future microformats where necessary.

I’ve dubbed this initiative Wineformats.

We’ll be discussing ideas and issues related to this effort on a new Wineformats Google Group and will be publishing the results of our work on the Wineformats wiki.

If you’re interested in getting involved, check out the wiki and join the discussion group. And this initiative is not just for the programmer types out there. Anyone with wine domain expertise or an interest in shaping the next wave of innovation for the online wine community is welcome.

It’s exciting to see other folks starting to pick up on the potential of the semantic web and wine. At Scrugy we’ve already laid the groundwork for mining microcontent embedded in web pages and RSS feeds. In fact, the first phase has already been implemented in our wine-smart web crawler and feed aggregation services where we are harvesting wine review information from tasting notes formatted using microformats.

So what else is possible with the marriage of microformats and wine related content? Well, here is a glimpse of our roadmap in this area.

We see tremendous potential in the development of open specifications for representing lots of other structured wine information. For example, on winery web sites alone the hCard/adr and geo microformats can be used when displaying contact information, tasting room addresses, and GPS coordinates. In addition, hCalendar can be used when listing winery events and hListing when listing wine releases.  Of course, wine retail sites can also use hListing.

The possibilities for developing applications that leverage this information are very exciting. Let’s consider what’s possible with a site like Scrugy. Since Scrugy is an aggregator of wine information, it will automatically pick up winery addresses, geo coordinates, events, wine releases, and so on from winery sites that are using microformats when they’re crawled. That means these wineries will only be responsible for keeping their websites up-to-date and will no longer have the chore of propagating updated information out to the many sites that list information on them. Essentially what we’re talking about here is turning the current model inside out where wineries will no longer have to push data out but instead tools like Scrugy can come and get the information. Updates are then more timely and perhaps most importantly the distributed information is more accurate.

Circling back to tasting notes and microformats, the advantages for the wine consumer are equally appealing. At the end of my last post on HDTNs (High Definition Tasting Notes), I touched on the power of aggregating structured wine review information. Consider the situation where a tasting note aggregator such as Scrugy has developed a detailed tasting descriptor profile for a particular wine. This profile would be the result of summarizing tasting notes from several sites and employing an authority weighting for tasting notes from reviewers of distinction (critics, wine makers, and so on). Then consider a wine newbie who comes along and can only tell you the name of a wine that they liked. Scrugy can take the dominant tasting descriptors from that wine and find different wines with similar profiles. This opens the door to extremely powerful and accurate wine recommendations and the opportunity to discover wines from producers and regions that previously may never had been thought possible.

So of the other Web/Wine 2.0 companies out there, who is ready to take the next step? Andrea Johnston with Inertia Beverage Group is already calling this “Wine 3.0″.  Is there anyone willing to join me in defining open specifications for bringing the semantic web and wine together? I’d be happy to host a wiki to get things going.

Tim over at Winecast is debating the question of whether “wine 2.0″ sites like Scrugy are just for (wine) geeks. Naturally I’ve got an opinion (or two) on this.

First, like Tim, I must admit up front that I am something of a wine geek (link to my personal blog) and I’m absolutely a tech nut. Over the years as a software developer I’ve seen many technical trends on the Net come and go. Sure there are some concepts that go nowhere but you can pretty much count on nearly every effort contributing somehow to the evolution of the Internet. Some ideas contribute more than others but the overall application development ecosystem on the Internet will take it all in and bubble the best ideas to the top. My point in all this is that we are still very early in the lifecycle of the Internet and to claim that one type of application that is popular in one sector will never be successful in another (i.e. wine) is a tough call to make.  Are any of the web 2.0 sites focused on wine even a year old? Heck, most wine blogs are less than a year old too.

Another point that I’d like to make is that the first users of almost every new site are geeks. Let’s face it. We geeks are always online, checking out new sites and ideas the moment they’re unveiled. So of course the initial user base of a new crop of applications will have a heavy geek factor. Does this mean that these sites will ultimately fail to gain mass appeal? The challenge, as I see it, is for these sites to continue to evolve and mature, building upon a proven formula, until they hit on the right implementation. I think Cork’d is a great example of a young wine web 2.0 site that seems to appeal most to the non wine geek. In fact, I’ve heard several wine geeks say that Cork’d just doesn’t have enough of the techno wine geek features they’d like to see.

I hope we all can agree that wine related sites have a place online. Wine quality continues to improve around the world and good quality wine is easier than ever to find at lower price points. As wine continues to reach new heights of popularity, especially in the new world, wine newbies will naturally look online to feed their new interest. But what will they be looking for and how will they want to access information about wine? Buying wine online is a no-brainer. But how does someone new to wine get to the point of making a purchase decision? You’re lucky if a wine newbie can tell what they like and dislike in wine let alone naming a specific wine that they liked. I believe that this is where wine sites need to start. That is, easy, intuitive, and approachable access to information on wine. This is exactly what we’re trying to provide on Scrugy. Are we there yet? Probably not. Are moving in that direction? You bet!

What do you think?

The tasting note is an elusive and sometimes controversial and intimidating part of the wine world. Anyone can create them but few of us do. Some people swear by them while others hate them. A few make a living off of them while others scribble them on napkins. Some live out their fantasies as poets in their tasting notes while others use cryptic shorthand that only they can understand. Tasting notes can make or break a winery or can end up crumpled in someone’s pocket destined for the spin cycle never to be seen again.

For those tasting notes that actually make it online, we want to help them live up to their full potential. That is, to offer a usable profile of not only the wine and producer but also of the reviewer. What do I mean by this? Well, imagine if you could take all tasting notes written in any language for a particular wine from several web sites, normalize their scores into a consistent scale, extract and summarize the tasting descriptors from all reviewers, apply an authority filter to add weight to tasting notes from recognized experts, and then provide a single global view of the wine from all of this information. This would give you a powerful tasting profile of a wine that is the true result of what people are actually experiencing. And this view can be expanded to provide tasting profiles at the vintage, producer, region, and varietal levels. Sound interesting? Scrugy is already doing this today!

Recently I wrote about Scrugy’s support for microformats. In this post I’d like to take it a step further and talk about what I like to call High Definition Tasting Notes, or HDTNs.

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With all the attention that wine sites with map mashups have been receiving lately, we feel compelled to point out that Scrugy has had  maps integrated on its wine region and winery detail pages for months.

For example, check out Scrugy’s Dry Creek Valley page. Not only does Scrugy integrate the Yahoo! Maps service to give you satellite and map views of the area, we also include local weather conditions, community average score, and a tag cloud of the wine community’s tasting descriptors/tags for the region. And when we say community, we’re not just talking about Scrugy users here. Scrugy aggregates wine information from several sites that provide tasting notes–a much more accurate representation of the wine community.

The winery detail page provides a similar view with a map of the winery’s location, local weather, and community score and tags from tasting notes for the winery. Staying within the Dry Creek Valley, check out the David Coffaro page on Scrugy.

Look for more great aggregated data and information on Scrugy in the coming days.

The private beta is over and Scrugy is now publicly available!

I would like to thank all of the beta testers that provided excellent feedback throughout the closed beta. We will continue to incorporate your ideas and suggestions going forward. There are several exciting and innovative features in the pipeline that I’ll be blogging about in the coming days so keep your comments coming.

Lots of us like to write tasting notes. In fact, there are millions of tasting notes out on the web. Many just have a score and maybe a few impressions of the wine. Others, though, include detailed information about the wine, background on the winery, and what food was paired with it. Some tasting notes are written by industry pundits who can make or break a winery with a score and review while others are written by wine novices trying to get their head around what they like and dislike in wine. Some tasting notes are added to blog posts, many to wine forums/bulletin boards, and still more to online wine communities.

At Scrugy, our challenge is to make sense of all these tasting notes. A daunting task indeed. So far we’ve done a pretty good job of letting you find tasting notes using Scrugy’s search engine. Also, some sites provide RSS feeds of their tasting notes that Scrugy can use to further narrow its focus. However, whether the tasting note is in the middle of a web page, buried in a bulletin board post, or part of a feed, isolating the vital and relevant parts of the tasting note among the surrounding content is nearly impossible. What we’re talking about here is basic information about the wine (vintage, producer, region), the score for the wine, information about the reviewer, and some impressions on the wine. Well, this effort just go a whole lot easier today with Scrugy’s support for the hReview microformat.

One of the more promising concepts in the Web 2.0 movement is the idea of a semantic web. That is, delivering content that is both meaningful to humans and computers. At the center of the semantic web are microformats. Put simply, microformats are lightweight and open data formats that build upon existing standards. There are microformats defined for representing people & organizations, events, social networks, tags, lists, reviews, and more. Microformats can be used anywhere well-formed (X)HTML is found, including web pages and RSS feeds.

So what does this have to do with tasting notes? By simply annotating a tasting note as an hReview on web pages, blog posts, forum posts, and feed items, Scrugy can pick up the detailed information it needs to properly index the tasting note. Let’s look at an example.

Here is the HTML for a simple tasting note as it may appear on a web page or in a blog post.

<div>
  <h1>2004 Navarro Pinot Noir Anderson Valley</h1>
  <p>Score: 5 out of 5</p>
  <blockquote>
    This vintage is intense: lots of berry, cherry flavors with
    a patina of toasty oak.
  </blockquote>
  <p>
    Reviewed by <a href="http://.../ted">Ted</a>
    on September 3, 2005
  </p>
</div>

Now the same tasting note annotated as an hReview would look something like this (additions in bold):

<div class="hreview“>
  <h1 class=”item“>2004 Navarro Pinot Noir Anderson Valley</h1>
  <p>Score: <abbr class=”rating” title=”5“>5 out of 5</abbr></p>
  <blockquote class=”description“>
    This vintage is intense: lots of berry, cherry flavors with
    a patina of toasty oak.
  </blockquote>
  <p class=”reviewer vcard“>
    Reviewed by <a class=”url fn” href=”http://…/ted”>Ted</a> on
    <abbr class=”dtreviewed” title=”20050903“>
      September 3, 2005
    </abbr>
  </p>
</div>

So with the addition of just a few class attributes and the <abbr> tag to the HTML, we now have a tasting note that is formatted just like the original but has the advantage of being computer readable. The “hreview” class name is what indicates that the nested content refers to a review (a review of a wine in our case). Nested within this element are elements with the pre-defined microformat classes ”item”, “rating”, “description”, “reviewer”, and “dtreviewed”. These classes tell us the name of the item being reviewed, the rating or score, a description of the review, who reviewed the item, and when it was reviewed. Instead of an opaque sequence of HTML tags, Scrugy can now interpret this markup as a tasting note and index it as such.

Although this example is simple, it does illustrate how seamlessly existing markup can be microformat-enabled without imposing restrictions on how it is displayed. And just as tools have evolved to make it easy for anyone to work with HTML to create blogs and web pages, new tools will emerge that make it easy for us to generate microformatted content as well. In fact, look for a new tools section on Scrugy that will, among other things, allow you to author a tasting note suitable for pasting into your favorite page editor or submission tool.

Stay tuned…