The volume of wine information available online today can be overwhelming. There are wine forums, wine communities, winery sites, wine association sites, wine region sites, wine blogs, and much more. With new content often being added to these sites by the second, it’s nearly impossible to keep up. And if you just want to stay informed on a specific wine related topic, such as the latest discussions about your favorite winery, how do you sift through the river of new content to find what you really want to read?

What if you could design your own RSS feed that pulled together the latest happenings for just the topics you were interested in? Well, a small but powerful feature was just added to Scrugy that allows you to do just that. Here’s how it works.

Say your favorite wine region is Paso Robles and you’d like to build an RSS feed that provides the latest wine blog posts mentioning the area. The first thing you’d need to do is submit a blog search on Scrugy for “paso robles”.  To do this just type “paso robles” (in this case include the quotes so Scrugy treats it as a phrase–this will improve the accuracy of the results), select “just wine related blogs” from the search type drop-down, and click “Search”. The search results will show you all blog posts with the phrase “paso robles”. Now since you want the feed to always show you the latest blog posts, sort the results by newest to oldest by clicking on the “Newest” link (just above the first search result). Great, now you’ve got the results the way you want them. The last step is to grab the RSS feed for the search so you can add it to your favorite RSS reader. This is where the new feature comes in. You will notice a small orange “XML” image along the upper right side of the search results page. This link will provide the very same search results of your search but in RSS format. Right-click to copy the link to your computer’s clipboard so you can paste into your favorite reader.

Now whenever you access this feed you will receive the latest results from Scrugy. Comments? Suggestions? Let us know. Also, thanks to eljefe from Twisted Oak Winery Blog for suggesting the feature.

Besides aggregating the best that the web has to offer on wine related content and tasting notes, Scrugy is also a state-of-the-art search engine.  But did you know that Scrugy allows you to limit your search to just wine blogs? To do a blog search, enter a search phrase in the search box at the top of any Scrugy page, click “double down arrow” to display the “search within” drop-down, select “just wine related blogs”, and then “Search”.

Since I’m drinking a Concannon Petite Sirah this evening, a search for blogs mentioning this wine would look like the following screen shot.

Once I click the “Search” button, Scrugy displays the results ordered by relevance. But what if I want the results ordered by the most recent blog post? No problem. Scrugy allows you to order results by relevance or by the newest or oldest post date.

Why risk your wine searches to any other site? Scrugy delivers the results you’re looking for the way you want them.

Suggestions? Comments? Let us know.

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.

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.