Grape Juice

Snooth.com: Non-Obnoxious 2.0

Posted on 16. Jul, 2007 by Erin in General

For me, the idea of ‘non-obnoxious 2.0′ is becoming a bit of an oxymoron, so when I received an email about Snooth.com, I snorted rather derisively, had a quick look, and sent a reply back to the company regarding the repetitive problems that social wine sites seem to suffer. I received a very polite email in return, detailing all the incorrect assumptions I had made about the site and inviting me to try the site again. On closer inspection I found it to be a fresh take on Wine 2.0. While the community functions aren’t implemented as of yet (the site is in beta), all the pieces of the puzzle are there for Snooth.com to be not just a gathering spot of gaggles of wine snobs to wax poetic, but a truly useful tool.

I highly approve of the “Snooth Rank”, which is a meta-rating assigned to each wine on the basis of the ratings it has received. The algorithm looks at the ratings, the number of ratings, as well how trusted the source of the rating is. It’s an attempt to halt that seemingly inevitable decline, for example, into one hundred reviews of “it’s good” spam posted by the same person on every wine, totally throwing off any hope of an accurate average score. What’s not quite clear is how the site interprets/calculates this “trust” factor, and how reviewers are lumped into the appropriate level.

Snooth.com has the smarts to make some recommendations as what wines, given the ones you’ve reviewed yourself, you might be interested in trying. While I do agree that taking wine advice from a database could be a little bit hit-and-miss, I really don’t see it as being much different than taking recommendations from a towering wine personality like Robert Parker Jr., who admits to being human by saying that wine ratings can be affected by the “emotion of the moment“. Which is more or less accurate? Neither really, they’re alternative means to a similar end: trying wines you’d never thought to. The recommendation system at Snooth.com is dynamic, meaning that as you rate more wines, Snooth is able to better pinpoint your individual tastes, and offer you a breadth of wines to tickle your fancy.

If you find a wine that you’d like to try, either through the recommendations or just some random browsing, the “Buy It Now” button allows you to purchase the wine from one of Snooth’s wine merchant partners able to ship to your state (as per your profile). They’re looking to expand the selection of merchants in order to provide comprehensive options to all states, but owing to the vast array of state alcohol laws, I’m thinking it may take a while to have everyone covered. But hey, at least you’re not Canadian, where you can look but you can’t have. No one ships up north.

All in all, I’ve been very impressed thus far with the team behind Snooth.com, who have answered all of my questions with surprising speed and attentiveness, and also with the site itself, which should be a great online wine tool once all of the features are in place and functional.