Review ANY wine, view ALL reviews

Jan 29, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

We're pleased to announce yet another beta release. Most of the enhancements are "under the hood", relating to our wine search engine and improving the integrity of that data. Our artificial intelligence has improved, which helps us correctly identify the exact names of the wines for sale, as well as the price details and related data.

Wine Data and Search Results

Another big improvement is that you can now review ANY wine. Prior to this release, we restricted wine reviews of wines that were not popular across different wine retailers, specifically, if that wine was only sold by one retailer. For further explanation on why it was this way initially, view this forum post. In enabling users to review any wine, we had to also make sure they we wouldn't lose reviews when a particular wine is not "for sale" anymore. This is now in place so we encourage you to review away!

As you may have noticed before, there were far too many wines in which our servers weren't able to identify the wine type (ie. "red", "white", etc.). This was usually due to a rare varietal or appellation, but you should now see more accurate wine type identifiers. At the same time we've also added support for wine name and varietal "synonyms". For example, if we find a "chard" and a "chardonnay", or a "cab" and a "cabernet", those will now be more consistently grouped together, respectively, as they should be.

User Enhancements

On the homepage, we're now showing more user submitted data for a recent review or forum post, including the user nickname and the first part of their review comments. There is also this type of related data for the "More Recent Reviews/Topics" sections. Furthermore, users are now able to access EVERY user review that has ever been submitted, all in one area. Just click on the "All Reviews" link under the More Recent Reviews, and you'll be able to sort all reviews on date submitted, wine name, or wine score.

We've also added a new section to the sidebar, called "Recent Activity". This section includes the 2 lists that already existed (Recent Searches and Top Searches), and now features a new list called "Most Popular Wines". These are wines that have been reviewed the most by our users.

And last but not least, you're now able to post comments to our blog posts. So if you're up to it, tell us what you think about each post. And keep up the requests for new features and enhancements, as this will help us gear the product to your needs. Thanks, and stay tuned for next time.

News & Updates

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Tweaks, Features, and Fixes!

Jan 15, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

Well, Vinquire has been online for about 3 weeks now, and we received some great feedback. Everyone had ideas and so did we ... we wanted to keep drinking red wine and everybody else wanted us to tweak, fix, and add new features to the site.
We're happy to say you won! So we've added a bunch of new stuff and released the code late Sunday night (1/14/07). Here's a list of what's new ....

• These blog/news entries! Aka, our pulpit :)
• Cleaner display of prices (aka, $9,999.00 instead of $9999.0)
• Larger list of recent reviews and recent forum posts on homepage
• Added Pinot Noir as a possible "favorite wine" on account creation (for you s-dogg)
• Google ads!! Just what you all wanted ;)
• Added wine scoring explanation/key (for 50-100 point scale)
• Reviews can now specify non vintage (NV) for the year
• Added "Welcome, Username" to upper corner if you are logged in
• Searches now "stem" words, aka searching Penfolds/Penfold/Penfold's is the same
• Searches use synonyms now, aka Ch/Chateau are same, Cab/Cabernet, Zin/Zinfandel, etc
• Some common misspellings should now be caught for tough words like Sauvignon, Bordeaux, Champagne, etc.

Hopefully these will make the site a bit more useful. Enjoy and Happy New Year!!

News & Updates

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