Hi Radulo,

We have this feature and maybe haven't promoted it enough. You can specify a search term that you do NOT want to see by adding a '-' sign in front of the term.

For example, if you wanted all Robert Mondavi hits, but not the woodbridge ones, u could search with this: robert mondavi -woodbridge

Here's the full URL: http://www.vinquire.com/wines/search/buy...

I hope that helps. Additionally, we have a few help style pages that help explain this and other advanced operators.

Look at the "How Vinquire Works" subsection here: http://www.vinquire.com/about/

Additionally, these two blogs explain more advanced features:
http://www.vinquire.com/blog/2007/nov/14...
http://www.vinquire.com/blog/2007/dec/19...

Thanks again for your input -- we do strive to make our wine search the best in the biz.

John
Founder

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I'd like to hear more about the idea. We do have an XML search that we've created, but it is not in use. Let us know what you'd like to do w/ the feature and we might be able to make it available.

You can post it here, or you can use the contact form if you want it to be personal.

Thx for the input -
John (Founder)

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If you find burgundy in that price range that doesn't taste like a wet dog, I will be impressed.

Actually, I guess if you give up your quest for Pinot style burgundy, I think they make a few other red varietals in that region -- like gamay which maybe you could score for that much cash. But then ... it's probably not the style of burgundy you're thinking (or have read) about.

Maybe if captain caveman swings by he can answer. I would bet that you'd only be able to start drinking (cheap) burgundy pinot at the 30+ price range (if not even higher).

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I just have to chime in on this -- first of all the RAP event looks great and i'm really bummed i missed it. Second of all, yes, I'm a huge fan of rose and I'm always thrilled when a tasting room has a dry rose to sample.

For me roses are a nice break from heavy reds, and they often have more zing for me than a white. Also, they're pretty and can pair well with lots of food. Big fan all the way.

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Temecula is so overpriced, unless u buy from longs -- but they've really convinced that they're the next napa. Aka, I need a new sticker. Also I feel special cuz I'm posting this qith my new blackberry! Yay

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Just out of curiosity, what wineries did you go to in Temecula? Andy and I have really worked that area over -- but haven't been recently.

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We have some blog entries that might help w/ reviewing and rating wines now:

How to score a wine on the 100 point scale:
http://www.vinquire.com/blog/2007/nov/27...

How to write a descriptive review for a wine:
http://www.vinquire.com/blog/2007/nov/27...

I hope these help -

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If you can spare a few extra dollars, the next level in the Concha y Toro lineup is the Casillero del Diablo brand. I really find them enjoyable wines.

You can find purchasing options here:
http://www.vinquire.com/wines/search/buy...

And a few reviews here:
http://www.vinquire.com/wines/search/?se...

Thanks again for the reviews!

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Thanks for the reviews. User Rez also reviewed a Ruffino, the reserve (which you may have had considering the $21 you paid).

Here's the link: http://www.vinquire.com/wines/detail/246...

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Hi Caveman,

Thanks for the great reviews. The Chappelet is there, but the spelling was one off. The spelling is Chappellet (two L's). If you can't find a wine, try appending a '~' character to it in the search. If you search Chappelet~ you will still get hits.

This advanced search operator is discussed more here: http://www.vinquire.com/blog/2007/nov/14...

Cheers Caveman! Thanks again-
j

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Sup Ro,

Try this link:
http://www.vinquire.com/wines/search/?se...

You can see the other malbecs that ppl have reviewed on vinquire.com. Not sure any of them look amazing, but it's worth a shot.

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Hi Ritch,

If you're comfortable giving the wine a point score on the 50-100 scale, you can also submit a review next time here: http://www.vinquire.com/wines/detail/138...

Thanks for using the site!

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Hi Caveman,

We use software to extract wine names from the thousands of wineries and retailers that sell wine. So each wine name is not hand entered, it is extracted from web pages via software.

This particular wine was extracted from HiTimeWine.net -- on this exact page:
http://www.hitimewine.net/istar.asp?a=3&...

Sometimes our software gets the wine name wrong, other times, the retailer lists the wine incorrectly. In either event, we may list the wine name incorrectly.

Because of the vast quantities of wine on the market, it is impossible for Vinquire to verify each wine by hand. Therefore, we must rely on our custom AI (artificial intelligence) software to extract wine names automatically.

We do continue to improve the extraction process, it is an ongoing process that will never be perfect.

These are the reasons you will occasionally see wines listed on the site that are not actual wines, or, are described incorrectly. I hope this helps explain some of the oddities users may encounter while searching for wines.

We really appreciate your solid reviews and your continued feedback -- thank you!

John

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I have to say caveman .... that was pretty hilarious. You really went from the high-end to the low-end, in a single review. Anyways ... solid stuff. Not sure how long we wanna leave this as the "featured review", but i really got a kick out of this one. Not enough of a kick to go buy a bottle of Thunderbird mind u :) but a kick nonetheless.

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For me, France consistently produces wines that are too dry and mineral/earth oriented than I can handle. I'm aware that they are the godfathers of modern wine techniques, etc., etc., but apparently I've lived in California for too long.

For both cabs and pinots, I'd almost always rather have a high end CA producer than a French equiv. Especially on the Pinot side ... let the flames begin.

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Hey sounds good. I searched for Clement Cab on our search engine and it appears to be widely available ... which is nice because then lots of ppl can try it.

If you're inclined, submit a review for it on the site. Then, if other people enjoy and submit reviews, it will bubble to the top of our wine recommendations (its based on how many reviews a wine gets and the score that is given).

Anyhoo .... the search engine said it's at safeway (big west coast grocery store) for $20... i'm gonna call and see if our safeway really has it. Stock can vary ....

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Ya total wine seems to be huge on the east coast. It almost seems like Traders is for the west coast (although Traders is nationwide now I believe).

Maybe we should add Total Wine to the recommendations page (as in, limit the recommendation to wines that are avail at a Total Wines outlet). Only prob is that i think there selection can vary pretty significantly? But so can Traders and the others ...

We used to buy most of our wine at this off-the-wall (and hole in the all for that matter) wine liquidator place called Bargain Bank ... but they're out of business. I'd say now most of my wine is bought at Trader Joe's ... but i have been visiting my local "legit" retailer more often as well (Blackwells Wine & Spirits).

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Ok so I tried it.

It had that "seen this before" thinness that made me feel like this natural blonde is going gray.

But for 5.99 it's still drinkable. If you're thirsty. And are trying to forget something.

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S-dogg,

Sounds like it deserved a 79. 84 isn't really a bad rating. Or at least ..IMHO. I'll pick up a bottle and see what happens .... if I go blind it's all your fault :)

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That's kinda funny.

I'm gonna experiment w/ lighting some incense that have a vanilla kick, smoke a cig to entice those tobacco overtones, and finally, put some red pepper flakes in my wine to give these half-ass $5 dollar bottles the spice they deserve!!!

Joe let me know how it works because if it helps i'm all ears. Actually, the tech side sounds pretty interesting. Vaporizing a vanilla bean - wow. Let me know if you hear a place that does this in SF and we will hit it.

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Wow Caveman!!

I'm surprised to even hear that you have tried the infamous two buck chuck!

Andy and I recently purchased a bottle of every single Charles Shaw "varietal", so we'll be posting more ratings on these bad-boys of the wine world soon. I'm really afraid of the Chardonnay to be honest.

If you make it to Trader Joe's any time soon, feel free to buy a menage of the Charles Shaw lineup and let us know what you think. We'll gladly reimburse you for the 10 dollars :) I think even Vinquire.com can afford that!

I find it difficult to review these wines because I'm not doing them blind. Every square inch of my body wants to find flaws and generally disapprove of these wines. But I still found it drinkable ... the horror ... the horror.

Anyways, thanks for the quality feedback on these bargain wines -- and seriously -- buy a few bottles and send us the bill.

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I think that you two might be the first people to actually rate something within a few points of each other :)

Besides Andy and myself of course -- although that can even be a rarity these days. Just check out our two buck chuck reviews.

I will have to grab a bottle and let you know what I think. Wait for it ... wait for it.... soon, I promise!

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I just called all 3 Trader Joe's (4/24/07) in the SF area and they all have this wine in stock. Black label, white writing, no large graphics. It's a winner.

"Stonehedge Reserve Cab Stagecoach Vineyard" - 2003, $12.99

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Ok, i'm now on a mission to get a few bottles of this stuff ... and soon:

http://www.damngoodwine.com/vino_Cline20...

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Don't worry S&S ... i subtracted 4 points (if i remember right) off every review that you did and it lined up perfectly.

But I did enjoy the explanation u scribbled at the bottom of your new & improved scoring system :)

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Agreed.

I think it's mostly about what level of a wine drinker you are. Most novices can really come up with nice bottles for < $10, and even jaded wine afficienados can still pick up some nice juice in that range (when you're lucky).

Well .. u sold me on the Mission Park. And you weren't a kiddin' that it's all out ... i even searched thru every retailer we crawl (3000+) and couldn't get a single hit. Must've been nice :)

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We've struggled w/ the low end of the scale. So much so that we pretty much merged a few scales and made our own ... with a few tweaks.

The major problem is that the scale is murky below 80 points. How many people can say a 75 point wine from a 78, or 73? With your level of wine education, you might be able to help us w/ questions like these ... but we certainly found ourselves in a quandary.

If anything, just for wine education, there should be tastings of known "not-so-good" wines that have been definitively rated by parker/ws et. al (if they exist) so people can understand the low end.

On a more practical note, we found problems when asking the wine rookies to rate wines with "standard" 100 point scales. They seem to consistently rate wines at about 72-77 .... and many of those wines had been professionally rated at 83'ish.

Ugh, in general, yet another rant at the 100 point scale. We had internal debate about using the 100 point scale at all ... most of our competitors do 1-5 stars or similar. I felt that regardless of our own personal feelings, the wine industry has already decided that question ... and it settled on the 100 point system. Whether we liked it or not became irrelevant .... in my mind :)

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Nothing to do with Sonoma I imagine.

We were there 2 years ago for a barrel tasting event (and were there again this year) and the "incident" occurred at that time.

So a few things on that .... huge event, tons of people, and Kendall Jackson is obviously one of the largest Sonoma producers.

So with that backdrop what I noticed (after the incident occurred) is that this women was tasked with staying on the 2nd floor and basically doing security. Maybe they have had problems in the past -- don't know.

All in all, I still will drink Kendall Jackson, it was just a really odd experience ... to say the least !! :)

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We're gonna have to bring in some Cline bottles for the next tasting and see if this all stands up to "scientific research".

I will checkout BevMo and see what they have. According to our search engine (looking at only chain stores):
http://www.vinquire.com/wines/search/?se...

Safeway (of all places) actually has some winners as well.

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Our code is so smart it knew that you were a closet sauv blanc fan :)

Ya, it's a bug. Andy's had it fixed for a while but we haven't updated the code for a bit cuz we're working on a "mega" release within the next few days.

thx for letting us know -

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Ok next comment on Cline ...

Does anybody have a retailer that consistently stocks something besides the Cline Zins???

I have tried multiple bottles of Cline and always thought them to be pretty consistent "bargain" style wines - but as of late, all the big retailers only seem to stock the zins. Weird.

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So upon "further research", I've deduced that every single Merlot that Turning Leaf makes is a "Reserve" wine.

Reserve is actually supposed to mean something... namely that a winery has two wines, the reserve and the non-reserve wine. Reserve wines go through a selection process only receiving higher quality fruit from the vineyards, and sometimes also endure more time in barrel, are released later, etc.

Turning Leaf .... don't play us like that!!

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As of 1/29/07 you can click (via the homepage) on "Recent User Reviews" or on "all reviews" and you will be taken to a page that has EVERY review ever submitted on the system, sortable by price or date or wine-name.

Here's a direct link:
http://www.vinquire.com/reviews/

Enjoy!

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Update, we did a release on 1/29/07 and now all wines are reviewable. If you can find it via the search, you can review it.

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FYI we did a release today (1/29/07) where there are "quite a few" new links on the frontpage. You should have much better access to data now.

Let us know :)

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The site is dark but so is wine.... am i right am i right? Ok i'm prbly wrong.

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Thanks for the great feedback!! Here's a list of some of the issues you brought up and some info about each one.

1) Spelling. Ya this definately is an annoyance. We currently already have rudimentary spell checking for common misspellings of words, like sauvignon, cabernet, champagne, etc. However we do not have full-blown "guess what the user really meant to type" for a large set of words. This is on our feature list but is pushed out a bit as it is not simple.

2) What does num retailers do? Sorting by # Retailers sorts the wine list by how many stores sell that given wine. I.e., how "popular" that wine is vs other wines in terms of how many retailers sell it. Kinda hard to explain. We are thinking of removing this feature or relabeling it because it is difficult to understand in its current format.

3) Guiding users through the site more effectively. I agree, we're working on something to kinda group people into categories and get them into the site based on how much knowledge they have of wine.

4) Nav bar/real estate. We will look into this.

5) Inconsistencies in layouts, not being able to click wine name, etc. Take a look at this again, we updated on monday (1/29/07) some of that should be better.

Thanks for the input $Bill

John

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Hi S-

Well i'm not a wine expert so i may be contradicted here, but i have seen this before and have noticed no tasted degradation. Actually, the odd part is I have usually seen this only on higher quality wines.

I took a brief look on google and found a few pages about it. Apparently, it's definately harmless although most people recommend decanting the wine before serving, or pouring slowly into your glass so you avoid the crystals.

Again though, nothing wrong w/ the wine.

Enjoy - j

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Just a brief update. We did add today a "more recent reviews" section where we list about 10 more recently reviewed wines after the initial 3.

We're still working on other ways to access past reviews so stay tuned.

J

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Hi S -

So I did your search and got things like ...
Taz Pinot Noir Fiddlestix
Taz Pinot Noir
Taz Pinot Noir, Santa Barbara
Taz Fiddlesticks Pinot Noir

Ya i understand that is confusing.

Here's the deal. Ideally, if our website was super smart (hint it's not) then we would know that those are actually all the same wine, and then, no matter which one you selected to review, all those wines would tie to your review.

The prob is this; we don't know that those are all the same wine. And here's why... in some cases, those actually *would* be different wines.

For example, Sterling is a huge wine producer, and they make about 4 types of merlots. Here are 3 of those *different* wine names ....

Sterling Vineyards Napa Merlot Reserve
Sterling Vineyards Napa Merlot
Sterling Vineyards Napa Merlot 3 Palms

So let's say that for your Taz search, we just said the hell with it, lets group all of those together and show a consistent name. Bam, no confusion on your end.

But we would then have to apply the same logic to the Sterling merlots, and would then lump 3 totally different merlots into the same group. Hence making the reviews pretty worthless because the reserve is now lumped in w/ their cheaper brands ....

So long story short. There's no winning solution -- well there probably is but we'd need a few phd's from google involved and Andy would definately have to be fired. haha, just kidding.

Anyways, we are definately working hard to make groupings better and actually, the next release (around 1/14/07) will have better groupings. Things like "Ch." vs "Chateau" and "Cab" vs "Cabernet" will be considered identical.

Enjoy and thanks for using vinquire -

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Ya sorry this is complicated. Rest assured we're working on allowing users to review every wine.

The initial problem was that lots of the wines we find have "less than perfect" names, either because our own software had a difficult time extracting the wine, or because the wine retailer didn't put the correct/clean name of the wine on their page.

This leads to nasty nasty wine names on our site. And if we let somebody review one of those nasty wine names, then we will have to always keep that nasty wine name into the future (so that we keep your review and/or forum posts which relate to that wine).

Our "fix" was just to not allow reviews on wines that we "weren't so sure about". In this manner we keep the reviews sticking to "nice" wine names only.

However in your case, you find a wine name that actually *was* a quality wine name, but our code deemed it otherwise. This is a problem and we are working on it.

Wow!! Haha, well u can see that it's kind an indepth issue. Hopefully soon we'll have something worked for u. Thanks for contributing!!!

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Hi 2bw,

We're about to release a bunch of new features, one of them is a simple "scoring key" so that you can quickly see what score correlates to what quality level.

The scoring system deserves its own entire website however. Apparently even the pros have barely standardized on what 90 points means, and especially w/ the lower end of the scale. For example, the 50-75 point range is totally subjective depending on what "pro" you are referring to.

Ayways, sometime this weekend (1/12/07-1/14/07) we'll be updating the site. Check back soon and thx for post.



J

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Hi S-dogg. Unfortunately no, there is no way currently to see more than the last 3 reviews.

In the "near future" we are going to have some links like "what are people drinking" and/or "best deals of the last month" that might allow you to get more info on what's been reviewed.

Thx for the suggestion

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Maybe we had a 'bad day' or the wine was 'out for too long', but we could barely even finish the samples at this place.

Now on the plus side, everybody in Sonoma thinks this winery is "cool" but we certainly didn't get the vibe.

We kinda had a buzz and when we were tasting, we all looked at each other and almost spit the wine out laughing. And the wines are stupid expensive.

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More like alcoholics. I heard that every review is done "late nite" and they certainly don't "sip and spit".

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I would like to see a buddy list feature... something like "What's Rick NOT drinking" -- because my friend is like the George Costanza of the wine world, if he likes it, i want to steer clear -- waaaay clear of it.

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My personal choice would be to have someone besides me implement all of these choices because some are hard!! (most notably spell checking) but i have to put this god-forsaken comp sci degree to the test so let's do this ppl!

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Ok at what "price point" should i be expecting reasonable wine service at a restaraunt??

Because I certainly haven't seen good wine service at the 20/25 dollar a plate restaraunts i have visisted as of late. Which is kinda strange because it's not that hard .... open the wine in front of me, don't man-handle it while opening it, and for the love of god don't make me pour it myself.

But apparently that is too much to ask for. Whatever, i guess i will just have to deal w/ take out and pour the wine myself.

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The deal is that usually ppl use it for 2 reasons:

1) On old wines that may have sediment. If you pour it slowly into a decanter you can avoid some of the 'gunk' at the bottom.

2) To aerate the wine. If you are drinking a young wine it can help the flavor to give it some air. Decanters do this much better than simply opening the bottle.

Have fun.

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Dunno if ppl agree w/ this or not, but i think Cline in general makes amazing wine for the "around 10 dollar" range.

Definately a step above others in the price range.

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I was in Sonoma and doing a tasting at kendall-jackson.

Afterwards, my entourage and myself were meandering among the gift shop (which is part of the tasting room) and an employee asked me to remove from my pants an antique doorknob that she had saw me steal!!

Unreal. Needless to say we left pretty hastily after that ..... she did apologize when she realized she had made an error but c'mon, is this common in Sonoma?? Thoughts???

Maybe i just look like a thief.

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Ya this site does have some major issues .... but nonetheless, i hear they have a quarter million wines indexed on the search???

So step.

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