There are a surprising amount of people who think that there is money to be made from online wine sites. Some are wine lovers, some of business people, and some try and be both. FindAWine.com probably falls into the latter category.
Founded by two young French business school graduates, it’s been in the works for almost three years. Finally, it’s now launched. And you can try it here: FindAWine.com.
If you want to find where to buy a wine you can use Findawine (just like Twenga, PriceRunner, Kelkoo, or Wine-Searcher). If you want to store your tasting notes and manage your cellar, you can do it (just like Snooth or Adegga for example). If you want to find the best wine and food match the have an artificial intelligence engine to help you. If you want to read up on wine knowledge, they have 1000+ pages with wine articles. If you want to read comments and tasting notes on a wine you can do it, Parker’s, Tanzer’s and other “authorities” (but it is unclear what kind of copyright rights they have to publish those notes though), or other community members. If you want to partake in a wine community you can do it (just like at Wine 2.0 or OWC for example).
And this points perhaps to the concern I have about FindAWine. It’s trying to be all things to everyone about wine. It’s as if there could be one site that answers all your questions about wine and does all you could ever want to do. And generally, that’s not how things work today on internet. Often, the specialists have an edge over the generalists.
Is this a sign of the Frenchs’ belief that there can be one true (and centrally managed) source of information (like the plans they had for a humanly managed search engine to compete with Google)?
The only way to find out if it makes sense is to try it and see if it’s useful to you. And that you can do here: FindAWine.com. Oh, and the money? Well, they intend to make the money on commissions from the online wine shops. Each time you go from a recommendation on FindAWine to a wine shop and buy a bottle they get a cut.
Oh, and in spite of the name the site is in French.
One Response
The French love nothing more than to have the king, er, I mean a central entity, take care of all of their needs. Why not a wine site that does this?