Dear CellarTracker User,

Over the past eight years, CellarTracker has grown tremendously, both as a tool for collectors and also as a repository of tasting notes that can be freely searched by any wine lover. Nearly 35,000 people have chosen to share public tasting notes, and it is that spirit of sharing which is so essential to the vibrancy of CellarTracker. I am disappointed to say that your trust and mine have been violated by a competitive website.

Last week Paul Mabray at VinTank published a blog wondering if Snooth was scraping large amounts of information without permission from CellarTracker. One day later, Philip James, the founding CEO and current Chairman of Snooth issued a confirming apology and explanation. Despite repeated assurances to the contrary in late 2007 and again in late 2008, it turns out that Snooth was continuing to pull data from CellarTracker. Snooth has now attempted to scrub their database of all content (1 million wine definitions and 1.7 million public tasting notes) taken from CellarTracker.

If you still see evidence of your public content ("user tags" drawn from your public tasting notes or "glass ratings" drawn from your public scores) on the Snooth site, please let me know. In addition, there is a new facility on the Snooth site to report copyright violations and request DMCA takedown. Just click the REPORT LISTING link in their INTERACT tab at the upper right on their page for a wine.

Depending upon what we find from this exercise in "crowd sleuthing," I may need to take further action. However, for now I think it is important to just focus on getting the data thoroughly cleaned off the Snooth site.

Sincerely,
Eric LeVine
www.CellarTracker.com

Since its launch in 2004, registration has grown to 131,000 members. On a typical day, you are tracking close to 20,000 bottles for a total of 22.3 million bottles tracked. The database includes more than 1,000,000 wines from 71,000 producers, the largest wine database in the world. The CellarTracker community has also emerged as an abundant source of wine reviews with more than 1,600 wines reviewed in a typical day for a total of 1,721,000 wine reviews, all written by real wine enthusiasts and freely available for the wine-loving community to enjoy on CellarTracker. Amateur reviews are not a replacement for those written by professional critics, but you are generating as many reviews in six days as Robert Parker publishes in an entire year. CellarTracker does also partner with 20 different publications to integrate more than 300,000 professional wine reviews for eligible subscribers. Taken together that is more than 2,000,000 wine reviews, the largest collection in the world. The site is one of the most heavily visited wine websites in the world with 25 million page views per month from more than 400,000 unique visitors. The bottom line is that with each new customer, CellarTracker gets more useful for everyone. All of this is a testament to the passion that wine inspires and power of community, core principles of CellarTracker from its inception.