Dear CellarTracker User,
When I sent out my 2008 year-end email, I vaguely mentioned some partnerships that would bear fruit this year. One of those was the Vinfolio Marketplace which I will provide you an update on. I am also incredibly pleased to announce another exciting partnership, effective immediately, with Allen Meadows and his Burghound.com website. Finally I wanted to provide a brief update on the upcoming user-interface redesign.
BURGHOUND.COM PARTNERSHIP
I am incredibly pleased to announce a partnership with Allen Meadows. I have been doggedly pursing Allen for nearly five years, and over that time hundreds of mutual customers have expressed an interest in our potential collaboration. Good things are worth patience, and this is a very, very good thing. Allen needs little introduction among Burgundy lovers. He has been visiting the cellars of Burgundy for 30 years, and in 2001 he launched Burghound.com, a quarterly newsletter loaded with in-depth reviews of Burgundy producers and their wines. Now nearly 9 years later he has published 36 issues, more than 45,000 wine reviews and is even readying his first book, The Pearl of the Côte - The Great Wines of Vosne-Romanée. There is a saying in wine that all roads lead to Burgundy, and Allen has been instrumental in helping people explore the vinous treasures of this wonderful region. In addition, Burghound includes extensive coverage of US Pinot Noir and bi-annual reports on Champagne.
As has been the case with publications from Stephen Tanzer, John Gilman, Roy Hersh and others, Allen’s reviews, ratings and drinking window recommendations from Burghound.com are now directly integrated within CellarTracker for Burghound subscribers. If and when you subscribe to Burghound, with one simple login from CellarTracker, the reviews will automatically appear in your cellar management software. If you love Burgundy or are even just thinking about starting to learn more, I highly recommend this. One good bottle basically pays back your annual subscription, and the quality and depth of Allen’s tireless work is unmistakable.
Finally, I also want to extend a special thanks to the people who helped make this integration possible, Erica & Allen Meadows who made time amidst their travels and in the middle of self publishing their book, the wonderful Burghound.com database developer Randy Resnick, Marc Lazar of CellarAdvisors and finally Andrew Hall (a fellow CellarTracker user) who helps me incredibly with the CellarTracker database of wine definitions.
VINFOLIO MARKETPLACE
In July, together with the folks at Vinfolio, we launched the Marketplace, a service to allow wine consumers to legally buy and sell wines. We have learned a lot over the past four months, and during that time nearly 500 CellarTracker users have listed more than 250,000 bottles across nearly 40,000 wines. Personally as a collector, I did not build my collection with the intent of ever selling a bottle. That said, listing it in the Marketplace was incredibly easy, and so far I have sold more than three cases of wines for very compelling prices. Vinfolio is a fantastic service organization that has helped to consummate these transactions legally and flawlessly. At the same time, Vinfolio has been working diligently to incorporate feedback from users to make the Marketplace even better. Just last week we launched new features including the ability for sellers to provide feedback to bidders and automatic acceptance rules (public BuyNow pricing and private AutoAccept reserve pricing). And until the end of the year Vinfolio has slashed their fee to 15% regardless of where the wine is stored. If you have wine in your cellar where the value has risen considerably or your tastes have shifted, I encourage you to check out the Marketplace.
USER-INTERFACE REDESIGN
As I have mentioned before, over the past year I have been working on an extensive redesign of the CellarTracker user interface. The goal is a site that retains the existing hardcore focus on data. At the same time, I want to make the site more productive, easier to read and navigate, and much more friendly for the many people who come to read reviews and find wine recommendations. And for those users who wish to interact, there will be tools to allow that.
At this point I have invested thousands of hours into this project, and I am very pleased with the progress. I wish I could snap my fingers and have this for you yesterday, but I want to make sure it is absolutely solid before I launch it. At this point it looks incredibly likely that I will have a beta available in December. I have also committed to taking a phased approach, so when this new site launches you will be able to use it in parallel with the existing CellarTracker site (with both sites using the exact same underlying database in real time, allowing you to switch back and forth with no gotchas).
Most people don’t love change in technology, and my goal is to manage the transition to the new site responsibly and patiently, to gather feedback and address critical issues before moving from beta to the final version of the new site (and retiring the current user interface). I appreciate everyone’s patience as I work on this. Trust me it is very real and getting closer every day, and I have been staring at this thing for more than 100 hours/week for quite some time. It is going to be terrific!
This has been a challenging and exciting year for me on many levels. I am deeply appreciative for all of the support from the CellarTracker community.
Sincerely,
Eric LeVine
www.CellarTracker.com
Since its launch in 2004, registration has grown to more than 85,000 members. On an average day, you are tracking (adding or removing) more than 13,000 bottles for a total of 14.5 million bottles. The database includes more than 700,000 wines from 55,700 producers, easily one of the largest in the world. The CellarTracker community has also emerged as an abundant source of wine reviews with more than 1,150 wines reviewed in a typical day for a total of 1,079,000 wine reviews, all written by you, real wine enthusiasts. Peer or 'amateur' reviews are not a replacement for those written by professional critics, but you are generating as many reviews in two weeks as the Wine Spectator publishes in a year. You have created the largest collection of peer wine reviews in the world, all freely available for the wine-loving community to enjoy. The site is also quickly becoming one of the most heavily visited wine websites with 18 million page views per month from hundreds of thousands of unique users. The bottom line is that with each new user, CellarTracker gets more useful for everyone. All of this is a testament to the passion that wine inspires and the power of community, core principles of CellarTracker from its inception.