Dear CellarTracker User,

This has been an exciting year for CellarTracker partnerships, and I am incredibly pleased to announce my latest partnership with Jancis Robinson.

While Jancis is well known internationally, I hope that CellarTracker can help to introduce her to many thousands of new wine lovers within the United States. As you may recall, Jancis interviewed me this past summer when we both happened to be passing through San Francisco, but we have actually been in earnest discussion for more than 18 months about potential collaboration. I am very happy to say that subscribers to her Purple Pages on JancisRobinson.com can access more than 32,000 of her reviews, scores and drinking windows, fully integrated within CellarTracker. (She has actually published close to 40,000 reviews on her site, but the work to synchronize the databases is ongoing. You will see us continue to make progress over the coming weeks.)

Jancis is an internationally known and highly respected independent wine writer. She writes daily for JancisRobinson.com, weekly for The Financial Times, and bi-monthly for a column that is syndicated around the world. She is also editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine and co-author with Hugh Johnson of The World Atlas of Wine, each of these books recognized as a standard reference worldwide. An award-winning TV presenter, she is invited all over the world to conduct wine events and act as a wine judge. In 1984 she was the first person outside the wine trade to pass the rigorous Master of Wine exams and in 2003 she was personally awarded an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen, on whose cellar she now advises. She loves and lives for wine in all its glorious diversity, generally favoring balance and subtlety over sheer mass. See the long version for more detail.

When I first created CellarTracker for myself in 2003 and then publicly launched the site in 2004, I dreamed of a tool that a wine collector could use to assemble all of the information about their collecting and tasting. I always hoped that CellarTracker might grow enough that I could convince established, professional wine critics to collaborate with me on behalf of our mutual customers. Slowly over the past five years that vision has taken shape in partnership with writers of small and large publications: Stephen Tanzer, Roy Hersh, John Gilman, Brad Baker, Allen Meadows and now Jancis Robinson. I strongly applaud all of the aforementioned writers for their willingness to collaborate with me on behalf of you, our mutual customers. As we each pursue our own journey through the wonderfully diverse world of wine, I think that the deep expertise which all of these professionals bring to their craft can help each of us to derive even more pleasure from wine.

With that in mind, please browse to http://www.cellartracker.com/getcontent.asp and follow the link to Jancis’ site to consider a subscription.

Finally, I want to extend a special thanks to the people who helped make this integration possible on the CellarTracker side: Marc Lazar and Joe Mooney of CellarAdvisors and Andrew Hall, a fellow CellarTracker user who helps me incredibly with the CellarTracker database of wine definitions.

On an entirely separate note, since I know that many of you will ask, my user interface redesign is proceeding very well albeit painstakingly. I am not sure I will have the beta ready before the end of the year, but you will see quite a bit more from me in the next few weeks. So please hang in there and trust that this is my most urgent priority. And if you find yourself in Seattle you will find me, most waking hours, camped out at Muse Coffee, coding, coding, coding...

Sincerely,
Eric LeVine
www.CellarTracker.com

Since its launch in 2004, registration has grown to 89,000 members. On a typical day, you are tracking (adding or removing) more than 13,000 bottles for a total of 15.2 million bottles. The database includes more than 725,000 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 1,130,000 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.