I have written an overview of the main wine price comparison sites but thought that you might find a bit more detail useful. Below are some of the facts, figures and opinions I have assembled on this subject. I have divided them into sites primarily designed for wine lovers/amateurs and those aimed at professionals and investors.
FOR CONSUMERS
www.wine-searcher.com
- The market leader, set up in 1999 and now based in New Zealand with a staff of 20
- 3,966,654 wine offers and 18,085 wine stores when I last checked but increasing steadily
- Extremely basic but workmanlike design
- Lots of fields, designed to make the site as useful as possible for the user
- Designed for regular consumers
- Truly international – maybe a little weak in Asia?
- $, £, Euro, Swiss Franc, Aus$, Can$, NZ$, HK$, Yen, Sing$, SA Rand
- No ratings though there are lists of top wine recommendations (including my 20-pointers), min/max price, by case or bottle, auction or not
- Ads and featured retailers – retailer listings are free but merchants have to pay if they want to appear frequently
- Policing retailers is a major duty: banning for six months those who lure customers with 'ghost' bargains
- Pro version at $29.95 per year is necessary if you want listings from retailers other than the featured ones
- See this LA Times profile
www.vinopedia.com
- Set up in the last few years by two wine lovers in IT who now work for it full time in the Netherlands
- 1,557,581 wine offers
- Very simple, clean, modern design with one search box on pale pink
- Designed for regular wine consumers – lots of stockists and lots of price comparison
- Tabs allow searchers to choose either US, Canada or Europe
- $, £, Euro, Swiss Franc
- Wine Spectator ratings are also included for each wine
- Searches by minimum score are possible
- Price drops and most popular searches by category (though rarely vintage) on the home page
- Free
- Income from advertising and from paid listings. For smaller stores, a listing is free, but the big ones that receive a lot of traffic are required to pay
www.globalwinestocks.com
- Founded in 2005 and still run by programmer Eric McGee outside Montreal, Canada, with a staff of three, once over 20
- 6 million wine offers from 20,000 retailers claimed
- Truly global and designed primarily for the wine trade eg their data underpins www.wineprices.com on Vinfolio
- Currently being revamped
- By no means beautiful – all wine names are in capitals
- Each listing is dated, really dated sometimes!
- The basic information is free to consumers
- Income from selling data and systems to others presumably
www.snooth.com
- Founded by ex-wine trade Philip James in 2006 and launched in New York in 2007
- 11,000 retailers and over 1 million wines with 2 million reviews
- Brilliant search engine optimisation so that it features strongly in many Google searches
- Part of Philip’s motivation was apparently that he ‘realised that the wine industry was hopelessly fragmented — with neither a standardised naming system nor a centralised repository of information’ but in fact Snooth suffers from messy wine descriptions (eg Forts de Latour is different supposedly from Forts de Latour Pauillac), which when I looked was apparently just $52 a bottle at ‘Berry Bro’s & Rudd’ (sic) according to Snooth when in fact it was £162
- $ only but merchants in 10 different countries
- If you click on ‘Learn more about this wine’s winery’ you too often get the message ‘We don't have much information about this winery'
- There’s one general para that covers all the Médoc wines, for example
- There are genuine attempts to impose a social media overlay on the site and to build up a community feel, which differentiates it from Wine-searcher
- User tags re Forts 1995: fruit, berry, velvet, black currant, chateau, closed, astringent, clean
- Income presumably from ads and deals with the likes of Conde Nast, Time Inc, AMEX Publishing and Yahoo! I wonder how closely they inspect Snooth's search results?
www.wineaccess.com
- Established by Jim Weinrott in the US early this century
- 100+ retailers, all in the US (so presumably they pay for the privilege?)
- Real-time price and availability information
- Marketing services provided to some of these retailers
- WineAccess is also the host for Stephen Tanzer’s independent wine information, International Wine Cellar
- Special offers of wine now made, and which provide a major income stream, so presumably the information given is not 100% independent
www.winealert.com
- Founded by Julian Berkin in the US for the US early in 2001
- Good network of US retailers, but this is an exclusively American site. About 200 retailers, most in the US. About 400,000 listings.
- In 2005 the service was completely absorbed into the American critic’s website www.eRobertParker.com, which has increased traffic considerably
www.winezap.com
- US only
- Only paying retailers are listed
- Sets its cap at younger (American) wine lovers
- Poor consistency (and spelling) in wine names
- Very broad presentation of results, so much so that you could get neck ache reading them
- Tries to be hip with videos and reviews and featured new members – good effort
- There’s also a forum but it seems little used
www.classicwines.com
- US only
- Very much a wine retailer so the information is not 100% independent
- Very American
- Presentation of results in this case seems too narrow, even though there is not much on either side except a caricature of Michelangelo’s David
- Confusing – all merchants seem to have the same price but they are featured only one at a time
www.winefetch.com
- Includes retailers in US, UK (and England!), France, Germany, Canada
- $, ,£, euros
- Much clearer layout than Classic wines or Winezap
- ‘Ship to which state?’ option, which is useful
- But the order of results seems random and not changeable
- Doesn’t tell you how many bottles the price relates to (one or a dozen?), or just how much wine each contains
www.vinquire.com
- Founded in 2005 and based in San Francisco
- More than 1 million wines and spirits
- Claims to use ‘our unique crawl technology’
- Users are encouraged to browse wines by varietal, from Acolon (0 wines) to Zweigeltrebe (0 wines)
- Social networking bells and whistles added to the site
- Retailers charged for listings: $200 a year for a basic listing but much more for an ‘enhanced’ listing
- Advertising provides another revenue stream
www.drinkprice.com
- All-British site at the beta (test) stage in Sep 2010
- Not just wine but all alcoholic drinks
- Social media model with an attempt at 'independent' reviews and videos, clearly aimed at those in their 20s and 30s
- Specials offers such as £50 off Armand de Brignac Gold, bringing the per bottle price below £200!
-
Modest if well-intentioned entirely French site dating from 2007
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12,500 French wines available from just seven different merchants
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Strong emphasis on wine reviews, from both professionals and amateurs
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Clear design
FOR INVESTORS/PROFESSIONALS
www.liv-ex.com
- For collectors and, especially, fine-wine traders
- '5.6 million lines of data, including trade-to-trade transactions, auction hammer prices and merchant list prices. Data sourced from 320 merchants in 26 countries (and 21 different auction houses)', who together, according to Liv-ex, account for more than 80% of global fine-wine turnover
- Online trading platform. Price spread. No stockists
- Sevenmajor currencies but no geographical indication of where stocks lie
- Liv-ex Price Watch supplies limited merchant list price data but the meat of the thing costs from £49.95 a year with the ability to track specific wines
www.wineprices.com
- US only, $ only
- Apparently based on GlobalWineStocks technology and displayed on Vinfolio.com’s collectors’ section
- Auction history given, with average prices of different vintages – but no stockists other than Vinfolio
- The US retail average price for the last 12 months is also given
- Links to tasting notes of various wine websites, including JancisRobinson.com
- Best for red bordeaux and California wine
- Lots of jazzy fine-wine indices
- Very clean design but lots of gaps
- Free but fairly skeletal