Thank you for your patience.

In 2009 Snooth spent a lot of time working with food and wine. In partnership with Epicurious.com and MyRecipes.com we were able to bring you recipe pairings directly on the wine details pages. We’ve heard from many of you that this is very helpful. We did want to gather feedback on individual pairings in the interest of promoting the good matches and tweaking any bad matches out of the system. To that end, we added the ability to vote on specific pairings. We’re looking forward to the added feedback on our electronic sommelier.

Finally, you’ll see more and more links around the site to Twitter and Facebook. We love seeing information from Snooth make it out to other social networks. Adding these links makes it easier than ever to get the word out about the wines, wine articles, and discussions about wine you’re following on Snooth.

For you and I, as wine consumers, this is bad news. Its also bad news for Snooth, as a company that is fighting the good fight to help demystify the arcane and convoluted world of wine. While Amazon may have ultimately become a competitor of Snooth, they stood the best chance of any company out there of shining a light in all the dark nooks and crannies of the industry. Hopefully putting an end to shady and illegal practices such as bait and switch, selling a wine that the store doesn’t yet have in inventory, using shipping as a profit center, dual pricing and so many more.

Many of us hoped that Amazon would use its might to force these issues, and others, into the spotlight, forcing new regulation, opening up consumer choice and making the wine industry a better place for all of us. Sadly, these hopes have just been shelved for the next few years.

This story is breaking now, and you’ll be able to keep up with it via Wine Industry Insight and Wine Business amongst others.

The day is finally here. As of today, you can now mark messages as spam to remove them from your inbox. We’ve also added the ability to delete old messages. We hope these two features will help you to keep your inboxes free of unwanted or outdated messages.

It would be even better if the spammers got the hint and didn’t even try to come knocking. I’m not holding my breath for that, but a guy can dream.

New York, NY (September 29, 2009) — Snooth, the world’s largest wine site, today announced that its popular A-Z Wine Pairings application will now be featured on the front page of Yahoo!

Users can peruse thousands of recipes from leading publications such as Food & Wine, Cooking Light, Real Simple and Health, among others, and get automatically generated wine pairings based on each individual dish.

The app highlights the most popular recipes, pairings, and wines of the day, with links to purchase the corresponding bottle.

For example, for a Tomato-Chicken Pasta dish, Snooth’s digital sommelier recommended “Fontaleoni Vernaccia di San Gimignano 2007″ with the rationale, “This mineraly white offers nice acidity with a medium bodied feel, allowing it to partner perfectly with this meal.”

The functionality was hand built using Snooth’s database of the world’s wines and the decades of accumulated wine knowledge among Snooth’s employees, particularly that of Gregory Dal Piaz, Snooth’s Community Manager. Snooth’s expertise in systematically analyzing and categorizing wine data was transferred to analyzing and categorizing recipe data in order to create the complex pairing algorithm.

“This algorithm is an interesting combination of our backend tech functionality, as well as the human expertise of our resident wine guru Gregory Dal Piaz,” said Philip James, CEO of Snooth. “We’re trying to democratize the wine experience and make finding good wine easier, and now everyone has access to a top-tier sommelier with the click of button.”

Since its inception in June 2007, Snooth has grown to be the world’s largest wine site, with over 500,000 users per month, 1 million wines and prices from 11,000 merchants and wineries worldwide. The site currently handles over 2 million searches per month and has over 125,000 registered users.

About Snooth

Snooth is the world’s largest wine site with over 500,000 monthly users. Launched in June 2007, Snooth is a free, highly interactive, social database of the world’s wines, offering both casual and expert wine drinkers the ability to search, obtain personalized recommendations, interact with fellow wine lovers, as well as seamlessly buy from a global network of over 11,000 merchants.

Designed to be easy to use, users have the ability to search by their own personal preferences (bold, peppery, fruity, etc), by a specific meal-pairing, price, or by region or producer. Snooth’s recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become.

Snooth’s massive database of 1 million wines and 2 million reviews, powers many third-party wine applications and functions as a central repository of wine data. Snooth is available on-the-go using its iPhone application.

Snooth was awarded the Model of Excellence by Infocommerce in 2008, and is the recipient of multiple medals from the Wine 2.0 trade organization. Snooth has garnered much press within the tech, wine and food spaces from publications including Forbes, Oprah, Techcrunch, Mashable, the Guardian, and many others.

Snooth’s team is comprised of experts in data management, user experience, and wine. Snooth’s advisors and investors include past and current management of Blue Fly, Price Grabber, Experian, Quigo, Inertia Beverage Group, and Global Wines and Spirits amongst others.

Please visit http://www.snooth.com for more information on the largest wine site in the world.

On many of our wine profiles, you’ll now see a section that does just that. It tells you what to expect when you’re tasting the wine. I’m excited to use this to get a hint about what I might find in a new grape or new region’s wines.

Here’s an example of this section on a Napa Cabernet Sauvignon, certainly one of the distinctive and iconic wines of the world.

We’ve also made it possible for users to upload more than a single photo for any wine profile. If you’ve got a bottle shot of your own, you can now add that to the wine. This can be very helpful, especially when the current photo is blurry, or if you have a version of the bottle with a label from another country. The same wine can have different labels in different markets, so one image may not be enough information.

Websites linking to each other makes a powerful network. Just as powerful are the links within a site, directing related pages around and allowing for a seamless browsing experience. With the release of our article pages, we found a great opportunity to go back and strengthen the Snooth web. When you’re reading an article or a post in Snooth Talk, it is very convenient to be able to learn more about the wineries, wine regions, or wine grape varieties mentioned in the text. Now you can do that using our handy links. If you’re looking at the details for a Chardonnay, and you’re curious to read what articles have been written about Chardonnay, now you can do that too.

We hope this class of helpful links will allow the site to flow more, and help you to become lost in the pursuit of more wine knowledge, as we continue to bring more of it into one place.

What’s sharing without friends to share with? Snooth is a social site, and an article without a place to talk about it is like a tree falling in the forest. If we don’t invite conversation from you, we aren’t doing the right thing. So this week, we’ve got a few exciting additions to the article pages. First off, you can leave comments right on the articles. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure your voice is heard.

To make sure that voice continues to be heard, everyone should be able to find articles from the past and the comments that have been made on them. As of today, you’ll notice a convenient search box to the right of the articles so you can find commentary about whatever you’d like to learn about.

If you’re keen to browse, we’ve also added a related articles section. If you love an article, and you’d like to learn more about related topics there’s a simple way to do that. All of these (and a few other goodies) we’re happy to present to you today.

Check these new features out on Greg’s articles about California Sauvignon Blanc or California Syrah.

I’m looking forward to future changes. Have you told me what you’d like to see yet?

My earliest experiences with wine were at my uncle’s table in Trentino, Italy. From an early age I spent my summers there and from an early age I enjoyed a bit of wine with my meals. In the beginning it was no more than a drop of wine in my water but over the years it passed through more minimal stages of dilution until I was allowed to drink pure, unadulterated wine with my meals.

Even in its pure unadulterated state the wine we generally drank was pale and low in both alcohol and tannin yet high in zesty acidity. That acidity made the wine the perfect compliment to the foods we ate. It also set me up for a lifetime as what is known as an “acid freak” in the rarified world of wine geeks. But most importantly it served as my foundation for understanding how wine and food work together.

My love of food and wine saw me through many stages of evolution. From my earliest forays into dinner parties for my friends, at age 16, to nearly 2 decades in the restaurant industry, I never lost interest in the intricacies of food and wine pairings.

Fast forward to today and we may be seeing the culmination of all my accumulated experience: Snooth’s food and wine pairing algorithm that is being used to power the wine pairing widget on our latest partner’s site www.MyRecipes.com.

MyRecipes.com has one of the greatest collections of recipes on the web, sourced from the myriad titles in Time Inc’s portfolio. Some of my favorite recipes seem to consistently come from Cooking Light and Health magazines.

For example, I love jerked foods, that smoky, spicy specialty of Jamaica. I will tell anyone who’ll listen that one of the best pairings I’ve ever come across is Petite Sirah and Jerk Chicken! So what does one do when one wants to jerk something else? I found this great recipe for Jerk-Spiced Shrimp on MyRecipes.com  and checked to see what types of pairings I thought this would work with. I know, it sounds a little weird but I’ve also been checking to make sure everything is working as it’s supposed to!

Well things look pretty good since the pairings are the correct bright aromatic white, fruity, rich rose and a rich, medium-bodied white. The actual wines that may appear for you might be different than what I am seeing since availability is a criterion we are using to choose which specific wines to display.

While I have chosen the styles of wines, trying to make sure to offer a pair of more familiar choices plus a geeky choice for each recipe, the actual wines that get shown to the user will change based on availability and how highly the wines are rated on Snooth.

Our rating system combines the input of professional tasters with that of our user to generate a unique Snoothrank for each wine. If a wine gets rated favorably, its Snoothrank goes up, increasing the likelihood that it will show up in the recipe pairing results.

Not only have we selected specific styles of wines that work with each dish but we are also filtering our huge database of wines to show you the preferred wines within each category. No other wine site brings you the sort of in-depth, intelligent food and wine parings that Snooth does. Our massive database, the largest on the web, gives us a unique advantage to offer this added value to our partners and our users.

Beginning tomorrow you’ll also be able to see the MyRecipes.com database of recipes displayed on Snooth. Each of our wine detail pages lists three dishes to pair with each wine.  It’s a great way to get ideas for your next meal and will make planning your next successful dinner party a breeze.

I hope you enjoy using our recipe pairing widget on MyRecipes.com as much as I enjoyed creating it. It really was a labor of love and I look forward to tweaking it and making sure the results are not only good, but take advantage of our ever growing and improving database to continue to bring you compelling, interesting and varied wines to pair with your favorite dishes.

And now to see what might pair with a nice roast lamb dish and peppers from my garden…

Gregory Dal Piaz
Community Manager
Snooth