12.03.2007

Wine 2.0

This morning, The Boston Globe published a typical December article with a few cool gadgets to help you solve your endless list of holiday giftees. Unlike most such articles, though, I actually cared about this one...because it involved wine!

For those readers who don't know me personally, I'm big on wine. I have a nice little collection started up, all the necessary accessories and a spreadsheet that I affectionately refer to as "my baby" with tasting notes on my first 300 or so wines, until the list became too much of a burden to maintain.

With the Wine Collector 250, though, I may be on the verge of a whole new level of obsessiveness. The $200 price tag seems a bit steep, but it would save a lot of time and effort to have help in tracking my studies and cataloguing my collection over time. Plus, being able to have a Yelp-like wine 2.0 community would be really cool, perhaps finally democratizing the American wine buying dictatorship of Robert Parker's palate.

As an added bonus, the Intelliscanner, which is really the core of the product, has the ability to catalogue (it seems) anything with a barcode. I just hope they'll be really innovative and look to combine the device with services such as Google Product Search (formerly Froogle), to enable real-time locally driven shopping comparisons. Wouldn't it be awesome to be out shopping and just scan the barcode to see other stores in the area (or online) selling the same product for less?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do check out www.cellatracker.com. I've used it for over a year now and it's tremendous because it not only allows me to categorize (or upload) tasting notes, it makes it easy to view notes from other users...plus a lot more. I'm not affiliated with it, but the more wine folks who use it, the better the community aspects...

dpm said...

Just for the benefit of readers, I think the correct url for the above comment is: cellartracker.com