Wine Finders and Keepers: Adegga

A number of new wine finder and cellar management programs have been unveiled that help consumers find wines that they might like, assist them in locating retailers who stock the wine, and then keep track of the wine you have and what you thought of it when you tasted it. I'll be reviewing some of these sites in the upcoming weeks. If you have suggestions for sites I should take a look at, please let me know in the comments below. (image by Mike "Dakinewavamo" Kline)

Maybe you have a relatively small stash of wine and are thinking of keeping track of it. Maybe you have been keeping tasting notes on slips of paper and you would like to have a more permanent record. Maybe you like reading wine blogs like Catavino and you'd like a way to link up your favorite blogs with the wines that you buy. If any of these possible scenarios describe you, then you might want to check out Adegga.

Adegga is self-described as a "Social Wine Discovery" site. The goal is to help you find wine you might like based on what others are drinking, rating, and writing about. The discovery process revolves around "watchlists" of people, wine producers, wines, wine shops, and blogs that you enjoy. Once you've put a person, place, or thing on your watchlist, your homepage automatically notifies you about new purchases, posts, and offers related to your wine interests. The site is colorful and intuitive, with a smart use of graphics to help you navigate. Nearly everything you click on brings up a new screen with new features, and its very easy to figure out the basics of how to work the site. If you click on the screenshot here, for example, you will get a sense of the many different kinds of information--blog posts, ratings, and more--that come up for each wine.

Adegga is a free site, and signing up for it only takes a few minutes. At the present time, the majority of data entered into Adegga is related to Spanish and Portuguese wine, so if you typically drink American wines you may find yourself entering a lot of information. Fewer than 100 wines on the site are from the US but every time someone else joins the site and starts entering their information the database will grow and develop. And it only takes about 2 minutes to enter wine information with a combination of typing and pull-down menus. (this is a good activity to do in front of summer reruns)

As with any of the online cellar/wine finder tools, there are small glitches and things that you wish worked a different way. Because I'm a variety hound, for instance, I wish I didn't have to go to a second screen and enter grapes for a wine after entering all the other information. Right now it's not possible for me to link a wine that I want to buy with a store in my area that might carry it, which would be nice. And sometimes the autofill function can trip you up and enter a wine name that you never intended. But these are pretty minor tics in an otherwise smooth program, and I've found Adegga quite responsive when I've made a mistake entering a wine and need something fixed.

There are sites out there with more data and with more users, but this site is the one that has the most integrated approach to the question of "how do I find the name of a good wine that I might like?" The Adegga team (André Ribeirinho, André Cid, Emidio Santos, and Bruno Pedro) should be congratulated for thinking how all the pieces of the social media puzzle might fit together in the service of locating a good bottle. Perhaps their success is related to the fact that they are active participants in this brave new world, and keep a blog as well as a presence on Twitter. If you are twittering like mad, have a Facebook account, and enjoy text messaging I think you'll like Adegga, so head over there and check out the site's features. There's no "one site fits all" cellar management program on the internet. You need to figure out what's important to you. Once you do, you will be able to find a program that fits you to a tee--and it just might be Adegga.