Brian and I started building Winescorecard back in November of 2006. We framed our original idea of using a compute algorithm as a tool to help people learn what kind of wines they like - to generate personalized wine recommendations based upon a person’s own individual taste. At the time, there really were no tools for that on-line. The tools that did exist mostly catered to fairly well educated wine drinkers.

As we started doing a bit of market research, we started reading wine blogs and professional publications more so than we ever had in the past. And something struck me - something that I always kind of knew, but tried to deny. We, educated wine drinkers as a group, are not very open to novices. Maybe there is just so much to know. Maybe we think people should make an effort to learn what we have learned. I don’t know. But we do seem to have a bit of disdain for people that show how little they know about wine. Not all of us, of course, but enough of us to give credibility to the wine snob stereotype.

It really hit home for me when Snooth, our well-funded competitor, really hit the press. When Snooth announced that it had raised $1.3 million there was much written in the blogosphere about it. The reader comment that struck me most was that Snooth was geared to novices, and was thus uninteresting. It was just a single comment, and they probably knew a fair bit about wine so the site really isn’t geared toward them, but it basically fit the tone of so much that I had been reading.

The wine community rants against Robert Parker and Wine Spectator because the ratings drive so much business. People should trust their palates they say. And it is true, they should. The reasons they do not are probably quite varied. I know most of my friends do not know anything about wine. Hell, I know very little about wine really.

Maybe people turn to these publications because they are busy, and they do not have the budget to try everything. They need something to narrow the field of wines in order to educate their palate.

Or maybe, as a recent study suggests, people need a sense of validation about their palate. Or, maybe, since this study implies that the typical consumer probably cannot tell expensive wine from cheap wine, people just do not want to feel like they’re getting screwed. Sort of a “Consumer Reports” kind of thing for wine.

What I do know is this - if more people drank good wine, more wine makers would make good wine. This would allow all of us - those in the wine business and wine consumers - to keep drinking what we like, while our novice friends can drink what they like. Even if that turns out to be high alcohol fruit bombs.

And that is exactly why Winescorecard.com is here today - to provide personalized recommendations to help people navigate the wine universe. Help us by becoming a member of Winescorecard.com.