Snooth: Best Wine Review Site

Snooth, a simple, smooth New York-based wine rating and recommendation service, is plugging the launch of its Facebook application. Unfortunately, the wine 2.0 service, which is still in its 1.0 phase on Facebook, doesn't yet allow users to search for wines directly through Facebook. Instead, users must create a profile and add wines through Snooth itself. So far, a mere 200+ oenophiles have added the app.

Snooth may not be the snazziest Facebook app for showing off your rack, but its site is better than competitors Corkd, Bottle Talk, and Winelog. My search for Sebastiani Cabernet Sauvignon 2001 returned just what I was looking for, along with a well-deserved "SnoothRank" of 4 out of 5. By contrast, Corkd returned the wrong vintage, Bottle Talk came up empty, and Winelog didn't offer any ratings or reviews.

Most wine recommendation sites offer a similar set of features: Users can tag, rank, and review bottles, as well as link to online stores where their favorites are being sold. Snooth, which launched in June after securing $300,000 in seed funding at the end of last year (angels), offers personalized recommendations (once you review 5 wines) and  claims to have a database of 350,000 wines and close to 2 million reviews.

"I realized that the world of wine is far too complicated for anyone to know it all," said Philip James, the site's founder...

"There's no standardization in the wine world, no bar codes, no IMDB, and most of the data is still stored in individual silos. There was clearly the opportunity to bring it all together and create a single focus point where users can learn about, search for, buy, then rate and review wine."

Snooth hopes to distinguish itself by creating a social network for wine lovers. It recently added a new "friend" feature, and plans to become more community-oriented by allowing users to tailor specific recommendations to friends - a la Netflix. We'll drink to that!

    Philip James, founder of Snooth, looking far too sober.