Vinfolio Blog

It’s been an exciting week at Vinfolio. If you haven’t heard yet, we’ve announced the Vinfolio Marketplace as an easy way for VinCellar users to sell their wine anonymously. Bidding starts when we launch in early July.

Now’s the time to go through your cellar and start marking your wine for sale. Selling is passive so once your wine’s been marked for sale, just sit back, pour yourself a glass of wine and let the bidding begin.

Improve your chances

• Set an optional asking price on your wine. Your asking price is public and informs bidders of the price you are willing to accept for your wine. This will help bidders set a reasonable bid. Enter an asking price when you mark wine for sale or from the Marketplace tab on the wine detail page.

• You can also set an optional minimum price. Your minimum price is private and represents the lowest price you would accept for this wine.  Your minimum price can be used to auto-accept bids on wine stored at Vinfolio (more about auto-accept in a future blog post).
• Upload a label image for your wine. Read Amy's blog post to learn how.  

What happens next?
We’re building robust tools to simplify the process of accepting bids and shipping your wine to us including:

• Custom bid alerts which notify you immediately (or less frequently, you choose) on bids which meet your specific criteria.
• Simple, guided bid acceptance process.
• Easy, visual steps for preparing wine for shipping.  We’ll tell you what to ship, when to ship and how to ship.

We'll be walking through the specifics over the next few weeks. Check back here frequently and you'll be ready to sell in July!

As summer approaches, there are a multitude of food and wine events that take place in the Bay Area. Isn’t it time you got out and enjoyed yourself? Below is a list of the calendar highlights (refer to today’s feature, “Summer food & wine festivals,” in the San Francisco Chronicle as well as Vinfolio’s “Wine Events” page for more details).

MAY

May 16, San Francisco

Uncorked  - Fourth annual food and wine festival in Ghirardelli Square. www.ghirardellisq.com

May 16, Monterey

Sustainable Foods Fair – Daylong fair at the Monterey Bay aquarium including the annual Cooking for Solutions event featuring celebrity chefs. www.cookingforsolutions.com

May 30-31, San Mateo

Maker Faire – The “world’s largest do-it-yourself festival” including demonstrations on an array of topics such as brewing beer and preserving foods. www.makerfaire.com

JUNE

June 4-7, Napa

Auction Napa Valley – The American Wine Classic – In 1981 the Napa Valley Vintners established what is now the premier charity wine auction. Includes tastings, dinners and lunches, as well the Barrel Auction at Robert Mondavi winery. http://www.napavintners.com/anv/anv_1_overview.aspx

June 6-7, Menlo Park

Sunset Magazine's Celebration Weekend – Demonstrations, panel discussions and workshops at the magazine headquarters. www.sunset.com/cw

June 13, Mountain View

Great American Food and Music Fest – Cooking demos as well as food and wine tastings at the Shoreline Amphitheatre. www.greatamericanfoodandmusicfest.com

June 16-18, Santa Barbara, CA

6th Annual California Wine Festival - With a venue in the heart of the historic Spanish center of downtown Santa Barbara, the California Wine Festival features top local wineries, restaurants, caterers and musical performers. www.californiawinefestival.com/

June 25-28, San Francisco

Pinot Days – More than 200 Pinot Noir vintners are featured in tastings and seminars at this four-day event at Fort Mason (Vinfolio is a sponsor). www.pinotdays.com

JULY

July 18-25, Napa Valley

Napa Valley Festival del Sole – Fourth annual festival includes concerts, art exhibitions, and food and wine tastings. www.fdsnapa.org

AUGUST

Aug. 6-9, San Francisco

SF Chefs. Food. Wine. – Tastings, panel discussions, and cooking demonstrations by local chefs and members of the food & wine industry in Union Square and nearby venues. www.sfchefsfoodwine.com

Aug. 23-24, San Francisco

Family Winemakers Tasting - Experience the largest tasting of California wines in the world that showcases the state's small, family-owned wineries. www.familywinemakers.org/tastings/tastings.cfm/

SEPTEMBER

Sept. 4-6, Sonoma County

Sonoma Wine Country Weekend – Wine seminars, cooking demonstrations, and vineyard tours. More than 150 wineries and 60 chefs will offer samples at the 30th annual Taste of Sonoma on Sept. 5 at the Gallo family's historic MacMurray Ranch in Healdsburg. www.sonomawinecountryweekend.com

Call me old fashioned, but Steve Gillmor's recent post on TechCrunchIT.com, "Rest in Peace, RSS", describing how Twitter has made RSS irrelevant in the Web 2.0 world we live in, made me yearn for simpler days when your AOL homepage had all the news you needed for the day.

Sure Twitter is cool. It's reshaped how people communicate, stay connected, and keep abreast of the latest news. But I think it may be just a tad premature to be announcing the death of RSS.

RSS came out of Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group in 1995, and was first introduced by Netscape in 1999  (Wikipedia). In other words, RSS has been around a long time in internet years (kind of like dog years, but much shorter). Twitter first came on the scene in 2006. And though all the world's a-twitter with Twitter, let's see how it will fare over time.

In the meanwhile, here at Vinfolio we support both. You can subscribe to a wide range of RSS feeds, from the latest additions to our great wine selection in the wine store, to our CEO's award-winning blog, The Wine Collector. You can also tweet to your heart’s content from our cellar management tool, VinCellar. Tweet your latest tasting notes, your latest additions to your wine cellar, or a wine that's worth checking out.

I will say that Twitter has a great shot at becoming the successor to RSS. Armed with a Twitter aggregator, today's information junkie can have his wine and drink it, too. Twitter marries the social web with the media-driven web. In other words, you can keep track of your friends, your favorite wines, and politics all in one place. Sounds like RSS, but better.

I for one am going to be curious how all of this plays out. In the meantime, I'll be tweeting and RSS-ing at a wine bar near you.

Something's been bothering me for a while now. VinCellar's trust ratings don't add up and sometimes are just plain wrong. A couple of weeks ago I took a look at how we calculate our ratings and noticed that the calculations did not really capture the nuances of tasting notes and voting.

A simple summary of the old algorithm is that it only considered reviews with votes
when deriving a rating for an author. How is this flawed? I'll use an example to illustrate. A user with 20 reviews and one vote is judged solely on that vote. If the vote is positive he's at 100%, if it's negative he's at 0%. What about the other 19 notes? These should count for something.

How our new rating system works

In an attempt to protect authors who have numerous notes (and even those with a few) we've altered the rating system to allow unrated notes to contribute a score to the overall rating. I like to call this the "Innocent until proven guilty" trust rating system. Also all votes on a single review only contribute a score to that review. The algorithm is optimistic in that the score used for unrated notes is the same as if the note was positively rated. Here's a technical view of it:

So, using the same example our user with 20 reviews (1 rated, 19 unrated) would now have the following trust rating:

and using the example of a user with only two reviews, one unrated and one rated, his trust rating would be as follows:

Not too bad. Here's the key point of the algorithm, multiple votes on a single review now only affect that review's contribution to the author's overall trust rating and an author gets the benefit of the doubt on unrated reviews until someone votes on them.

What this means to you

• Trust ratings are fairer - In general, everyone's rating will be higher. All users, prolific or not, will get the same treatment so you can add your first notes without worrying about having a low rating.
• Write more tasting notes- The more reviews you write, the less likely your trust rating is dented by negative reviews.
• Vote more - Votes only count on their corresponding review. Give someone the thumbs up when you like what they have to say, you also won't damage their rating too much if you vote a review down.
• Understand the system -  We know that this algorithm could be more sophisticated and we're open to refinements.

We'd love to hear what you think; you can follow the discussion in the forums. Thanks for your time.

Have you been on VinCellar lately and noticed missing label images for your wines?

Well, we definitely notice and it makes us sad. In fact, we often review our community data and try to fill in the missing pieces. 

One way you can help improve VinCellar is by uploading label images from wines in your personal cellar. This weekend, we'd like you to dig into your cellar, bust out the old digital camera and upload your California label images. 

To get you started, here are some of the most common California VinCellar wines that are missing label images:

Gnarly Head - Zinfandel Old Vines 

Viader - Cabernet Franc

Sebastiani - Cabernet Sauvignon Cherry Block (Old Vine)

Hahn Estates - Meritage 

Cakebread - Zinfandel Red Hills

Smoking Loon - Cabernet Sauvignon

Ravenswood - Zinfandel Old Vines (Sonoma)

Moon Mountain - Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve

Sequoia Grove - Cabernet Sauvignon Estate

Imagery Vineyard Collection - Cabernet Sauvignon Sunny Slope Vineyard

And that's just the beginning! Any wines in your VinCellar that have missing label images or incorrect years on the label image are great candidates for your photos.  

In case you forgot how to upload the images, Amy posted an excellent tutorial on this a while back.  

Thanks and happy photo shooting! 

In February we announced a number of new social features in VinCellar. Since that time the average number of new tasting notes has increased by over 60% while the average number of individuals entering notes each day has increased by 40%.

That release also rounded out our blogger-specific platform. Like your wine blog, VinCellar is targeted toward wine lovers and enthusiasts and our platform now makes it easier than ever for you to promote your reviews and scores to our growing community of cellar management users. Take advantage of these features:

• Free, web-based tasting note management.
  
• Mobile optimized site for accessing wines and reviews from your iPhone.
  
• Easy batch upload of tasting notes via our Excel-based import tool.
  
• Support for multiple scoring systems.
  
• Ability to upload your own label images.
  
• Individual RSS feed of your tasting notes.
  
• Ability to create a VinCellar Badge for display on your Blog/Website.
  
• Integration with Facebook and Twitter.
  
• Linking to your individual, blogger-designated VinCellar public profile page.
  

• Promotion of your blog and authored content on all individual notes.