Today we live in a Golden Age of wine. Cheap and mid-priced bottles have never been so good. Agricultural breakthroughs, better hygiene and a devotion to terroir have all made today’s table wine head and shoulders the best of any age of humankind. (The only sand-in-the-Vaseline comes in the highest tier of wine, which is exponentially more expensive than it was just a few decades ago.)
Thanks to the Internet, we also have more information about wine than we’ve ever had before. Theoretically, this is supposed to help you, the consumer, find wine that you’ll really enjoy. Unfortunately, the web being the web, this knowledge isn’t exactly at your fingertips. It’s scattered like chaff across a hundred magazines, subscriber sites and free newsletters, which is little assistance when you’re actually scanning the shelves at the store for a good tipple.
This is why the new site WineAlign is the best thing that’s happened to Ontario wine since William Lenko planted the first Chardonnay grapes on his Niagara farmland. WineAlign is a website that elegantly integrates into one page the scores and reviews from dozens of different wine writers. It then links this page to the LCBO’s own inventory locator. It allows you to sift through the best wines at your local LCBO from your desktop or, as you trawl through the aisles at Vintages, you can use your Blackberry to investigate each bottle.
If I sound like I’m trying to create a buzz for WineAlign, there’s a reason for that: I am.
The Short Cellar recently joined their stable of critics. In fact, if you’ve signed up for Precedent’s newsletter, you’ve already received a promotional code for 3 months of free premium service on WineAlign. If you missed this e-mail, I have a clue for you: the first eight letters of the promotional code are PRECEDEN. Can you guess what the 9th letter is, Robert Langdon?
My favourite thing about the site is that it was created by a lone wine lover, not a large media corporation. When I asked Bryan McCaw what inspired him, he immediately replied, “The day I cashed out of my previous software company, I went to the LCBO to buy a bottle to celebrate. I came home with $100 bottle of Shiraz that I didn’t like. I got tired of playing wine roulette. I said to myself, ‘There has to be a better way.’ I also noticed that the reviews published in the LCBO were only the ‘best’ review available for the wine, but in reality there could be a wide variance in opinions. Wouldn’t it be cool to bring all of those opinions together? This concept solidified in April 2008 and the goal was to answer the simple question: What wine do I buy today?”
Stay tuned next week when the Short Cellar will reveal the best thing that you can do with the camera in your smart phone.
Matthew Sullivan is a civil litigator in Toronto. He blogs weekly here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column also appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca. Follow along on Twitter: @shortcellar.