Show HN: GoodGrapes – Discover Wines You'll Love

by erichmenge • 13 years ago

23 19 13 years ago

erichmenge9• 13 years ago

This is a new (just for fun) side project of mine. New features are in the pipeline, but I want to get some people using it now while it is young so that I can get some good feedback on where to go in the future. It should be pretty stable and (hopefully) free of critical bugs.

Let me know what things you’d like to see added to make it more useful. Either in the comments, or preferably on https://getsatisfaction.com/goodgrapes so I have a list of things to do :)

The idea is that you recommend wine, and then based on your tastes wines will be recommended to you. It is also a great way to keep track of wine you’ve tried and enjoyed.

In a way I’m scratching my own itch. I enjoy wine a great deal but know little about it and find the choices overwhelming. Getting recommendations seems like a great place to start exploring.

Thanks!

andrewcross• 13 years ago

Some quick feedback. I'll be blunt, but don't take it the wrong way:

1) Show a nice big picture of grapes or wine or both on your home screen. This alone will boost the appearance tenfold.

2) Way too much explaining how it works. I don't really care if it's social or there's thumbs. Just get me wishing I had a glass of wine now.

3) Don't make me sign up to experience the value. The best call to action I can think of is to have me put in a wine I like and you show me a whole bunch of wines you think I would also like. No need to signup for that.

erichmenge9• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! All three are good points. With respect to #2, what do you think about the "top x" wines for the landing page?

paupino_masano• 13 years ago

Interesting site! I know next to nothing about wines so I think I may be using this next time I go to pick one out.

I do have a suggestion however: avoid using so much purple. As you already know, purple is a mixture of red and blue. The problem is that red and blue are the opposite ends of the color spectrum - this makes it very difficult for your eye to focus on this color - similar to trying to read red writing on a blue background, or blue writing on a red background.

Anyway - just a thought as I struggle reading the purple font (it strains my eyes ever so slightly).

erichmenge9• 13 years ago

Thanks for the input. I see your point with the red/blue. I'll play with some other colors this weekend. (Visual design isn't my strong suit).

wasd2• 13 years ago

I think andrewcross has some solid feedback. I once read that if you have to give instructions to your website, you've already failed the UX. Even though I could deduce everything that your website does without reading the instructions, I did so anyway which took me away from getting to actual product.

I wish your top 25 had price as a column. Otherwise, great job guys & good luck. I forwarded this to one of my colleagues who is a huge wino and will add his feedback.

erichmenge9• 13 years ago

Good idea with the price column! I don't want to persist that in the database but I'll see if I can figure out a good way to handle that.

erichmenge9• 13 years ago

Oh, and what do you think about the top wines being displayed as the root page? What would you like to see on the landing page?

wasd2• 13 years ago

Honestly, this is not my field of expertise by any means but one of the top 25 wines randomly selected with quotes, reviews and history with a simple way to cycle through other wines or see the entire list. Maybe scrape amazon + wikipedia?

languagehacker• 13 years ago

The wine.com API does a lot of work for you, here. I don't really see what you're accomplishing by adding a social layer on top of it.

If the killer feature is the recommendation engine social or otherwise, I don't think that you're selling it well enough. I also don't think that you have a good enough feature set for a decent learning model to consistently offer up good wines.

I once attempted to play around with this kind of domain space in the past. I was really disappointed at how hard it was to get the actual descriptions and star ratings of the wines I was looking at. I think the descriptions would actually be what would be useful for discovering new, awesome wines. For example, "You consistently like wines that were described in terms like honey or berry, so we suggested this Chenin Blanc to you," or, "This 2002 Cabernet Franc was suggested because you consistently favorite aged reds that are described with terms like 'tobacco' and 'leather'." If you have that, then you've created an AI wine sommelier. Start pairing things with food, and you have an app that might go places. But the data you need to make that happen is really hard to come by.

Wine is also a messy topic because of the ridiculous amount of local producers, which means that in places where people actually enjoy wine, there's a good chance they're drinking something that isn't available on the API, at all. In fact, if you're a wine connoisseur, odds are you're trying to find progressively more obscure wines in the first place. In other words, why would I, as your target audience, want recommendations from anything unexhaustive?

This project shows a lot of skill integrating with APIs, though, and the design isn't bad. But it seems like more of a weekend hack project than a viable service. Still, from someone who once used a beer API to teach people about search engines, well done.

erichmenge9• 13 years ago

Fair points. It is a bit of a weekend project, and it is really just me working on it in my spare time. Who knows, maybe it will grow into something bigger/better. Or maybe not. Either way it is just something fun to play with.

Thanks for the feedback.

JC001• 13 years ago

It would be great if there were ways to sort the results when you look in the big list of wines, such as by price, year, name, vineyard. Also, when there is more than one page of results, having the pages separated by something related to the sorting criteria is a lot more intuitive in order to browse through to find what one is looking for. For example, sorting by vineyard could do A-C, D-E, F-H or A, B, C. Either are lot easier to understand than page 1, page 2, page 3.

erichmenge9• 13 years ago

That's been in the back of my head. I'll put some priority on it.

Thanks!

andrewcooke• 13 years ago

also, don't show multiple years. display a particular wine (all years) and then let year selection happen on the wine's page. otherwise you can get a search result with the same wine repeated again and again for many years, which is frustrating if it's not the one you are looking for.

hiroprot• 13 years ago

What do you use to do the recommendations? Apache Mahout?

erichmenge9• 13 years ago

https://github.com/davidcelis/recommendable

fdschoeneman• 13 years ago

I think it's a great start. I'm working on a related project. But one thing that may cause confusion is that at least in my mind, wines are related to wineries or producers, and through a winery to one or more vineyards, rather than directly to vineyards. Often a winery is also a vineyard, but at least with cult wines there's a symbiotic supplier relationship, wherein, for example, a winemaker will produce a wine made from grapes grown by a particular vineyard, which is owned by someone else. The winemaker will then "vineyard designate" the wine, to both the winery's and the vineyard's benefit.

So the quick fix is that I think from looking at what you've built here, that maybe you should have a big list of wines, and another big list of wineries, rather than vineyards?

Hope this helps :)

tyrelb• 13 years ago

As an avid wine drinker, who has been around the world and tried wines from every country...

Get recommendations, try a bottle, and try something new all the time. It's to be an experience, it's not just a beverage.

Show HN: GoodGrapes – Discover Wines You'll Love

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