Wine and Social Media, Part Two

Wednesday I asked what you thought about wineries marketing to Millennials on social media, and the poll results as to whether it's successful or not was pretty split. Today, I wanted to highlight a couple of wine-related social media and websites that I think are pretty cool.

Snooth, a made-up name for a community of 600,000 and counting wine lovers. On Snooth you can search for wines, search community ratings, find a wine you want and then Snooth will help you shop for it (it's not a sales arm itself, however), and connect with other wine lovers. Snooth has smart software, too--once you rate 5 wines, it will figure out your tasting profile and help you find more of the same. (Drawback: when you have an eclectic palate like I do, or one that changes with the seasons, Snooth might not be able to keep up.)

Americanwinery.com, an online wine shop that specializes in American-made wines. Their business model is like Etsy.com--the wineries themselves sell the wine to you with no distributor middleman (americanwinery.com just charges a small administrative fee). If you live in a state that allows shipping, you may get a better deal here than in your brick and mortar store. The site just came out with a new Widget you can put on your blog or website that's live and interactive, allowing you to search for wines right on the spot.

OpenWineConsortium, a Ning website where you can connect with all kinds of wine people in the trade, bloggers, wineries, you name it, from all over the world. Creator Joel Vincent is also a founder of VinTank, a digital think tank for the wine industry, so he's a pretty forward-thinking guy.

Got a favorite wine site? Please dish in the comments.