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What's This Web Site About?

It is all about helping wine tasters discover new and interesting winery experiences and helping wineries find the right tasters for them at the lowest cost. Wine Questers is for the roughly 90% of the tasters whose objectives are a good time, taste some decent wines, and escape from the workday stress. When the tasters and wineries are networked together the benefits to everyone start to flow.

The current information sources are woefully inadequate and cumbersome. This increases taster frustration, reduces exploring, and increases winery marketing costs. A search function far better than Google's had to be built for wine tasters. Better maps were needed and the data available to load into mobile devices. WineQuesters.com is the solution.

It took months of travel and over 10,000 miles of driving so far to inventory most of the rural wineries with tasting rooms open to the public on a regular basis, rate their attributes such as picnic areas, and to shoot the Discover California Wine Regions videos. This content is being added to the site almost daily in 2008 and into 2009.

We are starting with California but tasters and wineries around the world have pretty much the same needs. We intend to add other states and countries soon. First we have to get through the site development stage and jump-start the Quester Network.

The 2007 GPS Mapping Odyssey

During 2006 Jim and Katya Preston were conducting wine taster ethnographic studies in many California wine regions. They began rating winery picnic areas for their WineryPicnics.com site, which was expanded and renamed WineQuesters.com in late 2007. During their wine region adventures they found it difficult to locate wineries with the abstract region maps available in magazines and at the wineries. This began an 8,000 mile odyssey through all 19 major California wine regions.

One day on the Silverado Trail he visited 25 wineries, the record for the odyssey. (No, contrary to popular belief, he did not taste at most of the wineries.)

Each day on the odyssey the suggestions for software features and information continued to grow. Tasters wanted to rate wineries and search for winery dogs and cats, wine clubs, events, women owned wineries, and on and on. Wineries wanted information available such as dog and family friendly, tour details, their landscaping, wine ratings by their customers (a biggee) and the list keeps growing.

Along the way Jim, sometimes accompanied by Katya, found many adventures that he never imaged existed. Wonderful little wineries tucked into the mountains, large ones with intimate tasting rooms and fun people behind the bar, and great food at winery restaurants. Experiences ranged from farm animals in a sort of petting zoo near Lodi to a side hill of waterfalls at the entrance to a cave tasting room near Fairplay to a tiny shack in Los Olivos that may be the smallest tasting room in California.

In late October the name was changed to WineQuesters.com to reflect the expanding scope and to promote, well, wine questing. Is wine questing a sport? A hobby? A lifestyle? Questers will sort that out with the help of the wineries.

In late November Jim called an end to the field work when he finished El Dorado County. Jim headed home to try to sort out what Wine Questers should be when it grows up.

Since then the project evolved into software and Web site development and endless hours of entering the data collected during field work and from winery Web sites. Wineries are beginning to maintain their own profiles and add more information. Promoting the site to the public should begin in late summer 2008.

There is far more to the wine tasting experience than great wines. Jim encountered almost 600 new experiences! Now tasters can find them and wineries can market them.

 

About Wine Questers.com

Wine Questers.com (previously Winery Picnics.com) is a division of Intiri, Inc., a lifestyle products company located in Santa Clara, California and near one of the original "tasting rooms" from the 1700's, Mission Santa Clara.

Background information on Intiri, Inc. and the management / founders is at: Intiri.com.


Contact us

Email contact for business issues:
Email contact for Web site issues:

Intiri, Inc.
2464 El Camino Real #80
Santa Clara, CA 95051-3002

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