Katya and I are currently entering the data from our GPS mapping and winery data collection trips last fall (2007).  We visited about 600 wineries with tasting rooms regularly open to the public, our initial criteria, and we have about 300 more winery profiles to set up to hold the data.  We are also collecting information from the Web sites to add to the profiles.  What a challenge!

I long ago gave up on using the Web to plan wine region visits.  Information I need as a taster/visitor is too hard to get.  It is dispersed, disorganized, sometimes missing, and on the association and other third-party sites it is inadequate and frequently wrong.

So like many tasters, if not most, I stayed in wine regions I was familiar with.  Occasionally I would travel to some region I hadn’t explored and drive around and hope for the best.  Only during our mapping odyssey did I discover the many wonders of California wineries.  Very few tasters can spend months driving to just about every winery tasting room in the state.

So now I’m back into winery Web sites and frustrated daily.  I really feel the value proposition or benefits of what WineQuesters.com is becoming.  Even when there is a Visit Us page I frequently can’t find the days and hours of operation or the address!!  Sometimes this information is buried several paragraphs down in About Us.  Sometimes the Visit Us page has enough information to visit the winery tasting room but the hours are in Contact Us.

Of the roughly 300 winery Web sites we have visited so far I think there were only one or two that were decent.  Still deficient, but at least useful.

But finding a winery is only a small part of what tasters want.  They have about a hundred other questions that are even harder to find answers for.  We collected those questions and they are now available to answer in the winery profiles.

It is like the wine industry in California decided to conspire against tasters and play hide and seek.

- jim