Catavino » avin

Catavino Gets a New Look!

Gabriella Opaz — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 01:53:12 +0000

In geologic terms, it wasn’t so long ago that I wore all black, had a tongue piercing and loved Don Johnson – scary, I know. Now maybe those didn’t all happen at the same time, but they did happen and are part of my evolution. We all go through transitions, phases and developments. Sometimes they’re easy, effortless and exciting; and sometimes, it feels like you’ve been run over by a 10 ton bulldozer. (Flickr photo by Jibba Jabba)

Catavino has gone through several evolutions in its lifetime. From its writing style to its design, there hasn’t been an adjective, or a widget, left unturned. And to give you a sense of where it all began, let’s glimpse at a small excerpt from Ryan’s very first wine blog post on July 30th of 2004:

First post in an attempt to spread some thoughts and keep up with some friends. I’m currently in charge of a liquor store with a large selection of wines from around the world, high end and low end booze of myriad types, and over 800 varieties of beers. Married with 3 cats…I’m currently attempting to escape our city with hopes of landing abroad…(click here to read the whole post)

That was many moons ago, and though it wasn’t under the Catavino banner, it was his very first attempt to describe the wine world around him. Personal and off-the-cuff, it was Ryan’s opportunity to share his vinous experiences without a filter or an editor. This continued through mid 2007 when I came on board. At first, my anal desire for correct grammar got the best of me, becoming Ryan’s worst enemy and best English warden. But then something interesting happened, I too wanted to share myexperiences while living in Iberia, and so I did. Today, we make a fabulous, though tumultuous, team. Neither lacking in opinions or passion, we were, and are, a dynamic duo to be reckoned with. And with each transition, with each desire to improve ourselves, our research, our writing and the wine world around us, the website has changed with us.

But first, we need to thank our friends and partners at CoreFactor, the fabulous team behind this makeover. Much like our little puffin featured above, we’re jumping up and down, elated to finally have the site that is not just cobbled together from odd templates and Ryan’s minimal knowledge of PHP and HTML. With a few euros, and a lot of time, we hope we’ve put together a website that is easier navigate, faster to load, more enjoyable to read and just plain fun to look at. Thanks COREFACTOR! If you need a great site, make sure to check them out.

New Features

You’ll notice that each category now has its very own color. And while similar to our old site, the new site entirely changes color scheme depending on the category. Click on “Food” and the page will shift to the festive red color of the tab. Click on “Explore“, the page will shift to orange. The goal behind this design is to help you navigate through the site in an easier, more enjoyable way. Granted, our design doesn’t help us when we have an article about a wine event that is also of cultural significance -whereby placing it in 2 categories – but we’re at least on the right track.

Over the past year, we have invested a considerable amount of time and funds into our videos. Consequently, with the help of Vinus.tv, Madcat Media and our own humble flip cam endeavors, we felt it was high time to create a high quality video page that was easy navigate.
Ryan is still waiting for someone to generously donate the Canon 5D Mark II, to help him pursue his dream of photographing all he sees. That said, his shots are not half bad, motivating us to revamp our photo page in order to highlight the places we stumble upon as we travel through Iberia. And for the record, the offer still stands if anyone has an extra 5D lying around.
Our map pages - listing great suggestions of restaurants, hotels and wine bars in both Spain and Portugal – have not changed, other than looking shinier in their new digs! But we will be spending some time in August to update the information. That said, if anyone has any quality suggestions to add to our maps, please pipe up! There’s only two of us, so we rely on you all to lend us hand when you stumble upon delicious or unassuming treasures throughout Spain and Portugal.
Finally, and most importantly, we are very excited to announce a collaboration with Adegga.com. In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out a new tool called, Adegga Lists, that will revolutionize how wine writers display their tasting notes on their own websites. Using Adegga and AVIN technologies, we have implemented a fully searchable database of the wines tasted on this website. This tool is still a bit rough around the edges, but it is fully customizable and can be used with or without Adegga integration. If you want more information about this new tool, and how you can get a version on your site, let us know, as we’re taking limited (very limited) beta testers on board. In the meantime, please check out the new Catavino Wine Page and let us know what you think.

So there you have it! We’ve cleared a considerable amount of dead weight on the site, have added some fun gadgets for you to play with, and will be tweaking and adding some additional features in the very near future. That said, please don’t hesitate to let us know what works and doesn’t. As this site is meant to make your experience more enjoyable, only you can give us the quality feedback we need. Oh, and if you come across some funky code that we didn’t clear in a post, we kindly ask that you alert us. We are well aware that some of those little buggers escaped our vigilant hunt, but with your help, we’ll fix them.

Thanks to all of your support and do share your thoughts!

Cheers,

Gabriella and Ryan Opaz

Portugal Overcomes Pride to Acknowledge an Unexpected Wine Leader

Ryan Opaz — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:54:38 +0000

Last year, I wrote an article on how Spanish and Portuguese wineries could succeed online. I mentioned words such as passion, culture, adaptability and history, which are all powerful reasons why Iberian wineries have a chance to succeed in Social media, but I’m afraid it’s not enough. I left out a key word that holds most of us back from succeeding, fear. Fear that if they try something and fail, everyone will laugh or pity them. Pride is extremely important in Iberia, often times dictating someone’s decisions and actions. From having your plumber blame the mold in your bathroom on your “poor cleaning”, as opposed to his poor grouting efforts, to the winery that won’t sell you their wine because you’re not important enough to carry it in your shop. But like nature, there are often powerful antidotes nearby when we’re presented with the world’s most dangerous poisons. In this case, the poison for Iberia is pride, and its antidote is the press.

People pay attention once your name appears in a publication, either appropriately or simply as a fluke. Make the front page of El Mundo for a comment about the latest weather trend and your phone won’t stop ringing off the hook. Cure cancer but forget to put out a press release, and you’ll be ignored. I’m cognizant that this isn’t just an Iberian affliction, but it can be very frustrating to anyone living here wanting to believe that their resume matters. In the case I’m about to describe, the pride was in the form of a long historied institution not wanting to acknowledge an upstart “youngster” who tried something new. Pride blinded them from seeing the ingenuity and innovation of his project, until this past weekend.

On Saturday, a close friend and business associate, Andre Ribeirinho, was named Wine Personality of the year by Diário de Noticias in Portugal. The award was given based on Andre’s work with his partners, Emidio Santos and Andre Cid, on the website Adegga.com, as well as his creation of the AVIN. If you’re not familiar with either of these projects, please take a moment to look at their respective sites. I’ll wait here…

What do you think? We at Catavino have been supporting Adegga for many years, with over 1,000 wine notes entered among our various writers. The exciting part is that Adegga is about to go big by offering tools for major wine events. Imagine going to a wine show and having all the wines immediately accessible on your iphone or laptop. Adegga can do that. It also has a community of wine lovers sharing information, tasting notes, and asking questions. The most appealing aspect is that it’s a place to talk about wine, not necessarily dissect it. Put another way, Addega is a “wine drinkers” community, versus a “wine spitters”.

Now onto the revolutionary tool, the AVIN. Originally designed as a means for Adegga to manage its data so that wines with similar names were not confused or mislabled, it has now evolved into so much more. The AVIN is a unique 13 digit number, which acts like an ISBN for wine. As it grows, it has the potential to eliminate so many of the wine world’s problems, from misspellings to multiple label confusion among one producer’s wines to preventing fraud. It’s also becoming independent of Adegga by moving its database to an external location. In time, a board of advisors will be chosen to ensure an open and secure project – Gabriella and I have been the first to be nominated. We’ll also work to have regions beyond DOC Tejo in Portugal adopt the AVIN as a part of their lableing laws, in addition to wine producers who will have now have a consistent method of identifying their wines. This is the future of wine information!

Portugal knew about Andre before this award, but it wasn’t until a newspaper and Anibal Coutinho rightfully awarded Andre with Wine Personality of the Year that Andre’s phone started ringing. Andre, and the whole Adegga team, deserve this, and I raise a glass to toast this exciting achievement. However, I also want to raise a glass to Portugal for creating an environment where someone like Andre can rise up and create something that is potentially a game changing idea. Portugal you have a very bright future, just don’t wait until the press tells you so.

Finally, I want to say that this act of letting pride stop something great from happening is definitely not unique to Iberia. The AVIN a project, which is now open and collaborative, is still looked upon by some as an impossible dream. I consistently hear that it won’t work, as opposed to “how can we make it work”. The AVIN works. It’s extensible, and if we can all put aside our pride, it’s a tool that can change the wine world. No more data errors. No more missed vintages. No more confusion about strange spellings. If you don’t believe it, send us your questions and we’ll answer them. And to those of you who still doubt it’s success, I say BS! As Gary Vee would say, “you’re not going to crush it if you don’t believe”.Â Wine data standards today are a joke. This needs to change. Here’s a solution. And it has offered it up as a gift for all to share and profit from.

Congrats again to Adegga, Portugal and the wine world,

Ryan Opaz

Adegga.com A Social wine site that is headed in the right direction

Ryan Opaz — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:27:15 +0000

You can’t do it all at once. Life is a series of small steps. And if you believe that any project that kicks off today will have success tomorrow, well, be prepared for disappointment. This is my mantra to every client we take on, “Start your blog today, work on it, and eventually, if you invest enough of yourself, people will reward you by paying attention.” Clearly, our friends at Adegga, a Portuguese startup, are firm believers in this philosophy.

Bootstrapping is when you start a business without venture capital, or a heavy investment, building instead, from good old elbow grease and a bit of self sacrifice. You look for help where you can find it, and you trade services with others who are in a similar position. Catavino is an exercise in bootstrapping, and we are proud to call ourselves friends with the Adegga team – united disciples of this philosophy. Over the past few months, Andre Ribeirinho, Andre Cid and Emídio Santos, have paved the way in exemplifying how a little vision and lot of persistence can eventually lead to success.

So what is Adegga? Well at its core, its a social tasting note site. In Adegga, you can leave notes on wines, manage your personal wine cellar, and participate in a community that is growing daily. Granted, we know there are plenty of social tasting note sites out there, and trying to keep track of them all is an exercise in futility. That said, this post will not attempt to answer the question on which one is best, but rather why Adegga is useful.

In truth, we at Catavino use three different tasting note sites for 3 separate reasons: Cellartracker, the behemoth site with a gigantic database where we can find just about any wine we’re tasting is perfect for our main note taking; Snooth, where we can find merchants anywhere in the world for any wine we mention (a task that is gigantic in proportion and I thank Phillip for his hard work on this task); and finally, Adegga, where we support its inclusive attitude towards wine bloggers.

The AVIN
At the root of what will eventually lead to Adegga’s future successes is a number called an AVIN. This 13 digit number is their solution for wine data organization problems. All of you bloggers/wine lovers out there know how notoriously difficult wine can be to define when looking at a label. There are different quality classifications from country to country. Some countries will allow the winery to mention grape varieties, while others cannot. There are instances when the wine name is very different from the winery name, or the names are the same but displayed in different ways. Obviously, this is a nightmare for wine sites that try to build a comprehensive database. User generated wine information ends up a mix of all systems in the end and duplicate wines are par for the course. The AVIN attempts to solve this issue by assigning a “barcode” to every wine, which will later cull any of the mis-entered wines and merge them together. Additionally, permanent redirects have been installed allowing the user entering an incorrect wine name to be redirected to the correctly entered name.

Apart from this, there is another neat and relatively new tool that Adegga has added to their site in an effort to reward wine bloggers for their contributions to the online wine community. If you are a wine blogger writing an article on a wine, add the AVIN for that wine in either the tags or in the post itself. Once published, the AVIN will signal Adegga to automatically reference your article as a resource on that specific wine page in Adegga. Check out this Port wine and notice how Catavino shows up. For bloggers, this is a great way to make sure your posts are appreciated and discovered by other wine lovers. Not to mention Wineries can add these to there blog posts so that current information can be provided immediately to wine consumers.

Another great service on Adegga is the ability for wineries to manage their own profile. This tool acknowledges that wineries should be a part of the conversation, allowing them to not only be better informed of what people are saying about their wines, but also ensures that if a winery chooses to participate, they can check to see if: the photos for the wines listed are correct, that their winery profile is up to date, and that they can then drive users to their own sites to learn more. Now wine lovers can follow a winery they love in multiple ways and wineries can see brand loyalty grow.

However, I do have a few problems that I know are being worked on but that throw a small wrench in the usability of their site. Number one is design. This is being corrected, and thanks to some fellow bootstrapping friends, the design should be revamped in the near future. Number two is data, Adegga is still young; therefore, the number of wines in the database is still relatively few. And although this is changing fast, it’s an inevitable problem with this type of site in its early stages. But at this point, as you add wines to Adegga, your notes and blog posts will be some of the first that people will see. Finally, a few other things that I think should be added:

Varietal information on wine entry forms: For some wines, this is very important.
Better personal cellar management: I want more locations, drinks, and sorting options. Currently, I’d suggest Adegga for wines consumed, and not your extensive cellaring goals
And a personal annoyance for me: Keep me logged in! I really don’t mind being logged in, and I hate having to log in each time I visit.

Otherwise, I’m excited by what they are doing, and I would urge people to check them out. Like I mentioned before, we’ll be using multiple systems, but for someone just getting into wine, this is definitely not a bad place to start. If you are a winery, especially one with a blog, I would HIGHLY suggest you VISIT this site. There are too many good tools here for you to ignore, and by participating in a site like Adegga, you are only helping to spread your image further.

So in recap, Adegga is still growing, as a result of the team’s never-ending energy and drive to make the site more user-friendly, more stream-lined and more social. Not to mention that Andre, the lead developer, is always open to feedback. And if the AVIN tool interests you, you might want to read the conversation happening over at the OWC about it’s usefullness.

To hear more information about Adegga, take a moment to watch Andre Ribeirinho’s and Moses Mehraban’s interview at the Going-Solo Conference held in Lausanne last month.

Andre Ribeirinho and Moses Mehraban at Going-Solo Lausanne 2008 – video powered by Metacafe

Cheers,

Ryan

Update! Andre just pointed me to a post on the Adegga blog that is worth looking at. Turns out for Wine blog wednesday this month they did not have time to participate, but Andre did want to contribute. So he took the idea that Dr.Debs had of a tag cloud and made it even better! Check out the wine tag cloud he created where each tag links to blogs that use the tags listed! Pretty cool and just another example of how Adegga cares about the blogs that will eventually feed it.