Posts Tagged ‘booquet news’

Food and wine pairings … by mood?

Friday, March 5th, 2010

pairings_mood

The idea of “perfect” food and wine pairings can stress out even the most creative host or hostess.  Knowledge once considered holistic and the embodiment of regional, varietal, and tasting traits has been chopped into a succinct “do this for fish,” “that for chicken,” kind of logic served up to broad audiences.

That’s not the booquet approach to finding food and wine pairings you love, so we designed our own food and wine pairing tool now live in beta. (Check it out.)

The booquet pairing tool draws from a taxonomy of more than 800,000 bottles of wine and allows both simple and advanced filtering based on dish base, main ingredients, time of day and occasion. Another unique feature of our pairing tool is that it allows filtering by mood. (That’s right, wines create a mood…)

Seach by grounded, happy, cleansing, or relaxed and you’ll get dozens of results to empower you to make your own choices. Of course, you could do “eenie-meenie-miny-moe” from the long list of results, or you could do further research based on what people say about a wine, its price per bottle, or its availability locally. (All features on booquet.com.)

So, the next time you want to serve white wine and a grounded mood to friends, take a look at the bottles booquet says to consider (below), but make sure to enjoy your friends too!

Zenato Pinot Grigio Venezie Igt – Zenato – Pinot Grigio Italy 2008
Gnarly Head Pinot Grigio – Gnarly Head – Pinot Grigio Central Valley, United States 2007
Suavia Soave Classico Superiore – Suavia – Garganega Soave Classico, Italy 2007
Zolo Torrontes Gaucho Select – Zolo – Torrontes Mendoza, Argentina 2008
Fish Eye Pinot Grigio – Fish Eye Wines – Pinot Grigio California, USA 2008
Pride Mountain Vineyards Viognier – Pride Mountain Vineyards – Viognier Sonoma County, USA 2008
Chehalem Pinot Gris Willamette Valley – Chehalem – Pinot Gris Willamette Valley, USA 2007
East Dell Estates Pinot Grigio – East Dell Estates – Pinot Grigio Niagara Peninsula, Canada 2008
Dom Perignon Rose – Dom Perignon – Champagne Blend Champagne, France 1998
Fielding Estate Winery Pinot GrisFielding Estate Winery – Pinot Gris Niagara Peninsula, Canada 2008
Fish Eye Pinot Grigio – Fish Eye Wines – Pinot Grigio California, USA 2008
Chateau Olivier Blanc – Chateau Olivier – Semillon-Sauvignon Blanc Blend Graves, France 2006
Dom Perignon Brut – Moet & Chandon – Champagne Blend Champagne, France 1998
Trimbach Pinot Gris Reserve - Trimbach – Pinot Gris France 2007
Hermann j. Wiemer Gewurztraminer Dry – Hermann J. Wiemer – Gewurztraminer Finger Lakes, USA 2008
Zind-Humbrecht Pinot Gris Zind-Humbrecht – Pinot Gris Alsace, France 2004


The “state of booquet”

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

After 6 months of work and just a few months from releasing our beta and iPhone app to the public,  here are a few high-level stats to give you a snapshot of where we are and how ambitious our concept is:

- booquet captures over 370,000 blogs, twitter accounts, message boards, and forums

- booquet has certified over 240,000 wines that are now live with posts and tweets associated on the site

- we have over 600,000 wines waiting to be approved (whether they have posts or no posts associated to them)

- there are nearly 67,000 wineries identified and live on the site

- each day, more than 4,000 blog posts, tweets, status updates, comments, replies about wine are added to the site

- over 230,000 wines carry an online purchase option

- we are nearly a third of the way done cataloging the online wine conversation

But wait, as noted in a previous post by Christine Kraft, we shall deliver an iPhone version of booquet.com into the palm of your hand very soon.  Even more exciting!

Stay tuned for further news shortly and watch for release of our mobile app.

booquet news: “private beta” launches; iPhone app development accelerates

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Heads down, hard at work on a product launch, it is easy to forget just how much progress has been made coaxing a tiny seed of an idea into a dynamic site. This post looks back at the key milestones we hit in December, and queues up what’s to come in Q1 2010:

December

beta tasters invited

We invited approximately 30 “beta tasters” out for a spin on the booquet site. We wanted to gather opinions and first impressions, so invited a list of close friends and Twitter colleagues to provide us feedback.

Overall, the comments we received were very helpful, with the majority of “room for improvement” comments landing in the simplify this, and clarify that departments. We’ll be working on implementing some of those suggestions in future releases and will pay special attention to highlighting the site’s less intuitive features, such as: Personalized wine feeds and Personalized top charts.

A theme in the feedback that makes us happy and is worth calling out here is: Most beta tasters really liked the look of the booquet site and how simple/uncluttered the pages are.  (Kudos to Jeff Rodanski and his team at Slice of Lime.)

Look for a second round of invites in February.

January and into Q1 2010

iPhone app dev work accelerates

This stuff is hot. Kyle Davis is leading us through the process. Right now we’re busy integrating  web services and finalizing our graphic theming strategy. With continued focus we should have a fully expressed version of the app for internal demo within 4-6 weeks. This app is a priority for us, so everyone on the team is focused on making it happen. If you knew what we had planned, you’d think, “I wish I had the booquet iPhone app now,” every time you shopped for wine. It’s going to be extremely useful.

Profiling wines by sentiment

Samuel Chevalier is working with us to add greater value to our wine databases and our recommendation engines. We kicked off an innovative project based on his work yesterday, and will drive toward completing Phase 1 of implementation prior to opening up the site to the public.

Certifying and improving the core wine data

Since so much of the booquet promise to help you “Find wine you love” depends on how well we deliver high-quality data in context, we are making a significant investment in scrubbing incoming feeds for incongruities, gaps, and typos.  Pascal Bouvier, our founder, and CJ Grimes, CTO are leading this heavy lift.

Thanks so much for your interest in booquet. We hope you’ll check back for additional news and notes monthly. Or, follow @booquet on Twitter.