The proposition is simple: Your friends and wine. Discover and choose wine by sharing your opinions with people you trust.
What’s immediately clear from this site, is that there is a commercial element to it, having dedicated pages for producers and for wine shops. Heartwarming to see a site that’s not purely built around Adsense
For me, the addition of wine shops is a really good thing (and something other sites are currently missing) as it provides me with a clear call to action, if it works:
So, I’ve read the review, I like the wine, so where can I buy it?
Adding a wine
Adding wine is easy at first but then becomes a little clunky. For example, when adding a Beaujolais Nouveau, there was a dropdown of what seemed to be an endless list of different Beaujolais appelations (caution: below is a VERY long image)
Rating a wine & adding notes
You can rate a wine, or add a note and rate it, along with adding tags. However, the rating bit being unnecessarily duplicated.
If I were to clean this up, I’d have one simple option, “Rate this wine“, which would allow you to give it a score as well as to optionally add notes and tags. We could then get rid of “Note, rate and add tags” which is a bit ambiguous.
Adding a wine shop
One small point, but a speed bump that slowed me down was when adding a wine shop, the site insisted on a web address for the shop.
Do all wine shops have websites? If so, am I expected to know it? Why not let me just add the physical address and let the website figure out where it is on a Google Map?
What’s a watchlist?
It’s not that clear what a watchlist actually is. Am I watching other people taste and choose wines? I’m not entirely sure.
While the idea is really good, i.e. keeping me in the loop as to what all my friends are drinking, it’s not adequately explained enough.
Don’t make me think!
Having clicked on “White wines”, under the wine tab, there are a few speed bumps in the way. Instead of seeing tags for whites, I’m seeing all of them.
It looks as if the site is asking me to pick again, even though I’ve specified I wanted to look at white.
One last small change
I really feel I’m nit-picking here, but the distinction between a red wine and a white wine is too easy to miss, the difference between a red or a yellow dot.
There are other icons, like a red versus a yellow bottle or glass, that could be used to achieve this effect in a more obvious way.
What else would I like to see on Adegga?
Wouldn’t it be cool if wine shops could upload their catalog by CSV and integrated into the wine search, so that any wine I look at, I could see if it’s available in my country (via my profile)? This is also a potential revenue generator for adegga, and a value-added service they could charge the shops for.
Overall verdict on adegga.com
Adegga is in private beta, i.e. by invite only. Just like a young wine, it needs to develop a little bit before it reaches its full potential.
However it’s clearly well made but I’d like to see the couple of things above sorted before it goes public.
Once these are fixed, I’d be happy to use it and, being social, recommend it to my wine-drinking friends.
Want to take adegga.com for a spin?
Leave a comment below and I’ll send you an invite.