Along with his Wine Library TV website, Cork’d is one of Gary Vaynerchuk’s most popular web properties.

Like the other wine websites I’ve reviewed, this site is all about adding and sharing wine.

There are three main aspects to the site:

1. Your wine journal: where you save wines you’ve tried with their tasting notes
2. Your wine cellar: wines you currently have stored
3. Your shopping list: wines you’d like to buy

On top of this is a social networking layer, allowing you to share your journal, cellar and shopping list as well as see those of others.

Adding a wine

Adding a wine (to your journal, cellar or shopping list) is a really simple process

Step 1: add the details (for journal, cellar & shopping list)

Step 2: Add your opinion on the wine (for your journal)

When adding a wine, you’re given the option of scoring the wine using the 100-point scale (which I’ve seen referred to elsewhere as Parker Points, after Robert Parker’s scoring system). It’s not as straightforward as 0-100, but not to worry, help is at hand on corkd.com explaining how 100 point wine scale works.

Once you’ve added a wine, it features throughout the site, with details available for all to view.

Included with a wine’s details are tasting tags which can be searched or browsed for. For example, I can see all wines members have labelled “leather” or “gooseberry”, rather than just searching using more traditional means.

However, if you’re still looking for a particular wine using more traditional search criteria, there’s a decent search facility and good options to browse by colour, grape variety, region and year.

The social side of corkd.com

Average scores

Wines reviewed by more than one cork’d member are averaged, so instead of relying on the revered wine writer, you have a wisdom of crowds effect. While most wines have only been reviewed by 2-3 members, I expect this to improve over time.

Recommendations

As I touched on above, when I add a wine, others can see it and search for it. Another aspect is wine recommendations. I can recommend wine to my drinking buddies and have wine recommended to me.

RSS feeds

In addition to the simplicity of adding and sharing wine, there are other options, notably RSS feeds - what is RSS? (new window). I can subscribe to other people’s journals, cellar, shopping list and recommendations, cellars, etc.

Overall verdict

Of the sites reviewed thus far, cork’d is easily the best (but there’s still one to go). The site’s promise, “the simple way to review and share wine” is just that. Sheer simplicity. To quote Apple’s Steve Jobs, “it just works” and it’s hardly surprising due to the pedigree of the site’s original designer, Dan Cederholm.

In wine points terms, I’d score this site between 96 and 98 points.

Why drop points?

Although Gary has to run his wine business, based in the US for his US customers, due to Gary’s hard work and endless enthusiasm, corkd.com has a worldwide appeal.

To that end, I’d like to see a small change when adding or viewing a wine: I’d like to see the option for members to choose their own currency, in my case, the euro.

What do you think?

Have you tried corkd.com yet? If not, give it a shot and raise a glass.