My Wines Release: June 6 2011

From the ERP site:

I don’t plan to give up CT anytime soon.

PS… What is My Wines?

At last.

It is nicer to compete against something real instead of a shadow.

What a missed opportunity for the My Wines team - if they could have just moved this up a couple weeks, the ‘end of the world’ jokes would have been great

Are they actually charging for this new software or is it included in your subscription? This release has been delayed for what, 3 - 4 years??

D-Day. Awesome. I bet Gen. Squires will be hitting the beaches with the first wave.

The software is “free” as long as you are paying them $100/year for access to eRobertParker. One unanswered question (which I suspect they will answer on 6/6) is whether you can download your own data if you let your eRP subscription lapse. I presume they HAVE to allow this since CT has always allowed users to download their data. The software was originally announced on 9/1/2006 for “imminent” release before the end of 2006. So they are not quite 5 years late.

DISCLOSURE: In case it’s not obvious, I run CellarTracker, a direct competitor.

100 beta testers? They are kidding, right?

Screw Eric; this sounds awesome!

The source code was in the boxes with the HAG wines, hence the delay.

I’m here all week.

Shameless Eric-Promotion here:

There is NO F’N WAY that MyWines will be able to compete, and for one reason - Eric LeVine. Unless they magically find someone who lives, breathes, drinks, and sh*ts wine database code, they will have a grossly inferior product. Eric is the quintessential mega-dedicated geek, and he knows every in and out of his system, and he has that magical element of shock and awe when he thinks of one stupid little feature to add. From a software design standpoint, you can’t touch something like this. Having a committee put together a team to engineer an idea is FAR different from what CT has become, entirely because of who is behind it.

Now enough of this blathering on about freakin’ LeVine.

Thanks man.

I am not necessarily a modest person, but I should point out that a huge amount of the value in CT at this point comes as a direct consequence of the size and critical mass of the collector COMMUNITY using the site. At this point it’s not really about me, my code, the database etc. CellarTracker is a living organism. Yes, I am deeply and endlessly involved and plan to be for many years to come, but it’s not about me.

As a “walled garden” product, MyWines will simply never general much critical mass, and the community aspects of their product will always languish as a consequence. That said, after 5+ years, I have to assume it will be a high quality product.

You exhibit much more faith and grace than I would. I suspect it will bark like a dog and I wouldn’t be afraid to say so if I were you and I’m not . . . so I said it.

Agreed. There’s also the issue of dealing with users/customers - Eric’s always been incredibly responsive on here/eBob/the CT forum or by email for any sorts of issues or queries and a lot of the quality of CT comes from the fact that he’s willing to consider just about any user’s needs/interests and make things easier for them rather than it being his way or the highway. eRP Support is better at stonewalling than actually providing customer service. But let’s see if MyWines even shows up on June 6th at all…

That is the entire subsription community.
You have to give them props for 100% participation.

FWIW I already posted over there that I thought the release date was 5/21/2011.

I was in the middle of typing up a response that was very similar to this when I got a phone call (what is this with work getting in the way). I can’t ever imagine MyWines competing with CT. While the software end is the guts of the product, Eric’s passion and understanding of the term customer service have taken it from being a product to a part of one’s life.


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In spite of my enormous respect for Eric, I have to agree with him.

No really. Eric’s combination of business sense, SW development ability, and passion for wine are, I am sure, quite rare, but not unique. Of course, that does not mean they have such a person behind My Wines, but it is at least possible.

OTOH the model of a walled system means it can never do what CT does. Even CT seems to me to have a propensity for people to echo Parker scores, at least on wines that Parker likes. I expect My Wines to be much more extreme in this regard. It will be inherently closed in terms of information flow and diversity of opinion, one of the most appealing aspects of wine imo.

The problem with an open system is that they let riff-raff like me in there. And you. And so you end up with oceans of useless data. And that will remain a problem until Eric can write the code for a “filter out everyone who doesn’t know what the F they are talking about” tool.

Are they going to delete/block TN’s that disagree with Parker?