Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers and explinations to common questions about Project Vino. If you still have a question, plese email hugo@projectvino.com.au and we'll get back to you asap.
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What is the point of Project Vino?
Project Vino is a website dedicated to enhanceing your Australian and New Zealand wine experiences - both online and offline. Wine is for sharing and the internet helps do just that. We hope you'll find value in th tools we've developed and fun in the Project Vino community.
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How much does membership of Project Vino cost?
Project Vino is, and always will be, free to use.
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Help! I've Never Rated a Wine Before!
If you're a little unsure how to rate or review a wine, or don't feel qualified, check out our "How to" page on rating wines here. You can also download our handy Wine Tasting Template from here and create your own wine journal. It's good for getting your thoughts from the restauratant to the computer. And don't forget, if you can taste and smell, you're more than qualified to rate a wine.
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Rating and Reviewing Wines on Project Vino
Project Vino allows you to record your opinion on wines you drink in a number of ways. Most simply, you can give the wine a score out of 5 for both its aroma and its taste. This will then be averaged into a total score for that wine. At the same time you can assign tags to the wine that came to mind when you drank it. This is a really easy way to add more meaning to the review with little fuss. See the "tags" subheading below for more info on tags. If you're more literarily inclined you can also expand on your review by writing as mush as you like in the "review" text box.
Everyone's ratings are collated into a single score for each vintage listed on Projecr Vino. Although this score is a good indication of how good a wine may be, there are many pallettes out there and it's best to find peope with similar tastes and see what wines they rate highly. This is made easy on Project Vino though because once you find someone with a similar pallette, you can addd them as a friend and get automatic updates when ever they review a wine on the site. Good isn't it.
Star Ratings
The 5 star system is a quick and easy way to record your thoughts on a wine. Simply rate the wine's aroma (smell) and taste each out 5 stars. Each star rating equates to the following;
- 1 star: "Poor" (<84/100)
- 2 stars: "Average" (85-87/100)
- 3 stars: "Good" (88-90/100)
- 4 stars: "Excellent (91-93/100)
- 5 stars: "Outstanding (94+/100)
Tags
Tags are single words that come to mind when smelling or tasting the wine. They can be to do with any part of the experience including aromas, tastes, structure, mouth feel and even faults. They make things easy and mean you don't have to worry about trying to be Earnest Hemmingway just to review a wine.
Full Reviews
If you do want to expand on your star ratings though, please do using the text inout box. This is also a good place to talk about where you tasted the wine or how the date went.
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Managing your Wine Cellar on Project Vino
You can easily keep track of all your wines using our cellar management tool - even those long forgotten reds in the back shed. To add a wine to your Cellar page in My Vino, simply find the vintage page of the wine in question using the browse or search features and click the "add to cellar" button. That wine (more specifically, that vintage of the wine) will then show up in your Cellar page. From there your can update the quantity value to match how ever many your own of that vintage. Now, whenever you drink one, simply go to your Cellar page and clcik the "drank one" button. The quantity number will drop by one showing that you have drunk one and you will be taken to the review page to leave your thoughts. It's that simple.
As a little side note, check out this great article written by Aussie wine maker Peter Svans about the Top 10 Myths of Cellaring Wine.
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Wishlist
Your wishlist is a place to add wines that you would like to try in the future. It's also a pretty handy place to point peolpe when they ask what you'd like for your birthday. It works in the same way as the Cellar tool - simply find the vintage page of any wine in Project Vino and click the "add to my wishlist" button.
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News Feeds n Project Vino
Your first impression of this tool might be "so what?" but it is actually really powerful and quite handy. News feeds on Project Vino allow you to track things that interest you;
- Follow events in cities and regions around Australia and New Zealand,
- Use them to see what your friends are drinking,
- Get notified of reviews of wines from your favourite wineries or regions, and
- Have your very own, personalized wine critic by following people with a similar pallatte to your own. Simply add them as a friend and you'll get updates in you news area.
When you create a personal profile (or membership) you are automatically subscribed to upcoming events in your town and the wine regions in your state to kick things off. You can change these at any time in the Subscription Settings page here.
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Local Events on Project Vino
Use the events calendar to see what's happening in your neck of the woods. These could be wine tastings or shows in your town or special events and festivals in your nearest wine region.
If you're having a wine event, please add it to the calendar via this page here.
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I Own a Winery, Can I Get Involved?
Yes, please do. You can ensure all the data on the site about your winery is correct and upload details of your wines and vintages not yet listed. Email hugo@projectvino.com.au for assistance.
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Who's Behind Project Vino?
| Hugo Sharp with Dave Powell of Torbreck |
Hugo Sharp founded Project Vino. He also founded, and still hosts, Australia's first wine focused podcast, The Oz Wine Show. Hugo's passion for wine started as a teenager at family events where wine was always present. Hugo is extremely passionate about wine and new media technologies and their intersection and is always happy to chat about them.
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How Did Project Vino Come About?
The start of Project Vino can be found in mid 2005. At this time, I (Hugo) was getting into a lot of podcasts about all manner of topics. One of those happened to be wine. Podcasts such as Grape Radio and Winecast are great, free resources to learn about wine online but they all had one big problem; I was in Australia and they were not. This effectively meant that all the great wines they were talking about, I had no way of trying. Not to be put off, I decided to start Australia's first wine podcast, The Oz Wine Show. Since then myself and my co-host Mick Barrett have interviewed some great Australian (and international) wine people and had a ball doing it.
For over two years now i've been really passionate about wine and all the fantastic ways the internet can help us enhance our experiences of it. In late 2006, all my thoughts and ideas on the subject started to coalesce into the form of a single site and I started jotting down ideas. By June of 2007, i had written and re-written all these ideas enough and the only thing left to do was get into the game and engage some web developers.
The great team at Toowards in Sydney and I worked until December and have now laid the foundations for Project Vino. The site you see at the moment is the first incarnation and will be built up with a number of really great features in the first few months of 2008. I can't say too much just yet though. Project Vino is first and foremost a community and we therefore welcome any suggestion you might have to better the site or for a new and wonderful feature to enhance your wine experiences. Email me directly via hugo@projectvino.com.au .
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