Wine-Searcher is a
web search engine
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
enabling users to locate the price and availability of a given wine, whiskey, spirit or beer globally, and be directed to a business selling the alcoholic beverage. There are also both Wine-Searcher and WhiskeySearcher mobile apps for iOS and Android.
The site is massive in scope, growing and adding listings, features and content since its debut in the late 1990s. Reflecting this ongoing development, Wine-Searcher won the Casa Ferreirinha Innovation Award at the 2022 Golden Vines Awards (see Awards section below).
As of October 2022, Wine-Searcher had approximately 15 million wine, beer and spirit listings from around 30,000 active stores and businesses, across 126 countries in 83 currencies. The full data set for all products involves billions of data points.
The website and its associated apps attract 4 to 8 million active users each month; depending on seasonality, hundreds of millions of searches are made each year around the world. In October 2021, the site referred users to merchants for products with a basket value of over US$1 billion. These huge volumes of high-quality data transactions have established Wine-Searcher as the pre-eminent global source of wines, spirits and beer pricing and availability.
Income is derived from advertising solutions, paid access to professional content, and providing access to market data and insight.
[Patrick Comiskey]
Wine-searcher.com levels the wine industry playing field
''Latimes.com'', 12 August 2010
Additional Features
Hundreds of thousands of scores and tasting notes from acclaimed critics are offered on the site. Wine-Searcher also contains a comprehensive encyclopedia, which covers thousands of grape varieties, product categories, producer profiles, vintage reports and wine regions.
It also provides authoritative news pieces and magazine articles. These are often widely shared, quoted and reproduced elsewhere.
The Wine-Searcher and WhiskySearcher apps also offer a label-recognition tool. Users can take a photo of a label to find out more about prices and availability, including nearby stores to current location.
On the website and apps, users can save the details of products they have tried or purchased, or create a wish list. They can give products ratings (1 to 5 stars) and upload reviews.
Wine-Searcher Market Data
Every day Wine-Searcher collects and stores online wine lists from a global range of wine retailers, producers and auction houses. This is done by bespoke software "spiders", which access websites and data feeds or utilize custom integrations with the target source. Manual and automated operations run daily to ensure accurate content, removing incorrect or out-of-date lists.
The long-term storage of data allows Wine-Searcher to offer detailed reports and market analysis including current and historical trends. This data can be packed on a global or regional scale for multinationals and other clients with a broader sales focus. It can also be pinned down to a single product, sold by a single merchant.
History
The company was founded in 1998 by Martin Brown, a former
e-commerce
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...
manager for London wine merchant
Berry Bros & Rudd.
In six months, Martin Brown coded the first version of the website, launching it in 1999. In 2006, the operation was shifted from London to Auckland, in Brown's native
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
. It has been self-funding throughout its history.
In April 2018, Martin Brown stepped down as CEO of Wine-Searcher, succeeded by Julian Perry. In 2019, Wine-Searcher opened a UK office in London to strengthen its handle on the European and the US markets.
The company now has a staff of around 80 employees, including
software developers
A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software.
A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...
, designers, database administrators, data analysts, product managers, customer relationship managers, wine specialists and content writers.
Awards
In October 2022, at the Golden Vines Awards (the "Oscars of the wine industry"), Wine-Searcher won the Casa Ferreirinha Innovation Award. The Golden Vines Awards were voted for by more than 900 wine trade professionals from 104 countries, who completed detailed surveys for the 2022 Gérard Basset Global Fine Wine Report.
References
{{portal bar, Drink, Wine
Wine companies
Comparison shopping websites
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