Wine.com Releases API. Verdict: Pretty Cool
One issue that Wine 2.0 is struggling with is normalization of wine names. Is that a 2006 Arlaud Pere & Fils – Gevrey-Chambertin Aux Combottes 1er Cru (Vieilles Vignes) you’re drinking, or is it simply a 2006 Arlaud – Gevrey-Chambertin? Are they the same wine? What’s with all these words on the label? What if we’re posting on the same wine, but since the names don’t match up, the Google overlords meet our posts with scorn and indifference. The poor bloggers don’t have a chance.
Adegga.com made a push to correct this madness with AVIN, something that was well intentioned but it too much of a hassle to get widely accepted. Without Dashboard widgets and Wordpress plugins, we bloggers are just too lazy to adopt a standard. If it isn’t involved in some Tweetup, it gets ignored by Wino Nation.
Enter Wine.com. Last month, Wine.com released an API out into the wild. Having been founded in Web 1.0 dot-bomb era, Wine.com is the most venerable of all online wine retailers. The brand has failed and changed hands several times since inception as new management constantly struggled to find profits in shipping cheap wine to consumers.
Now, though, their API may solve the problem of “Which Wine Is It Anyway?” Given an authoritative reference on lengthy wine names, the people can finally be clear on what we’re talking about. There’s a lot of other great stuff in there too. Juicy API calls like
/catalog/?search=mondavi+cab&size=5&offset=10&apikey=key
Will give you a rundown on Mondavi Cabernet. They built in powerful filtering too, giving you the ability to do stuff like
filter=categories(7155+124)+rating(85|100)
Pretty cool. I’m looking forward to what sorts of applications can come out of this. Price matching, automatic scraping of wine names, Greasemonkey plugin to automatically retrieve review scores for wines displayed on a page…
API docs
Coverage on TechCrunch
October 17th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Hi Gary,
the AVIN is about to become an independent project from Adegga.com and have its own API.
The website, avin.cc , is going to be relaunched with a much more useful and rich interface for wine names and a tool for winebloggers!
More news soon about this soon.
Having said that I think Wine.com API is a very welcome step in letting wine information be free.
André
October 23rd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Andre,
That’s great to hear. The AVIN certainly has promise. I’ll be looking forward to the new site.
Gary