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