The (amazing) future of beer and wine search.

Traditional wine search engines are usually keyword based, so you might enter ‘French wine,’ ‘Chardonnay,’ or ‘wine with salmon’ into a search box.  This doesn’t have to be done on Google or Bing, because there are plenty of specialized wine search engines such as Snooth, Vinquire, or AbleGrape. These sites will let you take your search results and then filter them by cost, region, or rating. If you think about it though, this is not the optimal way to search for something as unique as wine.

Imagine that you are at a wine tasting. What’s the goal? To help you find a wine that you will enjoy. In order to do that, they first hide the cost, region, and rating, the very three factors that other search engines rely upon! The reason they do this is to isolate your experience to the sensory elements alone, the taste / finish and aroma / bouquet of the wine in the glass that you’re holding. So wouldn’t it be great if you could search for wine that way, by taste and aroma, on your PC!?

Well you can, with the new German wine search engine Aromicon. Aromicon allows you to filter by factors such as ‘fruity,’ ‘chocolate,’ or ‘licorice.’ The inventors call this a virtual wine tasting. I call it a home run, searching a product that you smell and taste by smell and taste! Coming soon should be an English version, but Google will translate the current version for you.

Now, what about beer? The clever beer search engine CraftBeer takes a similar approach. They use graphics to illustrate sensory elements:

The Beer Color, the range is shown by graduated color in glasses.

Hops, the size of the green dot indicates the intensity of hop bitterness and/or aroma.

The Body, the size of the gray dot indicates fullness and/or sweetness.

And a flavor-filled description.

Flemish Brown and Red
Fully tart or sweet-and-sour, often with vinegary aromas on top of caramelly, burnt sugar flavors and profound fruitiness. Classic ruby-colored ales aged up to two years in oak then blended with unaged beer.

Finally, the right glass to use! A Large Tulip Glass. Enjoy the movie!

CraftBeer.com – The Right Glass for Your Craft Beer from Brewers Association on Vimeo.