Sites we love: cork’d

Walking into your local liquor or wine store and blindly trying to choose a new bottle of wine can be a challenge. While some participate in tasting groups to learn more before they buy, others just close their eyes, grab a bottle and hope for the best (and yes, I am speaking from experience). Sometimes you get a winner, and other times you get a bottle of wine better suited for a white wine clam sauce than an enjoyable after work drink on a patio. What it really boils down to is that there is so much choice it’s hard to know what’s good. This is where cork’d comes in.

cork’d is a free site for wine enthusiasts that let’s you rate and recommend what you are drinking. Started over a year ago by a couple of wine loving designers, the site is easy to use, very well designed, and provides a great jumping off point to learn more about wine. The site now has over 20,000 users and was recently acquired by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.

If you love wine and you haven’t yet checked out cork’d, go set up your free account and get tasting. Here’s how it works:

Keep track of wines you’ve tried in your Wine Jounal. You can rate, review and tag wines, and these “tasting notes” end up attatched as comments to each wine in our database. You can also build a Shopping List of wines you’d like to buy (think of this like you would a Netflix queue), and a Wine Cellar for wines that you own. Keeping track of what your friends are tasting is as easy as adding them as a Drinking Buddy. You can also recommend wines to your buddies after you’ve rated and reviewed a bottle.

Whether or not you’re a wine fanatic, a heavy participant or a lurker, you will find something of interest on this site. If nothing else, one look at Cork’d before you hit the wine store, and you’ll never have to choose blindly again.