

Show HN: GoodGrapes – Discover Wines You'll Love - erichmenge
https://goodgrap.es/

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andrewcross
Some quick feedback. I'll be blunt, but don't take it the wrong way:

1) Show a nice big picture of grapes or wine or both on your home screen. This
alone will boost the appearance tenfold.

2) Way too much explaining how it works. I don't really care if it's social or
there's thumbs. Just get me wishing I had a glass of wine now.

3) Don't make me sign up to experience the value. The best call to action I
can think of is to have me put in a wine I like and you show me a whole bunch
of wines you think I would also like. No need to signup for that.

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erichmenge
Thanks for the feedback! All three are good points. With respect to #2, what
do you think about the "top x" wines for the landing page?

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erichmenge
This is a new (just for fun) side project of mine. New features are in the
pipeline, but I want to get some people using it now while it is young so that
I can get some good feedback on where to go in the future. It should be pretty
stable and (hopefully) free of critical bugs.

Let me know what things you’d like to see added to make it more useful. Either
in the comments, or preferably on <https://getsatisfaction.com/goodgrapes> so
I have a list of things to do :)

The idea is that you recommend wine, and then based on your tastes wines will
be recommended to you. It is also a great way to keep track of wine you’ve
tried and enjoyed.

In a way I’m scratching my own itch. I enjoy wine a great deal but know little
about it and find the choices overwhelming. Getting recommendations seems like
a great place to start exploring.

Thanks!

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languagehacker
The wine.com API does a lot of work for you, here. I don't really see what
you're accomplishing by adding a social layer on top of it.

If the killer feature is the recommendation engine social or otherwise, I
don't think that you're selling it well enough. I also don't think that you
have a good enough feature set for a decent learning model to consistently
offer up good wines.

I once attempted to play around with this kind of domain space in the past. I
was really disappointed at how hard it was to get the actual descriptions and
star ratings of the wines I was looking at. I think the descriptions would
actually be what would be useful for discovering new, awesome wines. For
example, "You consistently like wines that were described in terms like honey
or berry, so we suggested this Chenin Blanc to you," or, "This 2002 Cabernet
Franc was suggested because you consistently favorite aged reds that are
described with terms like 'tobacco' and 'leather'." If you have that, then
you've created an AI wine sommelier. Start pairing things with food, and you
have an app that might go places. But the data you need to make that happen is
really hard to come by.

Wine is also a messy topic because of the ridiculous amount of local
producers, which means that in places where people actually enjoy wine,
there's a good chance they're drinking something that isn't available on the
API, at all. In fact, if you're a wine connoisseur, odds are you're trying to
find progressively more obscure wines in the first place. In other words, why
would I, as your target audience, want recommendations from anything
unexhaustive?

This project shows a lot of skill integrating with APIs, though, and the
design isn't bad. But it seems like more of a weekend hack project than a
viable service. Still, from someone who once used a beer API to teach people
about search engines, well done.

~~~
erichmenge
Fair points. It is a bit of a weekend project, and it is really just me
working on it in my spare time. Who knows, maybe it will grow into something
bigger/better. Or maybe not. Either way it is just something fun to play with.

Thanks for the feedback.

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wasd
I think andrewcross has some solid feedback. I once read that if you have to
give instructions to your website, you've already failed the UX. Even though I
could deduce everything that your website does without reading the
instructions, I did so anyway which took me away from getting to actual
product.

I wish your top 25 had price as a column. Otherwise, great job guys & good
luck. I forwarded this to one of my colleagues who is a huge wino and will add
his feedback.

~~~
erichmenge
Oh, and what do you think about the top wines being displayed as the root
page? What would you like to see on the landing page?

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wasd
Honestly, this is not my field of expertise by any means but one of the top 25
wines randomly selected with quotes, reviews and history with a simple way to
cycle through other wines or see the entire list. Maybe scrape amazon +
wikipedia?

~~~
erichmenge
Wikipedia is definitely on my list of things to do. That's a great idea for
the landing page.

Thanks!

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fdschoeneman
I think it's a great start. I'm working on a related project. But one thing
that may cause confusion is that at least in my mind, wines are related to
wineries or producers, and through a winery to one or more vineyards, rather
than directly to vineyards. Often a winery is also a vineyard, but at least
with cult wines there's a symbiotic supplier relationship, wherein, for
example, a winemaker will produce a wine made from grapes grown by a
particular vineyard, which is owned by someone else. The winemaker will then
"vineyard designate" the wine, to both the winery's and the vineyard's
benefit.

So the quick fix is that I think from looking at what you've built here, that
maybe you should have a big list of wines, and another big list of wineries,
rather than vineyards?

Hope this helps :)

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paupino_masano
Interesting site! I know next to nothing about wines so I think I may be using
this next time I go to pick one out.

I do have a suggestion however: avoid using so much purple. As you already
know, purple is a mixture of red and blue. The problem is that red and blue
are the opposite ends of the color spectrum - this makes it very difficult for
your eye to focus on this color - similar to trying to read red writing on a
blue background, or blue writing on a red background.

Anyway - just a thought as I struggle reading the purple font (it strains my
eyes ever so slightly).

~~~
erichmenge
Thanks for the input. I see your point with the red/blue. I'll play with some
other colors this weekend. (Visual design isn't my strong suit).

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JC001
It would be great if there were ways to sort the results when you look in the
big list of wines, such as by price, year, name, vineyard. Also, when there is
more than one page of results, having the pages separated by something related
to the sorting criteria is a lot more intuitive in order to browse through to
find what one is looking for. For example, sorting by vineyard could do A-C,
D-E, F-H or A, B, C. Either are lot easier to understand than page 1, page 2,
page 3.

~~~
andrewcooke
also, don't show multiple years. display a particular wine (all years) and
then let year selection happen on the wine's page. otherwise you can get a
search result with the same wine repeated again and again for many years,
which is frustrating if it's not the one you are looking for.

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tyrelb
As an avid wine drinker, who has been around the world and tried wines from
every country...

Get recommendations, try a bottle, and try something new all the time. It's to
be an experience, it's not just a beverage.

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hiroprot
What do you use to do the recommendations? Apache Mahout?

~~~
erichmenge
<https://github.com/davidcelis/recommendable>

