WineMaps

Well there have been a couple of personal experiences that led up to my vision of WineMaps, primarily the difficulties I experienced trying to find wineries and wine. I grew up in Mendocino County, CA where many fine wines are produced. Wine is part of the culture and helps power the local economy. Since moving to San Francisco, I have realized how difficult it is to find the wines I like that are produced Mendocino. The same problem exists elsewhere. In San Diego, for instance, it is very difficult to find locally-produced wines from Temecula valley and Ramona.

When travelling in Greece on my honeymoon, I wanted to visit a local winery at the spur of the moment. I had difficulty in locating and choosing them. With some effort, I was able to find my way to an amazing winery where I learned about wine tasting and production practices. After that, I decided to make wine part of my career. I tried selling it online — but I quickly discovered that the challenges of an overcrowded, highly-competitive, regulated industry weren’t for me.

With these experiences under my belt, I created WineMaps to help boutique wineries get discovered by wine lovers outside the larger (more obvious) wine regions. Wine makers are good at what they do — making great wine. But, their not good at making people aware of their offerings nor are they masters of information technology. That’s where we come in. WineMaps helps wine-makers by providing them a free, branded web page designed to help them be discovered by people looking to learn more about wine and wineries. If we both do our respective jobs well, we’ll attract customers to local wineries by leveraging web and mobile technologies, location-awareness and social feedback from others who have had positive experiences at wineries that might not be easy to discover otherwise.

What it does

How I built it

Challenges I ran into

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

What I learned

What's next for WineMaps

Built With

• drupal