Able Grape: One stop information shopping

This post comes from someone I hope to meet someday, a woman named Deb Harkness who lives out on the West Coast and dispenses as much info and advice on wine as anyone I've been able to find on the Web. Her Good Wine Under $20 blog is one of the few I've linked onto my blog, and it features enough links to a variety of wine and food sites to fill the biggest barrel in Tuscany. Sigh. Mine's not one of them, but I'll kow I've made it when I do.

She filed this post last Thursday:

Posted: 07 Aug 2008 07:30 AM CDT

The web is a big place. No matter how good you are at concocting perfect search strings on Google or whatever search engine you're using, when it comes to finding information on wine it can be damn hard to locate something useful. Enter Able Grape. They say they're in Beta, but they look like they're all set to become the Alpha Wine Information Search Engine. With over 13 million pages of online wine information indexed and searchable, this is like a one-stop online reference library. And because it's dedicated to wine, just a word or two in the search box will usually yield results -- the kind of results you're looking for, not the stuff you have no interest in when you type in Cabernet Sauvignon (as in, Cabernet Sauvignon bath products).What kind of information is gathered on Able Grape? Reference works, producer Web sites, blogs, scientific articles, event information, tasting notes are all included in the database, and then they're just a click away.Check out the site next time you have a wine question, like what does Pineau d'Aunis taste like, or what kind of soil Pinot Noir likes. It's probably faster than driving to your local library to try to find the answer on Able Grape.