Twitter’s wine foray has deep roots — check out Able Grape
October 16th, 2009
Twitter’s wine foray has deep roots — check out Able Grape
Twitter’s announcement that it’s launching a charitable side project and wine label to benefit child literacy in the developing world underscores the company’s deep appreciation for wine. And by that, we mean deep.
From what we hear, Twitter employees are avid wine connoisseurs that are well-versed in vintages and varietals at company parties. In fact, the company’s director of search Doug Cook launched a wine search engine called Able Grape last year as a “labor of love” and writes occasionally for Wine Business Magazine. He wins extra nerd points for leading a search engine optimization talk at a wine bloggers conference this year.
What’s Able Grape? It’s a search engine dedicated to teaching you about wine. It’s not quite Google – no spartan interface for search results. It’s more for research and learning. You can dig deeper by year, region, grape, producer, tasting notes and on and on. It catalogues 41,000 web sites and 21 million pages. Try looking up Bordeaux vintage reports from 2005, producers of the Domprobst vineyard in Graach, or anything about a 1964 Badia a Coltibuono. (Yes, it gets that specific. Plus it should give you an idea of how narrow and powerful Twitter search could get as the amount of data they collect grows.) So the company’s jaunt into wine-making isn’t all that surprising.
But it’s their first big non-profit campaign. They’re starting Fledgling Wine, which will sell Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and donate $5 from every bottle to San Francisco non-profit Room to Read. The organization is the brainchild of former Microsoft executive John Wood and establishes libraries and promotes literacy in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia and India. To produce the line, Twitter’s working with DIY winery Crushpad, which is less than a ten minute drive away from Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
The startup’s wine is $20 a bottle, and it might be pretty decent considering the company culture’s fussiness over quality drink.
Posted in Venture Beat | 
Tags: Badia A Coltibuono, Brainchild, Child Literacy, Company Parties, Crushpad, Deep Roots, Doug Cook, Google, Jaunt, John Wood, Microsoft Executive, search engine optimization, Twitter, Varietals, Vintage Reports, Vintages, Wine Business, Wine Connoisseurs, Wine Label, Wine Search Engine