Wine geeks can breathe a sigh of relief: there’s a new place for venting your bad experiences with that glass of Chardonnay you simply can’t stand. cork’d just launched recently, and allows wine fans to review and keep track of their favorite wines. I don’t know of any other collaborative wines review site, so cork’d has the space, for the moment.

Everything you expect from a reviews site is available at cork’d. You can (of course) leave reviews for a particular wine, keep a “cellar” list of wines you own, make shopping lists, and recommend wines. And, just like any good social reviews site, you can keep track of what your friends are drinking as well. Most everything has an associated feed, so you can keep up to date on anything from a particular user’s reviews to reviews made on a particular wine.

I could see cork’d being useful for wine aficianados who want to expand their horizons. But, another market segment that might be interested are the winemakers themselves–a winemaker could simply subscribe to their wine feed and find out what their customers think. This is similar to what I hope BuzzShout can be to early startups that want to know how their product is doing.

During the review process, you can tag wines and rate them on a five point scale. Afterwards, you can always go back and edit your reviews. I did see some bugs in their system involving lost text in my reviews, but I’m sure those kinks will be sorted out quickly.

The site itself is well designed. The color motif is very “winey”, with the burgundy red on top and the tannish color in the body. Tundro, the people behind cork’d, has done a great job with the design with smart wine graphics and a pleasing interface. Judging by the urls and interface, I would guess the site is built on RoR.

In terms of the wine selection, cork’d seems to be crawling the web for wines, and grabbing the product information when available. If you don’t see your favorite wine on the list, there is also an option to add a new bottle to the system. Depending on the intensity of their focus on aggregation, cork’d could turn out to be a valuable place for wine lovers to peruse a vast list of wines. Another valuable tool is browsing their selection by tasting tag, which allows you to peruse, say, fruity wines, or melony wines.

Their business model is currently based on sponsorship. A couple discreet ads are placed on the sidebar navigation. Fittingly enough, wine.com is an early sponsor on the site.

Overall, cork’d has great execution, and possibly a head start on any competitors. Tell all your wine friends to sign up and share the tasty knowledge.

Update: TastyDrop is also in this space, but their interface is more like digg-for-wine, which is missing tags and feeds. Despite this, they do seem to have a larger user base at the moment, so cork’d may need to play some catch-up.

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