Wine-Searcher

Wine-Searcher

Type	Web Search Engine
Industry	Internet
Founded	1998
Founder	Martin Brown
Headquarters	Auckland, New Zealand
Key people	Julian Perry (CEO)
Products	Wine Information
Website	www.wine-searcher.com

Wine-Searcher is a web search engine enabling users to locate the price and availability of a given wine, whiskey, spirit or beer globally, and be directed to a business selling the alcoholic beverage. There are also both Wine-Searcher and WhiskeySearcher mobile apps for iOS and Android.^[1]

As of March 2021, Wine-Searcher had approximately 13 million wine, beer and spirit listings from around 24,500 active stores and businesses, across at least 130 countries. The full data set for all products involves billions of data points.

The website and its associated apps attract 4 to 8 million active users each month; depending on seasonality, hundreds of millions of searches are made each year around the world. In October 2021 the site referred users to merchants for products with a basket value of over US$1 billion. These huge volumes of high-quality data transactions have established Wine-Searcher as the pre-eminent global source of wines, spirits and beer pricing and availabilty.

Income is derived from advertising solutions, paid access to professional content, and providing access to market data and insight.^[2]

Additional Features[]

Hundreds of thousands of scores and tasting notes from acclaimed critics are offered on the site. Wine-Searcher also contains a comprehensive encyclopedia, which covers thousands of grape varieties, product categories, producer profiles and wine regions.^[3]

It also provides authoritative news pieces and magazine articles. These are often widely shared, quoted and repoduced elsewhere.

The Wine-Searcher and WhiskySearcher apps also offer a label-recognition tool. Users can take a photo of a label to find out more about prices and availability, including nearby stores to current location.

On the website and apps users can save the details of products they have tried or purchased, or create a wish list. They can give products ratings (1 to 5 stars) and upload reviews.

Wine-Searcher Market Data[]

Every day Wine-Searcher collects and stores online wine lists from a global range of wine retailers, producers and auction houses. This is done by bespoke software "spiders", which access websites and data feeds or utilize custom integrations with the target source. Manual and automated operations run daily to ensure accurate content, removing incorrect or out-of-date lists.

The long-term storage of data allows Wine-Searcher to offer detailed reports and market analysis including current and historical trends. This data can be packed on a global or regional scale for multinationals and other clients with a broader sales focus. It can also be pinned down to a single product, sold by a single merchant.

History[]

The company was founded in 1998 by Martin Brown, a former e-commerce manager for London wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd.^[2] In six months, Martin Brown coded and launched the first version of the website.^[4] In 2006, the operation was shifted from London to Auckland, in Brown's native New Zealand. It has been self-funding throughout its history.

In April 2018, Martin Brown stepped down as CEO of Wine Searcher, succeded by Julian Perry.^[5][6] In 2019, Wine Searcher opened a UK office in London to strengthen its handle on the European and the US markets.^[7]

The company now has a staff of around 80 employees, including software developers, designers, database administrators, data analysts, product managers, customer relationship managers, wine specialists and content writers.

References[]