Breaking: Cork’d is Being Acquired by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV

corkd Cork’d, the social wine notes sharing site, is being acquired by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library and Erik Kastner for an undisclosed amount. Cork’d is widely recognized in the web development community as the work of Dan and Dan.

Dan Benjamin and Dan Cederholm that is. Benjamin was responsible for the programming end of Cork’d, and is the man behind Hivelogic. Cederholm is a creative designer of Simple Bits, and is widely known as a master of CSS. To see what the Dans have to say about the acquisition, click here and here.

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When Wine Library TV changed its look to the Cork’d interface last Friday, it was a sign of the emerging deal between the two. Additionally, Cork’d began the transition by switching to the 100 point rating system, starting a “cork board” to facilitate discussion between members and opened up an easy way to import wines for cellartracker.

According to Cederholm, Cork’d has 20,000 members. This provides a good base for Wine Library TV to begin integrating their live tastings into the Cork’s platform. Because Cork’s is built in Rails, and Erik Kastner is a Rails expert, there is an excellent opportunity for Cork’d to become more than a social “wine notes” sharing website.

Gary V. brings an energy and passion for wine that will surely grow Cork’d into the next big thing in the wine industry. Cork’d was widely thought of as a site for web developers who like wine. But Gary brings the wine knowledge to bridge the gap into mainstream wine lovers.

It will be interesting to see what develops over next few months. Needless to say, the team at Calwineries is very interested and excited to see the new developments.

Disclaimer: The Calwineries team are certified Vayniacs and are evangelists for Wine Library TV.

Written by: Ryan Fujiu on Tuesday, May 15 2007

Recent Discussion – Breaking: Cork’d is Being Acquired by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV

ryan said:

Thanks for writing in you guys. What you are bringing up is the main point of contention for a community built around tasting notes. We were thinking about making a separate section for tasting notes for our wines. But it didn't make sense to us, and would rather allow people to make comments and not be restricted to writing tasting notes. And by doing favorites instead of a rating system (i.e., 100 point, 5 star etc) we took pressure off people who dont know the difference between a 90 and a 91. this was we could rank the wines on popularity and show what people liked and what they didnt.

Thanks for writing in you guys. What you are bringing up is the main point of contention for a community built around tasting notes. We were thinking about making a separate section for tasting notes for our wines. But it didn't make sense to us, and would rather allow people to make comments and not be restricted to writing tasting notes. And by doing favorites instead of a rating system (i.e., 100 point, 5 star etc) we took pressure off people who dont know the difference between a 90 and a 91. this was we could rank the wines on popularity and show what people liked and what they didnt.

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Posted 1036 days ago.
4bottles said:

Moviestar, I agree, corkd doesn't have enough credibility as it stands. however, i think gary is very respectable and trustworthy. i saw a vcast where he bashed a wine from a winery that was a friend of the family, and had been doing business with wine library for like 20 years. With that said, i think gary can bring a certain degree of credibility to corkd, thus taking the wine recommendations to the next level. if there was some way to integrate some objective information in there, it would round out the reviews, thus making them useful.

Moviestar, I agree, corkd doesn't have enough credibility as it stands. however, i think gary is very respectable and trustworthy. i saw a vcast where he bashed a wine from a winery that was a friend of the family, and had been doing business with wine library for like 20 years. With that said, i think gary can bring a certain degree of credibility to corkd, thus taking the wine recommendations to the next level. if there was some way to integrate some objective information in there, it would round out the reviews, thus making them useful.

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Posted 1036 days ago.
moviestar said:

I like cork'd okay. to me, they dont give enough information to make the wine recs valuable. I like getting recs from people who have a similar palate to me and is not influenced by advertisers and what not.

I like cork'd okay. to me, they dont give enough information to make the wine recs valuable. I like getting recs from people who have a similar palate to me and is not influenced by advertisers and what not.

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Posted 1036 days ago.
diamondgirl said:

What an interesting conversation you guys are having. Ryan, I think Joel is right, the cork'd user base is probably not that valuable. I'm also a cork'd member, and think its going to be good that someone who actually knows about wine is running it. Hopefully they can make it even better.

What an interesting conversation you guys are having. Ryan, I think Joel is right, the cork'd user base is probably not that valuable. I'm also a cork'd member, and think its going to be good that someone who actually knows about wine is running it. Hopefully they can make it even better.

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Posted 1036 days ago.
joelvincent said:

They're chatting about that on the WLTV BBS already. Check it out... http://tv.winelibrary.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5593&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=20

They're chatting about that on the WLTV BBS already. Check it out... http://tv.winelibrary.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5593&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=20

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Posted 1036 days ago.