About two years ago, wine impresario Gary Vaynerchuk bought the wine-review site Corkd, but then he let it languish. He was busy with Wine Library TV, and branching out with speaking gigs, his own site, a book deal (Crush It!), another online TV show, and spending way too much time on Twitter. Corkd was pretty much ignored, and was even badly hacked last January. But Vaynerchuk promised that he would relaunch it better than ever.

And now he has. First, Vaynerchuk hired a CEO for Corkd, Lindsay Ronga. And on Tuesday night the site relaunched quietly with a much more social design. You can now sign in with your Facebook ID through Facebook Connect. And any review or rating can be sent out to your Facebook stream or to Twitter, with a link back to Corkd.

The home page itself is now an activity stream filled with reviews and comments of other Corkd members you follow. Just like before, you can rate and review wines, but now you can also become a fan of a wine, winery, or grape varietal. And those messages from wineries that you are a fan of also appear in your activity stream. “It becomes like a Facebook for wineries,” says Ronga.

In fact, that is Corkd’s new business model. It charges wineries $999 a year for verified accounts that let them link easily to all their wines and private message their fans on Corkd. Right now, if you go to a winery page that has not yet been verified, its wines are not linked to that page. Corkd is launching with 15 wineries, including Rutherford Hill Winery and Sojourn Cellars. Verified wineries also get featured on the home page.

There are about 350,000 wineries worldwide, so this could turn out to be a decent business if Corkd can convince even just a small fraction of them that it is worth signing up for a verified account. And that all depends on whether Corkd can recapture the attention of wine lovers online.

Trying to become the social site for wine lovers is a good strategy. The idea behind Corkd is that you get a Yelp-like consensus review score for any given wine. If you like someone’s reviews, you can follow them. And if you agree or disagree with a review, now you can comment on the reviews themselves as well.

Wine stores can take the ratings and reviews for any given wine and print them out in customizable “shelf-talkers.” Corkd is also working on an iPhone app that will let members research and rate wines while they are at a restaurant or a wine tasting.

To the degree that Corkd can become the place that people review, rate, and discuss wines, it could become a good marketing vehicle for wineries. But Corkd has a lot of catching up to do. Competitors like Snooth and CellarTracker are far ahead and already have loyal wine-rating followers. Snooth, in particular, is n a tear since raising money last January, right about the time Corkd was hitting bottom. Snooth also has integration with Facebook, user ratings, and other social elements such as the ability to become friends with other members. Which site would you give the higher rating?

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Vinfolio CEO Stephen J. Bachmann said the investment will mostly be used to accelerate the growth of its Vinfolio Marketplace, an online platform for buying and selling wine that currently boasts over 250,000 wines up for bidding, and the startup’s expansion in Asia.

There’s no shortage of wine-related websites and services out there. From the top of my head: review sites Snooth and Corkd, Vinogusto, good old Wine.com and wine ‘discovery’ service Adegga, although I’m sure there are many more.

Curious to see if Vinfolio will manage to gain mind and market share in this corked crowded space.

Cheers!

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Yahoo just opened its doors to a bunch of new OpenSocial apps. People who use MyYahoo as a startpage can now add apps from Mint, KaChing, WordPress, and more. The apps include a small view which appear on your MyYahoo page, but can also open up into a canvas view (which is essentially a dedicated page on Yahoo for that particular app). The Mint app, for instance, gives you a dashboard view of your finances and alerts. The WordPress app lets you do a quick post to your blog right from Yahoo. All together, Yahoo added 14 new apps for users to choose from. You can check your meds (Drugs.com), gas prices (GasBuddy), fantasy stock portfolio (kaChing), food and wine pairings (MyRecipes + Snooth), share books (WeRead), or just play Flood-It (LabPixies). You gotta add Flood-It, love that game.

The underlying apps will benefit from getting extra exposure on MyYahoo, but it won’t drive much traffic to their sites. People who want to go deeper into the apps will simply open up a canvas page, much like they do on Facebook. But that is okay, because it shouldn’t really matter where your users interact with your service. For Yahoo, this is yet another step in its effort to be the starting point on the Web for its users. The nice thing about the OpenSocial apps is that users don’t have to leave Yahoo to engage with them. So it is really Yahoo’s way of remaining a destination site and keeping its users within its walls, even if they are using non-Yahoo services. Today, Yahoo is also bringing some new add-ons into Yahoo! Mail, including PayPal and Picnik. And Yahoo! TV (which is built into some Samsung and LG TVs) now lets you watch YouTube videos.

The apps are built on top of the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). The canvas views at least support OpenSocial, but app developers still have to tweak the apps to make them Yahoo-friendly. For instance, the “small view” (i.e. the widgets which actually appear on the MyYahoo page) must be developed using “Yahoo! Markup Language” (YML), which is an extension of HTML with more bells and whistles. Yahoo is trying to bring together YML and the OpenSocial Markup Language (OSML), but right now they are forked. But turning an OpenSocial app into one that works inside Yahoo is getting easier. Yahoo joined OpenSocial last year. No word yet on when MyYahoo will start supporting Facebook apps. Oh right, cause that’s never gonna happen.

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Raise a glass to Snooth, a social wine review site that is gaining some traction and recently closed another angel round of financing of about $1 million. Angel investors included Joe Meyer, Kevin Fortuna (both from Quigo) and Ted Jansen (former SVP at Expedia), who are now on the company’s advisory board. The New York City-based startup last raised an angel round a year ago for the same amount. Snooth lets you rate, review and talk about wines. On Snooth, anyone can be Robert Parker. And you see what all your friends are reviewing and rating in your own feed. There is also an iPhone-optimized site, and a full-fledged app is in the works.

Snooth offers data to wineries and wine merchants, giving them an idea of where people who are interested in their wines are located, and makes money from lead generation (when a member clicks through to buy a bottle). The site has signed up 11,000 wine merchants worldwide so far.

In a letter to its shareholders, a copy of which TechCrunch has obtained, CEO Philip James gives an update of the business:

TRAFFIC:
We’ve seen exceptional growth over the last 6 months, and our traffic is now over 600,000 users per month, representing a 400% increase over that time period. In December we generated $1 million in gross revenues for our merchant partners.

Snooth is now the largest interactive wine site on the web (in terms of traffic), and we expect to be the largest wine site on the web by Q3 2009.

We are already the largest wine site by number of wines tracked (1.1M), wine reviews (2.1M), registered users (75,000) and we are gaining on the other companies rapidly in this last metric.

. . . FINANCES:
Thanks to the recent capital raise, and with our net burn rate of $60,000 we have a runway of over 18 months, assuming 0 revenue. This is a very conservative estimate as Snooth has been making revenue (primarily from lead generation) for the last few months.

The letter also notes that Snooth provides the wine results for Wikia Search, and ends with goals for 2009. James wants the site to grow to one million visitors per month, 250,000 registered users, and be at a $50 million run rate in generating sales for wine merchants. Snooth’s own revenue is only a small fraction of those sales, typically 10 percent. Assuming it does reach its goal of driving $50 million in sales to affiliated merchants this year, that could result in as much as $5 million in revenues for itself.

If Snooth can keep growing, though, it could become a nice little business. In comparison to the 600,000 uniques James mentions in his letter, Quantcast shows Snooth at 450,000, but with a similar growth curve. Google Trends shows that it has already surpassed Corkd (see chart below), Gary Vaynerchuck’s competing wine review site, which he has admittedly allowed to languish. Snooth is even catching up to Wine.com in terms of traffic. (Note that Wine.com is a wine shopping site, not a review site, although it does have ratings as well. That something called Snooth could be attracting as many visitors a month as a gold-standard domain like Wine.com is impressive in its own right).

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You can see what wines your friends have reviewed, or send recommendations directly to them. The site also offers recommendations through collaborative filtering techniques, and there is a Facebook app as well. The way the site makes money is by hooking you up with about 600 (going to 1,000) online wine merchants nationwide on a pay-per-click basis. Competitors include WineLog, TasteVine, Vinorati, and the very 1.0 WineSearcher.

The site Launched in June, and is getting between 200,000 and 250,000 unique visitors a month, says founder Philip James.

I gave the site a quick run-through and like the Ajax interface. There are sliders to narrow your search by price and vintage. And there is natural-language search, so it knows what a “spicy cab” means. The ratings for wines I know seem to be on the money. (Okay, I only tried three). Check it out and tell us what you think in comments.

Here is the press release.

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