Snooth is a social shopping site for the wine industry. User's can use Snooth's powerful search engine to browse 2 million ratings across hundreds of thousands of wines and then link to 11,000 merchant partners (stores and wineries) in 50 countries to make a purchase. In addition, Snooth is a social network. Users can create accounts, see what their friends are drinking, get recommendations and find their 'taste twins' - users with similar palates to their own.

CPA referrals from our product pages to a retailer or winery shopping cart.

Philip James, Founder Philip founded Snooth in 2006. Philip was formerly Executive Vice President at the Wine Messenger, a leading national online wine retailer, where he focused on general management and operational issues. During his time there, Philip raised a $700,000 round of financing and cut expenses by 25% while growing sales over 65% between 2005 and 2006. He also managed the company's internet marketing program - guiding the company to its position as a top-5 online US wine retailer and growing web sales by over 600%. Philip previously spent three years working in Technology Investment Banking at Merrill Lynch and has worked in the Venture Capital industry. Philip holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a Masters degree in Computational Chemistry from Oxford University. In 2003 Philip played an instrumental role in the world's highest altitude rescue, on the North Face of Mount Everest. Mark Angelillo, CTO Mark was previously a senior developer at Reflexions Data where he worked on sites such as Vivastreet.com - the largest classifieds ads site in France and a major presence in 11 other countries. Mark also played an instrumental role in the development of Smylesandfish.com, the online home of Smyles & Fish Magazine. Mark's areas of expertise include application development, Linux systems administration and web/database architecture. Prior to joining Reflexions Data, Mark founded Gradient Solutions, a software consultancy firm. At Snooth, Mark's focus will be on building the site, maintaining the database and creating algorithms used to generate the recommendations. Mark received his BA in Computer Science from Swarthmore College where it is rumored that he took part in the development of a soccer playing robot.

Proprietary algorithms for the search engine and recommendation engine on the front end. Try a search like "a spicy cali cab thats good with beef" to see what we mean. Business best practices and code for the integration, normalization and de-duping of data from new sources, on the back-end. With millions of entries in the database this is growing to be a significant barrier to entry for a competitor.

• Philip James April 16, 2008

  Snooth just announced its biggest news to date. We've gone global. Through our partnership with GlobalWineStocks, users from over 40 countries can now be connected with local merchants and price information.
  
  Snooth now has 2.4 million prices, 2 million reviews for half a million wines.
• Colin Nagy November 27, 2007

  Snooth today announced $1 million in angel funding from the company's initial backers, as well as a new group of international investors. This is the company's second round, following an initial $300,000 raised in December 2006.
  
  The new funds will be used to scale the development team, integrate the current backlog of merchants that have already partnered with Snooth, and add new retailers worldwide.
• Natalya Murakhver October 30, 2007

  Snooth recently launched its "My Wines" page which allows users to build and manage their personal wine cellars, maintain wish-lists, track reviews and tasting notes.
• Bambi Francisco August 21, 2007

  Nice site. I love the big search engine box. The site also has a large selection of wines you can find ratings on. The team also looks very experienced, with Philip having worked at Wine Messenger and Mark having experience in the classifieds industry. While there are many emerging social networks focusing on the wine industry, this one looks promising.