This article is a resource for you to find interesting sites.
I have performed website appraisal on 375 sites and I have ranked only the top 100.
Herebelow is an analysis of the results.
The big guns
In the fourth quarter of any year, many people look for food or wine information on the Web. This primarily benefits the established brands. The 4 sites that gained most valuation this quarter year are those the 4 top sites.
More generally a few sites dominate the pack. This is partly due to their early appearance on the Web (Wine Spectator, Wine lovers page). It is also partially because they have the weight of offline publications behind them (Wine Spectator, the New York Times, Wine Advocate, Dr. Vino).
In the last few years a few authors made their way to popularity. They steadily rose by virtue of:
- producing consistently good content that people want to consume;
- and being regularly cited by their peers.
Diversity
The recent holiday season has favoured the big sites. You can expect challengers to rise in the next installment in April.
In the last few years the web offer has immensely diversified. Everybody and their wine supplier now has a blog. There now are many quality wine critics who comment on line. Some belong to the mainstream media, others not. You can have your voice too and this is good for everybody.
So go on a reading journey by browsing the list of 100 best wine sites!
How to participate
Websites are automatically included in the contest as soon as I learn of their existence. To be eligible to the next issue of the Cellarer wine directory, the below conditions must be met:
- The main topic should be wine.
- Producing estates and wine sellers are excluded. Some of them run wonderful websites but the type of information is different.
If you disagree with the directory criteria, please comment below or e-mail me.
Once the above conditions are fulfilled the websites are also considered for addition to another tool: a search engine dedicated to wine and food.
Here are the metrics I use for rating the wine sites. You can follow the directory evolution by subscribing to the feed on websites 
.
I keep a list of the top 25 or so wine sites by traffic, based on Google Ad Planner figures. My list looks different from yours – for example, I have five purely wine websites with more traffic than the Wine Spectator, your top site. I am happy to email you a copy. Get back to me?
Martin Brown did email me his log of traffic. Yet I don’t intend to use Google Ad Planner for tracking the top wine sites.
One problem of Google Ad Planner is that the terms of service include non-disclosure: “the data you obtain from Google Ad Planner [...] is Confidential Information of DoubleClick.” Because of this I cannot publish this data.
A bigger problem is that Google data sometimes make no sense — even with established sites:
Wineloverspage.com shows no traffic since April 2009.
eRobertparker.com shows no seasonal variation (and we know that we should see a big graph hill in the holiday season).
Jancisrobinson.com, Vinography.com and Drvino.com show no traffic for a whole year.
Here is a recent conversation on their data problems.
For me the Compete service remains the most accurate traffic monitoring tool to date.
thanks for taking the time to keep up with these lists!
Wow, this is quite the extensive list. I am glad that I don’t have to chase all over the internet to find a few sites. Thanks for the leg work!