This article is a resource for you to find interesting sites.
I have performed website appraisal on 500 sites and I have ranked only the top 250. Herebelow is an analysis of the results.
The big guns
More people look for food or wine information on the Web in the Autumn that in other seasons. This primarily benefits the established brands. This semester the sites that gained most traffic were (in decreasing order): the Wine Spectator and CellarTracker.
The sites that gained most traffic this year were the same. Conversely fewer and fewer people go and visit the small sites, I mean the ones that do not show in the selection because they are not enough visited. So we may have a vicious circle here : few visitors bring low visibility. Maybe you have to reach out to become famous…
Diversity
The recent holiday season has favoured the big sites. Yet challengers already show in this list. You can expect some to rise higher 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. So go on a reading journey by browsing the list of 250 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.
Here are the metrics I use for rating the wine sites. You can follow the directory evolution by subscribing to the feed on websites 
.
3 websites clearly stand out as the biggest information hubs: the Wine Spectator, the Wine lovers page and Robert Parker’s forum. This in part is explained by their quality. It is also explained by the long time they have been known by wine enthusiasts.
So lie back, relax, and enjoy my comments on 
Most of the top websites stem from operations based in the US. The majority of the listed sites are written from that country. The following facts may contribute: the USA still is the country the most present on the Web, they still dominate the English-speaking culture and, for the first time ever in 2010, people in the United States sipped more wine than any other nation. By contrast only 17 percent of people in France drink wine regularly.
