Wine 2.0 Site, Snooth, Raises $1 Million Angel Round

A New York City-based startup called Snooth just raised $1 million in angel financing, on top of an earlier $300,000 round. Snooth is a social wine recommendation site that lets you search for more than 300,000 different types of wine. It has 1.9 million reviews, both professional and drinker-generated. Hic.

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.