WineStumblr: New Website Let's You Plan Woodinville Wine Tasting Trip and Rate the Experience

Woodinville native Dustin Brownell (WHS '04) and fiancé Ashley Charneski (WHS ’06) have launched a new online business to help people find which wineries are open for tasting and let folks rate their experiences at the wineries in Woodinville.

WineStumblr.com does two things, “It lets you see what tasting rooms are open at any time or day,” said Brownell in an email to Woodinville Patch. “It lets people put together `tours` of wineries, where a user can add several wineries to a list and the website will find the day that they are all open and what order they should visit them in (based on the time the doors open and proximity to each other). They can then share these tours with friends and it will always be kept up to date with tasting room hours and location! The idea being that the "wine-knows" of the world could put together groups of wineries for different reasons/occasions and share them with the less experienced, to help guide on their wine quest.”

It’s also a place for people visiting the wineries tasting rooms to rate their experiences, reviewing the activity as much as the wine. Woodinville Patch interviewed Brownell (who now lives in Bellevue), about the new website.

So, Winestumblr.com is more about people’s experience at a tasting room than a review of the wines tasted, is that right?

Exactly, while how much someone enjoys the wine they taste clearly impacts the experience, we are looking to focus on that experience as a whole. There are already an incredible amount of online resources, people, apps, magazines, you name it, which review wines individually and give their feedback. We aren’t trying to further clutter that space.

What Ashley and I realized is that there is a disconnect between the wines themselves and how much you enjoy yourself at a wineries tasting. We had been tasting at wineries who didn’t have our favorite wines, who haven’t won 5 ‘Winery of the Year’ awards, but because of the warmth of the employees and the overall atmosphere we had a great time and made purchases or returned with friends. Alternatively, there were times we searched out wineries whose wine we had tried and loved, but the experience at the winery had left us feeling detached and disappointed.

With all the blogs, wine magazines, Facebook pages and industry press, how is your site going to stand out in the crowd of writers trying to get a piece of the Woodinville wine scene?

The winery industry is definitely exploding on all fronts in Washington. Our approach to the wine experience is unique. It was born over a dinner conversation regarding the explosive growth of wineries, and how even as Woodinville natives, it seemed impossible to keep up. We wanted a simple way to discover all the great new wineries that were opening their doors, the ‘best kept secrets’, and still include the traditional go-to’s of the Woodinville wine scene.
We really are approaching WineStumblr from a different angle, we’re completely user centric. Our goal isn’t to pump out content for Google ranking; our goal is to connect users with wineries that they’ll enjoy. We don’t want to keep piling on new content that people can’t find; we want to pull all the top content that already exists into a single, coherent place. That’s what’s best for users. We’re looking to partner with some of the great wine content contributors. They’ll win as having another, fully credited, platform to spread their message, and our users win by having a single resource they can rely on to give multiple points of view.

As a native Woodinvillian, in your opinion what role does the wine industry have in the future development of Woodinville?

The wine industry has been heaven sent for the Woodinville area. For so many years we saw Woodinville teeter back and forth on how many mega-corporations they were going to bring into the community with their promises of big tax revenue to ease a struggling small town’s economy. As the wine industry has grown locally, it has been the corner stone Woodinville has needed to build around. I strongly believe that a strong small businesses scene is essential to a healthy community and disdain building our towns economy around multi-national mega-brands, and wine industry has given us an alternative.

Are you trying to appeal to the Seattleites or do you want to capture a national audience?

Our goal right now is to really prove ourselves in the Seattle/Woodinville market. We think Seattleites have a lot of pride in their community, and have been leaders in the ‘eat and buy local’ movement we’ve seen gain momentum in the last few years. Consuming local is more than buying produce, it means supporting local products too, and that was essential to providing the business incubator environment that got so many of these wineries started.

Why choose wine, or were you just looking for good business opportunity?

Woodinville wine came to us as an ‘ah-ha’ moment as something that was in need of a better user experience. My fiancé, Ashley and I saw it as a great opportunity to work back in our home town communities. I focused on the technical and programming, while Ashley focused on collecting the information and the user experience on the site.  I have always been passionate about trying to use the web to try to help local business and improve the strength of the community, WineStumblr really does both. There isn’t really a business plan around WineStumblr, there are no investors or bank loans.

Our idea is that we can use the web to help the wineries manage their online presence, or even more advanced programs like managing their wine club and releases. We are users first, so anything we can do that helps simplify things for wineries and get more information to our users faster, while letting the wineries focus on making great wine and wine tasting experiences, is a big win for our users.

Why the tasting experience and not the taste of the wine? Is the experience as important to people as the quality of the wine?

We don’t expect people to fully decouple the wines themselves from the experience they had. After all, drinking the wine is a big part of the experience. What we want users to do is really evaluate their experience as a whole. You may have had your favorite Cabernet ever, but was the server rude? Did you have to walk 3 miles because there is no parking?  Did you leave feeling like you didn’t get much for your money? We really want to know how you would describe it to your friends the day afterwards.

Are you going to cover all tasting rooms in Washington or just on our side of the mountains?

If things go well, we would love to start rolling out to more wine regions. Our concept is a “Craigslist-type” experience, where we can have communities anywhere, but you are only dialed into one at a time. This keeps our experience clean, localized experience for our users.