Wine Magazines & Forums

Decanter.com - an interesting read for both wine professional and enthusiast.

A real fund of information on fine wines throughout the world

The database of tasting notes and ratings is a very useful tool for any wine lover. The wine reviews are quite comprehensive, and the flexibilty by which the data can be queried makes it easy to home in on specific wines. The interface is a little old fashioned and the navigation could be better, but all in all Tastings.com’s vast collection of notes represents a terrific resource for the serious collector or lover of wine.

The Quarterly Review is worth bookmarking and checking once a quarter at least for the high quality articles and latest news. It has little to attract you back more frequently, but it’s free and simple to use and usually has at least one or two pieces of genuine interest.

It would have been easy to dismiss this site as yet another half-hearted and rather cynical exercise in selling. Many such sites tease the visitor with a few paragraphs from the current issue and little more. Here though is an extraordinarily generous and comprehensive collection of serious and professional wine writings, offered freely.

The Wine Enthusiast offers quite a lot of valuable content on its site and that is invariably of a very professional standard. The Buying Guides are packed with tempting sounding wines, and you could always use the www.wine-searcher.com facility to try to find them in the UK marketplace.

A commercial site that, commendably, does try very hard to do more than just sell, sell, sell. The bias towards Australia limits its usefulness, but this is early days for the site and the money and talent behind it promise that it could become a very significant addition to the world of online wine. Worth watching.

The articles and links probably make this site worth a visit for the home wine-maker. The fact that many of the pieces presume the reader has access to some nice, fresh Cabernet or Chardonnay grapes limits the usefulness of some of the advice, but others deal with wine-making from concentrates or other fruits.

For the home wine maker, even with its American slant, WinePress.US is incredibly useful.

Big, glossy and much more corporate than personal, this unashamedly commercial site will possibly divide visitors into love it or hate it camps. It caters mainly for a sector of the American public that views wine very much as a lifestyle product, embracing it along with cigars, European sports cars or stocks and shares: wine as a statement rather than a passion. For all that, it is one of the largest and most professional resources on the web and thus deserves its five-star place in this guide.