My Wines will launch 2009* and will provide a unique set of tools for acquiring wine, managing a wine cellar and interacting with our community of wine lovers from around the world.  As a fully integrated component of eRobertParker.com access will be free to all subscribers.  

My Wines is based on several exciting concepts:

• You'll be able to configure My Wines to your particular requirements and level of interest.  For example, managing a cellar inventory is time consuming so not everyone wants to do it.  It will be an optional component but, even if you chose opt out, you’ll be fully able to use the other components as fully as possible based on the amount of information about your wines you do have the time and interest to post.
• You’ll be able to access your wine information using the same Search Engines you use to access our database of over 120,000 professional wine tasting notes.
• Traditional online wine shopping tools require that you come to them to find the wines you want to buy.  As My Wines gets to know what you’re interested in acquiring it will come to you when those wines become available.
• You’ll be able to add your own notes to the database of over 120,000 professional tasting notes so other wine lovers can see how your impressions compare to the pros as the wines in everyone’s cellar mature.
• You'll have access to My Wines from your cell phone via an enhanced version of Robert Parker Mobi.
• Users of Robert Parker's Cellar Manager software will be able to import much of their data into My Wines.

This is only a brief summary and there’s quite a bit more to My Wines.

*Explanation of the Delay: We had been targeting My Wines for the fall of 2008.   There are several reasons for the delay that we want to share with you:

1) As we've communicated in the past, the My Wines schedule lost nearly a year because we had to redesign and reprogram the administrative back end to eRobertParker.com first.  These are the programs that control your log on, site security, credit card processing, subscription management and a few other things.  This was a big project that we had originally hoped to do after My Wines but changes in credit card processing regulations necessitated doing them first.  There are, however, some real advantages the new software provides for My Wines.

2) The year delay caused by #1 was a cloud with a "silver lining".  We've been watching a new web software development technology from Microsoft quite closely for the past couple of years.  It was our hope that it would mature in time for use as the platform for My Wines.   We've determined that it has matured enough for our use and you will definitely understand the benefits of that when My Wines is released.  It will be significantly easier-to-use, faster and functionally more complete than would have otherwise been possible.

3) You all know that the Internet has evolved over the past 2-3 years such that "social networking" and other Web 2.0 functionality is now one of its most important attributes.   Around a year ago, as we started serious My Wines development in the new technology, it became clear to us that it was capable enough that we could substantially increased the scope of the project while maintaining the speed and reliability you've all come to expect from eRobertParker.com.  As a result the My Wines that will be released next year will, in fact, be quite different from what we had originally designed.