A few days ago, we found a Spanish wine video site called, Vinus, a new start up covering Spanish wine, history and culture in a very hip and trendy way. Founded in the beginning of August, it has already published 3 videos, all of which feature a rapidly speaking female host covering a variety of 5 minute topics. The best way to describe the format is CNN meets Entertainment Tonight, adding some additional social media on the side like Twitter and Flickr.

Although we are very excited to see this new format, we do have a few critiques:

1. Autoplay makes the site unfriendly for work environments and just frustrates us. When I visit a site, I want to look at it first and then decide for myself when I will play the video.
2. The main page is FLASH, making it difficult to browse through. When I hover over descriptions, they jump around, and it’s hard to read unless I hold the mouse very still. Why use flash on a site like this? Not sure, though I do know Spain seems to think flash is the only way to design web pages. I hope this changes soon!
3. The article I read mentioned that the videos are available on Youtube, but you wouldn’t know that from the site itself. Why not use YouTube to promote your videos, allowing others to get the embed content off your site? Seems odd to have your own video player and then cross post to Youtube.
4. They have an RSS feed but no auto-discovery. Simple tagging allow intelligent browsers can find your content and feeds easily. This is the number one way I subscribe to sites.

On the positive side, we sincerely hope that this program will help Spaniards boast about other wines in Spain other than Rioja! It will be interesting to see how successful this is and whether the non-web-savvy Spanish populous will adopt it as a reliable wine resource.

At this point, the service is only offered in Spanish with no indication of translating it into English in the future. So if you want to brush up on your Castellano (Spanish from Spain), check it out!

Cheers,

Ryan and Gabriella

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