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No More Wining! With new downloadable software from WineScore, you'll never be grape-shy again By Michael Stabile In the early '90s, when the Internet was a mere horse and carriage to its current DSL cigarette-boat status, I had tons of money-making schemes involving the 900 number/cell phone explosion. Looking back, there were no Edisons in the bunch (can't pronounce a dish at a French restaurant? Call 1-900-INTERPRET and we'll save you the embarrasment of a faulty accent!). But alas, none came to fruition (Can you really imagine your date running to the men's room to find out the correct pronunciation of Pouilly Fuissé or pissaladi´ere?) There's little point to this detour into riches-I-might-have-made, except that finally, someone has come up with one to make me jealous. Except instead of phone numbers, it uses the technology of the Palm Pilot. WineScore, a start-up project from a wine industry veteran, not only catalogs over 50,000 California, Oregon and Washington wines and wineries, but accessibly ranks them on a scale of 1 to 10. For each varietal, vineyard and bottling, WineScore tallies the individual rankings given by the major wine connoiseurs of the region (independent tastings, industry journals) and averages them to make wine buying as facile as possible. In addition, it offers a sidebar of yearly production ratings, so that if your Duckhorn Merlot rates an average of 8, you can evaluate it even more accurately according to the year of the bottling and move it up or down a point. While WineScore isn't yet available for the Sony Dreamcast, one can download it onto a Palm Pilot or Visor for about $25 off the winescore website. And it works as easily in Safeway as it does at Rubicon. Cheers! . [ San Francisco | MetroActive Central | Archives ]