Wine lovers now have a new option when seeking the best price on the perfect bottle of wine.  San Francisco-based Vinquire provides a web-wide search engine that will tell you where and at what price you can buy a specific wine.  In addition, the site enables users to rate wines and get recommendations. 

According to the company, they currently maintain a database of some 500,000 wines.  Search results are sorted by price, enabling visitors to scope out the best deals.  In limited testing by Cork & Knife, the results seemed generally helpful and accurate, although in at least one instance the search engine reported an incorrect price.  Vinquire co-founder John Kleven explained that because Vinquire searches all wine web sites and not just ones that participate by sending information directly to the site, it will occasionally grab the wrong price.  Nevertheless, the site appears to be a good resource for wine hunters.

Vinquire enters a marketplace with a handful of other players.  Wine-searcher.com and WineZap both offer similar services, but rely on retailers and wineries to participate. Both also accept payment for featuring results more prominently, something that Vinquire is not doing. 

"If you use Vinquire, you're searching over 3,300 wineries and retailers.  There is a general shift in the business world away from paid content towards advertising revenue models.  Vinquire is following this path," Kleven explains. "We are a wine search engine that is coupled with a social networking wine site.  But by doing this, we are the first company to pair the two features together. "