About Free Wine Searcher

Free Wine Searcher: Search for wine prices in Europe

About Free Wine Searcher

Free Wine Searcher is a search engine for wines. It helps you find the best price on a specific wine you are looking for. Prices shown include VAT of the country of the seller. The use of this service is free.

How it works

Free Wine Searcher has a web robot that retrieves information on wines from Internet stores that are publically available on the internet. The big difference between a normal search engine like Google and us is that we don't retrieve web pages as flat text. Instead, we interpret the information on the advertised wines and allow you to easily search for a wine. Just type in the name of the wine you are looking for, and you easily find all prices for wines that match your search criteria. Every night, we update the wine list.

Independency

We are not linked to any store. All wines that match your search are shown, not just wines from sponsoring stores. In principle, anyone selling wine can be indexed by Free Wine Searcher. However, our focus is on the European wine market currently.

About the founder

At a Bordeaux 1990 tasting

My name is Jasper Hammink, I live in the Netherlands. After studying Applied Physics I started working in IT consulting in 1996. Wine has been a hobby and passion of mine for over ten years. With the Internet emerging as a sales channel for wine, I was looking for that a good free service that would allow me to search the Internet for the best place to buy wine. Payed services existed, but I thought searching the Internet should be free for everyone (you don't pay for Google either).

Rather than spending a couple of Euro's or dollars on a payed service, I decided to start a little experiment to see whether I could create such a service myself. Although I had a background in IT, I had almost no prior experience in programming. Still, I gave it a try and by the end of 2006 I had a Beta version of what is now called a "Comparison Shopping Engine" for wine. This is when I got really enthousiastic about this project: this could actually work! In the beginning of 2007 I decided to turn my full-time job into a part-time job, which gave me extra time to enhance the site.
At this moment, the site is indexing about a quarter of a million wines from Internet shops throughout Europe daily. My goal is to create the best service possible by extending the number of wines indexed and by enhancing the functionality. And my goal is to keep the price search service free, after all that is the reason I started this site in the first place!

Can I help?

Yes, you can! Visitors are key to the success of Free Wine Searcher. If you enjoy this service, you can do something in return by spreading the word. By placing a link on your site or blog, or by telling friends about this service. With enough visitors, Free Wine Searcher will survive, remain free, offer more and more services and even better search results! Also, any ideas, comments or compliments are welcome, you can leave a message here.