We are completing changes and additions to My Wines suggested by the extensive beta test program. Based on our progress we are now planning to release My Wines on Monday, June 6. There will be a revised tutorial that we suggest all interested subscribers view in order to better understand what this exciting new arm of eRobertParker.com does. We'd like to publicly thank the over 100 people who participated as beta testers and whose comments and suggestions have been invaluable in improving both the functionality and the usability of My Wines.

You've probably got a few initial questions so we'll try to answer those here:

1) How does it fit within eRobertParker.com? My Wines integrates fully with the web site. Using it begins with searching for wines, just as you do now. However, we'll have two versions of our search engine -- what is there now and a new My Wines version. Silverlight, which is required to use My Wines, is a free Microsoft "plug-in" that works with virtually all browsers on both PCs and MACs. It is widely used so you may already have it. For example, NBC used it extensively on its olympic web sites. When you visit My Wines, a message asking if you want to install Silverlight may appear.  If you click OK, it installs totally automatically in a few seconds.

2) What does it do? The initial release of My Wines provides several new functions.

• You can manage several lists of wines so, for example, you can identify wines you'd like to try or buy.
• You can record your own tasting notes either for your own private use or to share with our community of wine lovers.
• You can find notes posted by others using the same My Wines search engine you'll use to find the notes posted by our professional reviewers.
• You can manage your wine cellar inventory either as a list with text comments about cellar locations or by using a unique new "visual" tool. It's up to you how much of this you want to do.

3) What will come out in the future? In the near future we have plans to allow you and your friends to create your own Groups -- a private "site within a site" within My Wines. As our database of user-contributed tasting notes grows you'll get a better picture of what others think about wines and we'll provide some exciting new tools -- including one for visual reporting on your cellar -- to help you do that. We'll also be providing additional reporting tools based on what we hear from our wine community about your needs.

4) Why did it take so long? Basically two reasons. First, we're a small business with limited technical resources that have had to maintain and enhance an already complex web site while developing My Wine. Second, we felt that Microsoft's new Silverlight technology would allow us to provide you with a uniquely powerful user experience. Our goals all along have been full integration with the rest of the web site, real ease of use and an exciting visual approach to wine appreciation and cellar management. We feel that even this beta release of My Wines will demonstrate that we've been able to do all these things. Along the way we essentially developed My Wines two times using earlier versions of the technology but determined that it wasn't ready for the sophisticated use of a web browser we had in mind. Only with Silverlight Version 3 -- released this past July -- did we have the programming tools to do it right and we were not going to release My Wines until we felt it was right.

5) Will new things also take too long? No. Silverlight now works and Version 4 makes it easier and faster for us to add new features you want. Moreover, we've built many of the future capabilities we expect you'll want into the infrastructure we've already designed and coded.

6) Can I import my cellar? If you can provide your wines in our standard Excel spreadsheet format you can use our import tool in to create your own personal My Wines list, purchase information and text comments about cellar locations from it.

7) How will you know what we want? That's a major purpose of releasing the beta -- it provides us with a way to let us know what you like, what you don't like and what you'd like to have that isn't there. Our future development priorities will be driven in large part by what you and our wine community tells us.

8) What about accessing My Wines from my cell phone? We hope to release a My Wines phone app in the future. It will provide you with the ability to access your My Wines cellar inventory information and post tasting notes. We will probably start with the iPhone. Microsoft has announced that Silverlight 4 will be supported on the new Windows Phone. We should be able to provide richer My Wines functionality on those phones.

9) What about the Robert Parker Wine Advisor and Cellar Manager software? We'll soon release a special import so users of that software can move much of their information to My Wines. Soon after that we will discontinue support for this software.