I saw cork'd a while back and never paid much attention, but the company has caught my eye again. Cork'd leverages user generated content (UGC), like Yelp.com does for restaurant reviews, to help people select that next great bottle of wine. Personally, I love wine so it's only naturally that I would think this is a great idea.  And, once mobile technology makes it easy for people like you and me to access reviews on the go (say, in the wine shop where there are too many undifferentiated labels) it seems like something that could gain exceptional traction among wine heavy enthusiasts.

I can't help but wonder: if yelp.com, which provides ratings and reviews of local businesses, is a vertical search engine then could there be a "sub-vertical" search engine opportunity within the reviews category? In this case, cork'd would be a sub-vertical of yelp, which is a vertical of the bigger Search market dominated by Google. One challenge I see for some sub-verticals is bringing users back enough to monetize the business sufficiently.

Either way, as a person who is obsessed with building products for dummies I think cork'd would benefit by putting wine reviews on the home page. It's my personal belief that the more you make someone think, the worse your adoption rate will be. If you can enable someone to experience the product right away (rather then reading about what they will experience) you'll get better adoption. Not all products can do this, but cork'd most certainly can!