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By way of a friendly search engine, Buyersvine connects consumers directly with wineries. The startup’s mission is to offer consumers lower prices and vineyards higher margins. By dragging and dropping a selection of predefined tags from categories such as colour, type, character, price, food pairing, interaction and recipient, users can look for a wine that’s a perfect fit. A red that goes well with baseball, or a USD 40-50 bottle for a first cousin. (Yes, the tagging is that specific.) For ongoing wine searches, like USD 10-20 dry whites from California or Oregon, users can subscribe to an RSS feed to keep track of new wines that fit their request. Buyersvine links directly to vineyards, which handle sales and shipping. Still in beta, Buyersvine isn’t currently charging wineries for lead generation or listing. The website is a sister venture to Synapse Wine, which provides web-based applications for managing small to medium size vineyards. Another fledgling player in the wine search market is Snooth, also in beta. Snooth’s database is far more extensive and its search engine more sophisticated. But unlike Buyersvine, Snooth works with large wine retailers like Wine.com and Vinfolio instead of small vineyards. Buyersvine’s key selling point is helping consumers find and buy wines directly from boutique vintners that they wouldn’t find on their own. Which makes it a very useful marketing tool for small sellers. The Seattle-based company mainly features US vineyards. Makes sense, since international shipping costs would make ordering small lots of wine directly from vineyards in France or Australia prohibitively expensive. Time to set up something similar for wine buyers and sellers on other continents? Keeping it local or regional will definitely add to the cachet. Spotted by: Amy Leung