It’s not uncommon at all for me to get several of the same kinds of search resources at once in my e-mail, but it’s very unusual for me to get several different resources devoted to the same topic at the same time. In the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve found and heard about three different resources devoted to wine.

The SF Gate had an article about Able Grape ( http://www.ablegrape.com/ ), a search engine of about ten million pages devoted to wine. This specialized search engine scored about a C on the Strawberry Shortcake test; an astounding number of wineries apparently have their own recipes for strawberry shortcake. A search for northern California generated much better results with over 11,000 results discussing vineyards, retailers, and wine-related media.

Speaking of northern California, there’s WineMap at http://winemap.org/ , which will open to the general public on March 1st. WineMap is collecting information on wineries and where grapes are grown, and placing that information on a map. If you can’t wait for the site to open, you can already download its database to use in Google Earth.

Finally, there’s WineMad, at http://winemad.net/ . WineMad is a wine reviews aggregator and custom Google search engine that’s currently indexing 900 wine Web sites and blogs. The front page lists recent wine reviews and articles, with additional tabs for red wine reviews, white/rose/sparkling wine reviews, and cheese articles and reviews (of course). A blog for this search tool is available at http://winemad.wordpress.com/ .

These sites look interesting and useful for the wine connoisseur; I can’t judge completely however as I am more of a root beer kind of person.