So many wines and so little time!

AmericanWineryGuide.com was created to help the overwhelmed wine-drinker find and learn about America ’s best wineries. With over six thousand wineries in the U.S., finding wineries that consistently produce quality wines at affordable prices can be a challenge. For most people, it’s not because there’s not enough information, it’s because there’s so much information and just not enough time to learn about, or keep up with, each new producer and each new vintage.

AmericanWineryGuide.com incorporates information from hundreds of sources to help you find wineries based on the criteria that is important to you, whether its viticulture practices, winery amenities, or visitor opinions. In addition, AmericanWineryGuide.com uses tens of thousands of wine ratings from the best wine-rating publications and wine bloggers, and results from international wine competitions, to calculate a rating for each winery and each of its varieties at various price points. Whether you’re looking for the wineries that produce America’s best red wines or are looking to identify Santa Barbara wineries that produce the best Syrah priced between $16 and $30, use organically-grown grapes, provide bulk-purchase discounts and have an art gallery in their tasting room, AmericanWineryGuide.com makes it easy.

In addition, AmericanWineryGuide.com provides: winery, event and wine-related business reviews and photos from other wine tourists, a wine event search with event profiles listing participating wineries, Google mapping and trip-planning tools to include custom itineraries, a map of America’s Viticultural Areas with information about each, your personal AmericanWineryGuide to keep track of all the great stuff you find. We hope that you find the site useful and greatly appreciate reviews and feedback.

Jim Finley – A fateful trip to Napa & Sonoma in 2007 planted the seed for AmericanWineryGuide.com. Jim was responsible for building the itinerary for his traveling party and found the task much more difficult than it needed to be. While discussing the process used to create the itinerary with his traveling partners, one of them mentioned “You know, you should build a website to help people plan wine tasting trips.” That small comment launched a six month development project that ended up taking five years! Prior to, and during the development of AmericanWineryGuide.com, Jim has held several information technology jobs supporting both commercial and government customers as a project manager.

Tim Donahoe worked with Jim on some of those information technology projects and is now the “tech. geek” behind AmericanWineryGuide.com.  Tim enjoys tinkering with the HTML, Javascript, Django, Python, Linux and MySQL that make the site work.  When he’s not working on the site you can usually finding him sailing the Chesapeake and drinking wine – yes, often at the same time.    Contact Tim at tdonahoe@AmericanWineryGuide.com.