About Thumbs Up Wine
Thumbs Up Wine is dedicated to making it easy for consumers to find the very best wines – and steer clear of the bad ones – in the stores they shop at the most. Currently, over 50 national chains are covered, including Costco, Food Lion, Kroger, Safeway, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods.
Thumbs Up Wine’s wine review experts, Joe and Matt, professionally review hundreds of wines each month. Reviews are regularly posted on here on our website and on our Thumbs Up WineFinder mobile app. Both are designed to quickly match you with the best wines in the store you’re shopping in – while you’re standing in the aisle. You can search everything from price, varietal, and food pairings, to more advanced searches like geography, flavors, and palates. Full‐screen bottle photos make it easy to match the picture with the wine on the shelf.
Our expertise and passion for wine can be seen in our extensive library of high‐energy, high‐impact videos – check them out here, on the “videos” page, or on our YouTube channel, Thumbs Up Wine Review, already the #3 most-watched wine channel on YouTube.
Growing up in an Italian-American family, wine was a big part of family meals. Joe’s grandfather made his own wine, and Joe made his first wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon, when he was only 12 years old. He did everything from hand-picking the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes all the way through bottling. It was then that he caught the bug and he’s been into wine ever since, participating in hundreds of blind tastings, professionally reviewing thousands of wines, and co-hosting a wine radio show.
A few years ago, Joe was in a supermarket and realized that, despite all of his expertise, it would be extremely difficult to pick out the best bottles because there were so many. And, with the quality and taste of every bottle changing every year, it would be an overwhelmingly impossible task for a regular person who’s just looking for a good bottle. That's when he started working on ThumbsUpWine.com and the Thumbs Up WineFinder mobile app with the goal of quickly matching people with the best wine in store where they’re shopping (and in the process, help them avoid the duds!).
Joe is co-host of Wine Wednesdays on KSRO 1350 AM in Sonoma County, California, a member of the Guild of Sommeliers and coined the “4 F’s” term when referring to what wine is all about: Food, Family, Friends, and Fun!
Everyone has quirks. Everyone has gifts. Matt has a quirky gift. Ever since he was a child, Matt has had a mild obsession with determining the value of everything. As an adult living in Sonoma County, California, Matt developed another obsession – wine. ThumbsUpWine.com and the Thumbs Up WineFinder mobile app is where his two passions have come together.
Born and raised in Redwood City, California, Matt has been around wine his whole life. When he was 5, he was already picking grapes at his grandfather’s vineyard in the Central Valley and earning 40 cents a crate. Wine was always a big part of Matt’s family life and as he grew older, he expanded his knowledge base around the business of making wine. After tasting thousands of bottles and honing his remarkable palate, he discovered that his overlapping obsessions created a new passion - finding wines that represented exceptional values.
Matt has driven almost every wine country road in Northern California, scouring the countryside in pursuit of great wine values and he truly enjoys the hunt for the next great deal. Matt is a member of the Guild of Sommeliers and he and his family reside in Sonoma County, in the heart of Northern California's Wine Country.
About the Thumbs Up WineFinder App
If you’re like most shoppers, it’s hard to feel confident when selecting a bottle of wine. You’re in the wine aisle, staring at thousands of bottles, trying to figure out what to buy. It’s overwhelming because there are way too many choices and no easy way to figure it out. Well, now there’s a way, because now there is Thumbs Up WineFinder.
With Thumbs Up WineFinder you can:
- Instantly find the best wines in the supermarket or warehouse store you’re shopping in.
- Find wines by price, type, food pairings – even categories like flavor and palate.
- Use full-screen bottle photos to easily find the wine on the shelf.
- Experiment worry-free, because the bad bottles are filtered out!
Thumbs Up WineFinder is the ONLY app specifically designed to match you with the best wines in the supermarket or warehouse store you’re shopping in – while you’re in the store. All you do is tap the price, type of wine – even the food you’re having – and we match you with the best bottles and best values. Not ANY bottles, the BEST bottles! And, with coverage of over 50 of the largest chains like Trader Joe’s, Costco, and Whole Foods, you’ll always find the best wines wherever you shop.
All wines in the Thumbs Up WineFinder app are rated on Value (no confusing “point” scores – yay!), so you’ll know how much each wine is actually worth before you buy it. Now, you’ll know if a wine that’s $10.00 is really worth $20.00, and you’ll happily skip the $10.00 bottle that’s only worth $3.00. Our professional reviewers taste hundreds of new wines every month, weeding out the bad bottles, and making sure that every wine you see in the Thumbs Up WineFinder app has one thing in common: QUALITY.
|