Get Yer Drink(vine) On

As I touched on in my column last week, one of the most frustrating aspects of being a craft beer drinker in Ontario is the haphazard way that the LCBO distributes the products in their seasonal specialty beer promotions. Unlike Vintages releases where the wines usually all show up on the same day as scheduled, the seasonal beers often hit the shelves weeks before or after the official release date, and follow a distribution pattern that is either completely and utterly random, or designed by a malevolent LCBO employee who enjoys toying with the hopes and dreams of beer geeks province-wide.

That's not to say that the wine lovers have it easy. Even though the Vintages releases come every two weeks like clockwork, the more limited items can be difficult to track down. Even some non-Vintages (or in the case of beer, non-seasonal) bottles can be hard to find as stock dwindles, and favourites may be restocked at different times in different locations. The online inventory search at LCBO.com makes it a bit easier to track things down, but the numbers aren't always reliable or up-to-date, and if you don't check it every day (or even multiple times per day), some things can arrive and sell out before you even know about it.

For anyone who can relate to the problems above, there's now an answer to at least some of your problems, in the form of a brand new website called Drinkvine. And it took an especially frustrated and tech-savvy LCBO customer to make it happen.

Drinkvine was created by Ralph Holm, a beer lover in Almonte - a small town near Ottawa - who often found himself missing out on new brews due to the limited quantities and spotty distribution in his area. So, being a resourceful fella with some technical know-how, he put together a program that could email him any time a particular beer (or any other product) appeared in the online stock numbers for nearby LCBO stores. As he notes in the discussion thread on BarTowel.com where he recently announced the site, "It worked great. Many times I knew that stock was in before it had hit the floor. I became the first person to know instead of the last."

After a few months of using the program himself, he reckoned that a lot of other people would also appreciate the service, and he started work on the website that was unveiled last week at drinkvine.com. Both the concept and interface are remarkably simple: you register your email address and password, set up lists of "my drinks" (via a simple search function) and "my locations" (based on postal code), and add any or all of the items on your "my drinks" list to a watchlist. Then, any time stock appears for one of your watchlist items in one of your locations, you'll get an email.

In addition, you can bring up a page on the site for any product in the database - whether it's on your "my drinks" list or not - and instantly see the 10 closest LCBO outlets (based on your registered postal code) that have it in stock. Conversely, there's a page for every LCBO location in the province, each displaying a small Google map and a list of any products from "my drinks" that are currently available according to inventory. In both cases, the number of units in stock is noted, making it easy to find which store has dozens of bottles available versus those that only have a couple.

Like any new website, there are still a few kinks to be worked out. And while it provides a more flexible and logical interface to the LCBO's online inventory information, the fact remains that said information is often incorrect for a number of reasons, most notably because it's not real time and is only refreshed every day or two. But those small issues aside, Drinkvine is still a remarkably useful resource, and one that any serious boozehound in Ontario will find immediately indispensable.