DATE: Monday, May 26, 1997                  TAG: 9705240742

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: PILOT ONLINE STAFF 

                                            LENGTH:   62 lines

POUR A FINE VINTAGE VIA THE WEB; THEY'RE STILL WORKING ON THE BOUQUET

A few weeks ago, Pilot Online staffer Mark Edelen decided he needed a vacation and proceeded to buy his airline tickets over the Internet. As you read this, Mark has winged himself westward for a week in San Francisco and wine country.

Now, we don't begrudge our hardworking colleague one bit for wanting a well-deserved vacation. But it seems to us that he could have saved a lot of money and turbulence if he had simply bought some wine over the Net, instead of those airline tickets.

Of course, you don't have to travel to California (on the Internet or otherwise) to find fine wine. The Williamsburg Winery was the closest site to home that we found, offering a few historical notes on local wine production and an order form for its stock. For a statewide perspective, Virginia Wine Country offers a complete list of the region's wineries, events and tourist information (nearly hotels and restaurants).

Since Silicon Valley and Napa Valley are practically side-by-side, it's no surprise that California wineries managed to snap up the easy-to-remember Wine.com. Sure, this site links to plenty of West Coast vineyards selling their wares, but there's also a pretty good bulletin board for questions and an online auction for special wines, tours and collectibles such as ``antique corkscrews from England.''

Bids for the auction are accepted over the course of a month rather than in ``real time'', but Virtual Vineyards goes one step further by sponsoring an online wine tasting that combines online commerce (order two bottles of a selected vintage ahead of time) with scheduled live chats by the proprietor.

Another twist on wine tasting can be found at Robin Garr's Wine Lovers Page, which includes a personal database cataloging tasting notes from hundreds of wines. (We searched for several Virginia wineries, to no avail.)

Two online magazines of note for the vino-phile: The venerable Wine Spectator not-so-humbly declares to be ``the most comprehensive wine web site in the world'' (well, it does let you search 55,000 wine reviews by price, variety, etc.) while SmartWine is a little more smart-alecky. (``Does Barbie drink Wine? Mattel denies it but. . .'' is mixed with more traditional fare.)

Finally, serious connoisseurs will visit the World Wine Web encyclopedia of global grape-growing regions. Read it in English or French, and if your computer is configured for sound, the home page will play the gurgle of wine being poured every 30 seconds or so.

Thanks go to Ed Winslow, who read last week's column about weather sources on the Web and helped us find a site that details historical weather data for the region. The National Climate Data Center draws charts of all kinds of data - precipitation, temperature, wind speed, sunshine - from weather stations around the world. The service can be slow at times, but when you need to know the average monthly rainfall for the past 15 Aprils in Williamsburg, it's worth the wait - especially if you're tending grapes for next year's vintage.

PILOT ONLINE: The Hampton Roads FUN! section now includes a Dining page with searchable restaurant reviews (try ``wine'' to see what the reviewers thought) and the Restaurant Finder, which helps you find addresses, maps and phone numbers for every restaurant in Hampton Roads, searchable by city and type of food.

Have a new Web site or a new feature on a current site? Send Internet announcements, questions and suggestions for this column to pilot(AT)pilotonline.com with Online Column in the subject field. Or, write us at Pilot Online, 150 W. Brambleton Ave., Norfolk, VA 23510.

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