Vinogusto is growing fast, let’s have a look at the statistics:
- Google Analytics: over 10.000 unique visitors/day (+100% in 3 months)
- Alexa traffic rank: 92.000 on a 3 months basis and 50.000 on a weekly basis (+80.000 positions in 3 months)
Our audience is spread over different geographic areas. The main markets are France (28%), Spain (20%), Belgium (15%), lThe Netherlands (12%) and the United States (5%).
We are looking forward the next update of theGoogle Trends for Website . If you want to know more, have a look at an analysis of the different web statistic tools (in Spanish).
Il Vesuvio is a bustling little family-run trattoria situated a stone’s throw from La Chasse. That’s a name that always makes me snigger, meaning “the hunt” but also “the flush”, as in loo. Tirer la chasse = to pull the chain. Anyway, it’s on the main drag of Avenue des Casernes but set back just enough that you don’t have to breathe in exhaust fumes with your food. The generous canopy will save you from sunstroke too.
There is a fine selection of pizzas at reasonable prices, but as it was a holiday weekend I felt flush (geddit?) and ordered the grilled sole, which came served with fries and a braised endive.
I have two criteria for judging Italian restaurants. Firstly, they must serve veal as well as pizza. And secondly, they must offer panna cotta on the dessert menu. Il Vesuvio did both. The panna cotta came with a choice of topping: I had mine with coffee liqueur. I can’t tell you. It was the most sublime, creamy, heavenly thing I have had in my mouth since Christmas. (Don’t ask) I would go back there just for the panna cotta.
The waiters are brisk, flirty and efficient in that way Italians are. My waiter must have been all of 17. And I think you all know how I like a young man. He had a cheeky grin, which widened still further when I told him the panna cotta was exquisite. “Home made, of course?” I added. He looked at me with arms outstretched: “Ma certamente, Signora! La mamma!”
Grilled sole doesn’t come cheap, and at 19 euros it accounted for two-thirds of my total bill. But the pizzas are pretty reasonable (10-12 euros) so you could count around 25 euros for a standard pizza-wine-dessert meal.
Unfortunately Il Vesuvio is not open for weekend lunch or Sunday evening. But on a warm weekday or Saturday evening, or even a cold one (the interior looked cosy and welcoming) it is worth a visit. Or if you are lucky enough to have a day off during the week. The pizzas looked and smelled great, and the place was packed with regulars, so probably a good idea to book on a Saturday night.
But do remember to save room for the panna cotta. A little taste of heaven.
Wines available: Villa Antinori, Santa Cristina, Five Roses,…
How to get there: Il Vesuvio
Source: Daphne’s Dinner
Some of your friends might use Vinogusto already. In a few clicks you can compare your Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo contacts with Vinogusto and find your friends already using Vinogusto or invite the others to join you.
Vinogusto.com went live in May 2007 and has over 3.000 registered users today. Lately, our wine community welcomes 15 new users daily. Besides, over 5.000 winelovers visit us daily and enjoy the reviews of 23.952 wines and 37.439 adresses.
Vinogusto, the 2.0 community for wine lovers, increases its capital by 200.000 euros.
The objective is to improve its functionality as social network in order to provide even more complete services to its users and clients. In the investment, wich will be effective March 25th, are participating multiple recognized web enterpreneurs, such as the founder of Meetic , Christophe Salanon; the founder of Toprural.com and partner of 11870.com, François Derbaix; the founder of Rentalia.com, Marta Esteve; and the Ebay Belgium member, Alexis Vandewyer.
This decision comes as an answer to the continuous and rapid growth in visits that Vinogusto has experienced over the last 4 months (400%) which resulted into a significant increase of users and clients of the sector, looking for presence and visibility on the Internet.
Vinogusto was created 9 months ago by the Belgians Marc Roisin & Laurent Mikolajczak with the purpose of offering wine lovers like themselves a place to share their passion in a one of its kind Web 2.0 environment.
Vinogusto is available in four languages (Spanish, French, English and Dutch), totalizes over 150.000 visits monthly today, offers information on more than 25.000 wines and 35.000 addresses with more than 45.000 users’comments, along with content on winetourism, wine and food pairing, etc…
All of this turned Vinogusto into the most important wine related social network in Europe and an important promotion space for the companies of the sector.
Looking for a winery to visit in Vacqueyras ?
Check the location of the different wineries on our maps.
We spent some time to improve the overall application performances (meaning the loading time of each web site page) in order, first, not to handicap the overall site by a resource consuming page, but also to offer to our visitors a fast navigation experience.
To summarize, the application is fast, the code is “clean” and what is sent to your browser is optimized for a very fast display.
On the 28 August, we migrated vinogusto.com from the small (but still quite effective) server that served the site towards a new more powerful dedicated server. Vinogusto is still hosted at ovh (one of the biggest hosting European company) and will benefit from a powerful server that should offer correct performances for the year to come.
We observed that at least 2 AD blocking tools has been disabling all places pictures on Vinogusto.com.
- Symantec internet security suite, with its default options
- Maxthon Tabbed Browser
The effect was the disappearing of all places pictures (the right column of the homepage), on the whole website. Those software make it silently by erasing without warning the <img … html tags.
We corrected the problem that was due to a directory badly named (’ad’ for address)…
We’re sorry not to have pointed the problem sooner.
