Mixing the latest Web technologies with centuries of viticulture, Cork’d is a (relatively) new social networking site with the sole purpose of allowing its users to share information about wine.

Now, this seems kind of strange at first glance, because the collective imagination doesn’t really see Web guys as wine guys. Beer or Mountain Dew seem a better fit. But Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin most definitely are wine guys, and that’s why they built the site. Look more closely and you’ll see–“Web 2.0” innovations are really well suited to wine, tagging most especially.

Tagging allows people to classify wines at varying levels of sophistication simultaneously. Some wine terms are clear enough to be understood by just about anybody, such as “dry,” “sweet,” “light,” “heavy,” and the like, and users new to wine could tag or search using these terms. Meanwhile, terms like “acidity” or “berry” could help a somewhat more knowledgeable person find the right bottle, and the true wine nerds could search for bottles with the barest whiff of “Edam cheese” or “baby diaper” (for those who don’t know or can’t remember, these are actual descriptions used by Paul Giamatti’s character in Sideways). When users can talk and think about wine in the way that works for them, they create their own taxonomies and take a lot of the intimidation factor out of wine.

Once concern I have is that the site needs a whole lot of users to work properly, since there are just so many bottles to classify and you presumably need several users to tag a bottle to get different perspectives on it and make it easier to search. But they are off to a good start, with over 4,000 users as of June 1, one week after launch.

I wish them luck, because I am an unabashed fan of wine and good design. I think Cork’d has ample helpings of both.