By and large this is a question that does not usually elicit an interesting response. However in the world of news-reporting – digital media often covers the essential how, who, when and where questions of journalism, because our communication mediums are increasingly location aware, user-specific and time stamped. What is a question that requires actual human input – and in the past 3 years people have been answering it in terms of Facebook status updates, and for the early adopters – by joining the twitterverse.

Yesterday, however, the answer to that burning question reached critical mass and took on historic significance. Whilst some protested and others wondered about what was going on outside their office walls, multi-tasking employees were able to get on with their work whilst receiving a blow by blow account of history unfolding. It has been overstated to the point of cliché that the medium is the message – but yesterday the message made a medium and Twitter found its place in the global setting. Beyond the news-helicopters, simple tweets turned digital enthusiasts into citizen journalists and for once, a multitude of opinions on the same subject were heard. Suddenly all the hype made sense – some of us had tweeted previously to moderate effect, but for most of us not concerned about letting the world into our daily happenings, Twitter just left us scratching our heads.

The power of Twitter is its ability to allow multiple voices to communicate disparate opinions in unison. Of course, its fantastic to be in the loop of the wonderful world of Stephen Fry via twitter – but what we saw yesterday was not celebrity admiration, but rather the changing documentation of history, where instead of being written by the victors, we captured a glimpse through the eyes of the observer – raw, unfiltered and uncesorable. We have seen dictatorships stifle freedom of expression in blogs and websites – but the immediacy of Twitter gives the voice on the individual more resonance than before.

Of course history in the making needn’t be people tweeting from Hurricane Katrina or Tiananmen Square – we all have histories, cultural histories and personal histories. A father tweeting the anxiety of being in the waiting room whilst his child his being born, a techy tweeting the anticipation at a tech-conference whilst waiting for Steve Jobs to unleash Apple’s new toy, or a Machester United fan tweeting from the stands during half-time with the score at 1-1. Every generation alters the way it communicates, and it seems that those alterations are happening more frequently. In 6 years we have gone from long-form e-mail, to group e-mails, to text message, on to Facebook and finally: Twitter.

Of course Twitter has its critics, and there are those who see it as a distraction and a detraction from complete discourse. But so often when our collective brains are abuzz with thought, instead of thinking in full sentences or having complete thoughts, our minds are aflutter with neural tweets.

Could Twitter be the closest we have come to reflecting how our society collectively thinks, sees and experiences the world?

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Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

The keynotes were superb with Al Gore, Jerrry Brown, and David Suzuki really leaving a moving impact on me. Nobody was afraid to go deep. Sure there was plenty of talk about clean tech innovations or green building or policy changes.. but more so people were incredibly open about spiritual and conciousness based changes that are going to take place around the world to solve this crisis. Sarah Susanka even brought the crowd to tears with her moving presentation. It’s so much bigger than green or solar or oil… it’s about enlightening the human race that we are one and we share the same spirit with each other and with the world as a whole. I found it to be quite the religious experience to be at this conference. A few others being recently when I went into the wild of Alaska for a few weeks and when I saw the Dalai Lama speak in Bethlehem, Pa.

Aside from the heavy stuff, there were tons of innovative companies doing everything from cutting edge solar installs, to green acrhitecture consulting, to new age battery storage, smart grid stuff, efficiency software, New Resource Bank (which is exploding with business during this banking crisis… lol gotta love it!) and sooo much more. You had builders, utility reps, entrepreneurs, mad scientists, engineers, and everyone was so open and loving and connecting. I was blown away… it took me 3 full days to digest it all.

There were also brilliant seminars and panels, the best one for me being the State of Investing in Clean Tech, where partners from KPCB, Foundation, Sigma, and DFJ (all the big Menlo Park firms) talked about what companies they’re investing in and what technology is working… and yet something was different. These are VCs and of course money is there first concern, but with this clean green movement we are finally going to enter into a phase of social… or better yet eco-capitalism… where we benefit the environment and the social welfare of all while making a shitload of money and creating a shitload of jobs. This is an unprecendented opportunity in economic human history. Create a concentrically cyclical supply chain and pass the prosperity around the world. I was inspired by the VCs stories of how they’re going green in their own lives and their deep personal commitment.

A few themes from the conference to leave you with:

1) Nature to the grid baby – energy, health, architecture

2) Ecology + Economics = Sustainability (Eco-Capitalism)

3) Sky power will fuel the earth

4) The only thing special about humans is our foresight… our ability to see and shape the future. So lets use it.

5) A new connected conciousness is emerging that will limit the individual ego that has evolved and scorched our earth with fragmented, disjointed, greedy agendas. The only chance at eternal life is if we live together as one.

6) Be the change you want to see in the world!

In my humble opinion, these are unprecedented and magical times in the history of our race and our planet. There’s no better place to be then right here, and right now.

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My grandfather was a banker and probably spent his entire life working for the same profit a single banker a third his age would have made in bonuses over the last five years. The key difference between my grandfather and the modern banker however, is that my grandfather valued his society, his customers and the future – whilst the banker of today has merely intellectualised greed with a series of financial instruments used to justify the unjustifiable and create as much personal gain in as short a span of time as possible. So much has the plague of greed and lack of value spread that Rhodes Scholars and top intellectuals have been wooed into studying finance, whilst in today’s times of real challenges , their skills would be better employed in engineering, medical research and civil society.

The old institutions were even built with materials of substantial value – marble, granite slab and steel – whilst today’s modern building, like the ‘Gherkin’ in London or many other modern institutions seem to have chosen a material that reflects the high-risk, short-term gain and quick-buck mentality of modern business: glass. Today’s institutions are primarily made up of transparent and easily shattered material – how apt a metaphor.

Listening to a debate on torture the other day I was struck by one of the key tenets of the argument against torture being that it dulls our intelligence community and our ability as a society to ask proper questions and gain reliable information honourably. The strength of the argument for me was that it did not appeal to human suffering but rather appealed to the sustainability of our society – saying that torture makes our institutions lazy and therefore weakens our society. Surely that also holds for using high salaries and bonuses as an incentive to work, and the same argument can be made against the high-risk/ high-return mentality that has been in fashion for a time – not on the basis of an argument against greed, but rather on the basis of long-term sustainability and the value to humankind. Paying signing bonuses and giving large profits doesn’t make people work harder, it just makes them want more for less, and in a slew of defaulting banks one has to wonder where all that money for all those bonuses was coming from in the first place. What will impact the future of society more: the downfall of Lehman Brothers or major headways into stem-cell research? Stem-cell research is the obvious answer. Given that, think of all the wasted talent the job-losses that Lehman represents – intelligent minds distracted by greed who, instead of getting lost in the complexity of derivatives and materialistic pursuit could rather have been adding actual value to society trying to make their mark on history.

In these times of financial uncertainty, three things have actually gone up in value: wine, art and mineral resources. These are all things with perhaps the exception of oil that our grand-children will one day see (assuming the world is still around of course.) Society demonstrates its true wisdom in times of adversity as was the case during FDR. Only when great societies are ascendant do they lose judgement and overextend themselves (think Rome and post-Clinton America). Adversity forces us back to the basics, while opulence encourages indulgence in the superfluous.

If we as a society are to succeed, and our civilization is to continue prosperously and sustainably, then we must focus our efforts on those things that create value for more than ourselves – but for generations to come. Wine is such an area – it enriches families, creates a profitable supply chain, puts focus back into the environment and provides pleasure to the consumer. Whilst old Lehman employees may have hit bottom, they can always get up and dust themselves off and try again –taking comfort with a few friends and a couple glasses of wine. At this time when their employer no longer exists – it will prove that the only thing valuable in their lives is their friendships and their family. The failure of their institution discredits their chosen career and hopefully when the hurt of Monday’s events subsides and the lens of greed is lifted, they can refocus on what matters and ply their brains to creating sustainable value in an industry our grandchildren and children the world over will one day benefit from. Let us not fear economic uncertainty, but merely reflect on the causes of it and then go back to the thread of that which runs through history and continues to last today: art, wine and all that which thousands of men throughout the ages have laboured away at –not for profit or wage but merely for the love of civilization and society. Let us say cheers to the death of Lehman and hope their employees will emerge with a desire to help society and not just themselves…

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This article was written by Joseph Ho of uShip.com, an online marketplace for moving companies.

Moving wine bottles can be quite a daunting task. Imagine unpacking in your new home and realizing your most prized bottle has been cracked and is leaking on your other possessions.  Read on for a step-by-step guide to prevent damage to your wine during a move.

1. Use a box with dividers. You can purchase boxes with dividers specifically designed for wine and liquor bottles from moving companies. An alternative is getting similar boxes for free from wineries, liquor stores, restaurants, or supermarkets. Stick to using smaller boxes for ease of transport. Multiple wine bottles in a box can be heavy and hard to handle, an undesirable combination for fragile items.
2. Reinforce the bottom of the box with extra tape. The last thing you want is for all the bottles in the box to fall out the bottom of the box while it is being carried.
3. Make sure the bottles are tightly corked.  A good preventive measure to avoid the loosening of corks in transport is to secure the corks using wire cork cages, especially for sparkling wines.
4. Wrap the bottles with paper or bubble wrap. Start at a corner of the paper and wrap the bottle diagonally on the sheet, folding in the excess paper on the sides as you roll the bottle. When done rolling, wrap the exterior of the bundle with shipping tape to secure the wrapping and any loose ends.
5. Place the wrapped bottles in the dividers, and fill in the empty space with packing peanuts or crumpled newspaper.
6. Seal the top of the box with a generous amount of tape.
7. Clearly label the box as fragile to prevent damage.
8. During transport, make an effort to keep the temperature of the bottles as low as possible. Many moving companies offer climate controlled moving vans.  Ideally, the wine should be kept at 55°F to prevent damage, but this may be impractical. You may want to carry more expensive bottles in an ice chest with dry ice.

There is no feeling quite like opening a nice bottle of wine after moving into your new home. By exercising caution and following these steps, you will surely transport your wine collection successfully.

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Red Wine is a perfect libation for festivals – primarily because it doesn’t need to be kept cold; it doesn’t lose its fizz and if you’re drinking wine locally produced its dirt cheap and super-good. Within minutes of popping the cork however I’d managed to spill the Rioja on my new pants and was questioning the merits of wine in a situation where a shower is hard to find… when suddenly, with a splash of from my water bottle – the wine was gone. Brilliant! Wine proof pants – what more could a young millennial wine-lover at a music festival wish for? I reckon marketing the pants specifically as wine-proof and selling it at Bonnaroo could be a good gig.

Festivals have become huge in the UK – and I guess the States is now picking up. Winemakers have a huge opportunity to sponsor music festivals – because the combination of music, nature, art and alcohol are what festivals are all about. Festivals have re-invented themselves since the days of Woodstock and are a perfect platform for not only entertaining people, but many organisations use them to spread awareness and raise money.

The Green Man Festival coming up next week is one of the most prominent indie festivals – where, much like the Big Chill – and both less commercially than Glastonbury, it promotes organic food, green living, sustainability etc. There’s a huge oppotunity in this concept and I’d really like to see some of the Oregon wineries putting on some music festivals and promoting their wines together with bands from Washington State and around. Many vineyards have acres of land and there’s plenty scope to host festivals on the vineyard grounds themselves. Once millennials cotton onto the benefits of wine and the contribution of viticulturalists to the environment and to local communities – it’ll certainly be the final push needed.

Now that I’ve found a pair of wine-proof pants; and have finally sprung for a decent festival tent whilst having fallen in love with festivals on the first night of Benicassim in a monent of sitting with my wife and two close friends, Will and Anin, drinking Rioja as a pre-game at the campsite with Sigur Ros about to play… I think it’ll be hard to go back to taking normal holidays.

Hopefully next year the Grapethinking team can bring some of the fabulous Tastevine collection to Bonnaroo and some of the other festivals in the US, and one day to the UK – we’ll provide a tent, picnic blankets and a selection of some of the best and most affordable wines from around the world… we’ll leave the music to the musicians though. Don’t forget to bring wine-proof pants…

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If you are in the mood for traveling, or nearby, you should probably set your sites on one of these cities, as they we’re recently ranked The Top 10 Places to Celebrate July 4th:

1. Boston
2. Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard
3. Chicago
4. Mount Rushmore
5. Philadelphia
6. Queen Mary 2
7. San Diego
8. San Juan Islands
9. US Virgin Islands
10. Washington, DC

Enjoy a safe 4th of July and Happy Birthday America!

What is crazy is that none of these firework shows above will compare to the Thunder over Louisville show.  I know Louisville has a great show, so if you are nearby there (Jeff…), it would probably be worth the trip.  As a child, our family would always trek to see Thunder Over Louisville in early April, which is claimed to be the “Larget Fireworks Show in North America”… here is clip from last year’s show:

Also… We have some exciting changes here at Grape Thinking (inside and outside) that we will be sharing with you soon!  Just in case you haven’t noticed, we have made quite a few changes to our site, and have more to come.

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How dare Senator Clinton come out against Senator Obama, after his over rated comments about small-town America being bitter, with a series of photo-opportunities, going through the motions with a camera crew in tow – and in one audacious clip, pausing to have a sip of beer and drink a shot!

Oh sure Hillary, you drink beer so that makes you working-class.

The idea that a certain product can dictate one’s class is especially infuriating to a real wine-drinker, who recognizes wine’s essentially humble and agricultural roots – much the same as beer. That Clinton thinks that she can relate to the working class man with a photo-op drinking beer demonstrates that she is in fact far more derisory of the working class than she would dare let on. Although Obama may be on record saying that people cling to guns and religion because of economic uncertainty (which may not be entirely untrue), for Clinton to respond by taking a sip of beer and drinking a shot means that she thinks the best way to get the attention of the working class is to show an affinity for the bottle (which is slanderous.) Unwittingly, and thus tellingly, she implies that middle-class America are a bunch of drunks.

It is in follies like this that you can see the Rove-style politics at play, where there is power-play between the have’s and have-nots and well-to-do senators descend into the unwashed masses for the photo-opportunities and a quick ego-boost. However, with the recent Gallup ratings showing Obama’s new lead, we can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that our man Obama will most certainly win in Pennsylvania tomorrow night.

What the Clinton coalition will never understand is that instead of being like a fine wine and maturing with age, they,ve gone sour. Obama has the sparkle and fizz of youth, with the sophistication, complexity and dynamite of champagne. Every time he finishes a speech one feels like celebrating and toasting the future, whilst Clinton’s speeches do nothing more than make you want to imbibe ouzo.

Obama has a fight cut out for him, but I advise you go and buy some champagne today and have it at the ready to pop open tomorrow night: because 20 years from now, you’ll want to be able to tell your children that that’s what you did. Essentially Obama has allowed every citizen to become part of the citizenry. Unlike the last two elections where many Americans felt robbed. Obama, through grass roots movements like An Obama Minute, his crowd surging rallies, online-community, and a winning coalition of tech-savvy , wine-drinking, young and able people the world over has been able to win countless hearts and minds. Being an American president is not so much about experience, but more about being able to take big ideas, and like the epiphanies at the end of a symposium, make people excited about them. And if it’s inspiration America wants, I’d recommend champagne over vinegar.

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To stay in the spirit of Happy Hour, I will be tasting several Tempranillo blends for a client who will soon be releasing a new wine brand. Free wine is AWESOME! Once they get the juice right, we’re going to send out some free samples, so if your interested, contact us

EDIT: We’ve started receiving quite a bit of traffic on this post… To those of you coming from reddit.com, welcome, and Thank You for visiting. I just realized we do not have a link up, so I went and created a CJ Affiliate account for one -> Dotster.com.

Someone else also pointed out the chip dip was AMAZING. I took some photos during the easy 5 step process of making it to share with you, as we did a little tweaking to the recipe.

Step 1 – Get it together

What we used:

8 0z. Cream Cheese
8 oz. Sour Cream
1/2 Red Onion
4 Cloves of Garlic
1 Roasted Red Peppers (sliced is ok)
1 Package of Frech Onion Dip Mix
Garlic and Herb Seasoning
A couple spoons worth of butter
1/2 bottle of Freixenet Brut De Noirs

Step 2 – Before you Drink (5 minutes)

Dice the onion into small pieces (I like this guy’s way of doing it)

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Dice the garlic cloves and roasted red pepper
Set out the Cream Cheese so it will be soft.

Now that we are through with knives, start pouring yourself glasses of champagne!

Step 3 - Heat things up a bit (10-15 minutes)

Take a medium sized skillet and place over medium heat
Melt the butter in the skillet, add the garlic, and enough champagne to cover the bottom of the pan.
Cook the garlic until it starts turning white. Garlic loses its “kick” once it turns white, and considering we are cooking it in the champagne, a small piece should start tasting sweet.

Now take your chopped onions, and add them to your pan. Also, add enough champagne to almost cover the onions. We’ll let them continue to simmer over medium heat until the champagne has been cooked off. At this point, all of the onion should be light pink and slightly translucent in appearance, and have a soft texture with a slight crunch. Remove from heat and let sit for a few minutes.

Step 4 - Mix things up (5 minutes)

We split our cooked onions and garlic into 2 batches at this point, because we did one dip with the red peppers, and one dip without. Place the onions into a mixing bowl, there will be some liquid here which will help the flavor of the dip. Go ahead and add in the packet (or 1/2 packet if your splitting it up) of French Onion Dip Mix, and the Roasted Red Peppers, Green Onions, Jalepenos, or anything else that sounds interesting.

Mix well, then add in the sour cream and cream cheese. Again, I am using half the cream cheese and sour cream in this picture, because I split the onions into 2 batches. Add the garlic and herb seasoning and fresh ground pepper to taste. Place in a container and chill for about an hour

Yes, that is what turned out to be a wise purchase of Chaser Plus in the top right of the above picture. At this point, it was actually 8:23, and the rest of the bottle of champagne was already gone. I’ll have to tell you about Champong, beer pong but with champagne… loads of fun…. which brings us to Step 5

Step 5 - Enjoy (all night long)

Other Ideas:
Cook some extra onions and garlic, and mix with sun-dried tomato and/or hummus to serve with toasted pita bread.
Chill the onion mixture, and add in cilantro and lime and mix with cocktail sauce for shrimp or oysters.
Use the leftover ingredients to make an omelet.

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You have to check out these Champagne Onion recipes we found over at The Gilded Fork. I’m going to make them tomorrow, and have a good idea at the different flavors I can create by using different combinations of sparkling wine and onions. I figured we would make these 3

• “Sweet Vidalia Champagne Onions” – This recipe will make a great chip dip. We’ll cook the onions and some freshly minced garlic in Andre Blush Pink Champagne (a $4 bottle of delicious sparkling rose), and then add sour cream, chives, fresh ground pepper, and some sour cream and onion dip mix.
• “Purple Champagne Onions” – We’ll cook the onions with Hardys or Leasingham (both are a sweet sparkling Shiraz from Australia) or Leasingham then mix with cream cheese, and maybe a little roasted red pepper for spice. Put some sun-dried tomatoes and smoked salmon on a piece of toasted baguette along with a dollop of our extremely colorful sauce, maybe even garnish with a sprinkle of green onion.
• “Champagne Braised Cipollini Onions” – This recipe got me thinking about an entrée , like this beef tenderloin. We’ll cook the onions using Freixenet Spumante (a fruity, dry Cava from Spain) or Mionetto Prosecco Brut (a light Italian Prosecco), then slice them thinly and pour the reduced sauce over them. We’ll either cook a small tenderloin, or grill a filet, then thinly slice it; make sure you let it for 5-10 min. before slicing so it stays tender and moist. On each slice, place some onion sauce and horseradish cream (horseradish and sour cream). If I have a hard time finding Cipollini Onions, I’m sure the Vidalias would also work great.

Most people will go out this holiday season and buy bottles of Andre and Cook’s, both from California, which are a great and inexpensive way to bring in the New Year. The Cava, Prosecco, and Sparkling Shiraz mentioned in the recipes are also great imported wines for toasting a New Year, plus I don’t think any of them are over $20.

So go out during the Holidays and buy any bottle of Champagne or Sparkling White Wine, pop the cork if you feel the need because whatever you find enjoyable whether it be a loud or soft pop, is your preference. If hanging out with a cultured crowd the flamboyant procedure might not be advised. Sit back and let the bubbles tickle your throat and get jazzed about a healthy and prosperous New Year!

Quick Lesson: Champagne is a wine region in France located about 100 miles east of Paris. It is legally divided into 5 wine producing ‘districts’: the Aube, Côte des Blancs, Côte de Sézanne, Montagne de Reims, and Vallée de la Marne. Champagne/Sparkling Wine is generally marked as Extra Brut, Brut, Extra dry, Sec and Demi-sec, depending on how sweet they are. Extra bruit is extremely dry, while demi-sec is the sweetest.

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