MOG is one of the newer communities to have arisen and it’s dedicated to music and features profiles of musicians like Ben Gibbard. Unlike MySpace, which has become slightly commercialized and is used by every petty marketer to invite people to parties or sell cell-phones, MOG is strictly for music. What I like about the site is the ability to see as well as listen to what other people listen to; there’s a MOG-O-METER which reads all your most recently played iTunes tracks, and then it makes recommendations of what you should listen to. Better than that, you can actually listen to music on other people’s pages for free, without downloading it.

Calwineries.com is a perfect example of how such brand innovation has stepped out of the music-only sphere and can be applied to wine. The formation of a community is exactly what the industry needs, wine people like talking, and so there are discussion boards, there’s information about any California winery you need, and one can even find emerging industry heavyweights such as Pinotblogger weighing in, which makes for a promising and powerful voice to be addressing this emerging wine community. Josh@pinotblogger.com has really opened up communication, with the recently launched Podcast and by going so far as to publish his cell-phone number on the blog, there’s no doubt that such graceful transparency is the future of wine marketing, especially for wines like Capozzi, and Stormhoek, and Vilafonte, which have all made unbelievable use of the online channel in building brands.

However, my feeling is that many California Wineries already enjoy a voice, and it’d be great if the conversation could be expanded and was between California and the world, rather than just California and California. Thinking about it this morning while reading The Pour where Asimov had quite recently spoken about various Natural wines, and linked through to a particular Rioja winery-site which enables you to do a cellar door tour, I couldn’t help but thinking that there’s a bigger picture here. Focusing on California when you have the entire world to talk about is to look too closely at the grapes when there’s an entire vineyard (to plagiarize seeing the wood through the trees.)

Grape Radio had a fantastic Podcast a while back from a Pinot Symposium, and wine-makers from Peay Vineyards and around were all discussing Pinot Clones and Swan, which had been gotten from Burgundy. However, the same clones have also gone to South Africa, New Zealand and Oregon, and it would be much more interesting to hear a world symposium where top growers held a tasting and related experiences of the same clone in completely different continents, let alone terroir? In real life it would be expensive to organize, but if the discussion were held online, where winemakers could freely exchange comments on a single discussion board, not just wineries from California, but wineries from across the globe, much interest could be sparked and a lot could be gained.Long term, it is not only an opportunity for foreign wines to get share of mouth in the US, but it’s also for Californian and US wines to get mind-share overseas. The best known Californian wine in the UK is Gallo, and if you want to find Frog’s Leap or anything from upstate New York you simply can’t, whilst you can find wine from Uruguay or Argentina quite easily in any London store.

Capozzi and Stormhoek, though from different countries entirely, have a lot to learn from one another, but at the moment there isn’t a platform to do it on. Grape Thinking, as many of you have guessed by now, will be that platform. In the coming months we’re going to launch an international wine community, where oenophiles will not only be able to affiliate themselves with global wineries, but they’ll be able to purchase the wine and review it themselves. Israeli Wines, a particular passion of mine, amongst others, will be given a platform to not only market themselves on the same platform as Australia and New Zealand, but because its digital there will be no fights for shelf-space or case-displays. Grapethinking will be the ‘digital vine’ connecting global vineyards, winemakers, bloggers, restaurateurs and wine lovers into the first global digital cocktail party where wine, opinions and dreams can be shared.

Claude Levi-Strauss, whom has nothing to do with the jeans, concerned himself with the structural formation of myth in society. Recently, in thinking about wine, and how some of its original uses were to have a drink that did not come from tainted lakes, I came to a rather important realization. Many of our forefathers relied on wine-consumption, and only later did people begin to drink it socially. Levi-Strauss would perhaps tell us that wine has thus developed a mythical status in culture, and by the principles of evolutionary psychology, the act of drinking wine may no longer be for survival, but what remains is the primitive feeling of relief at having wine, which is as engrained in our being as is the feeling of happiness at Spring time.

One of the reasons that human beings find that wine and food go so well together, is because human beings used to drink wine with their food out of necessity. Secondly, wine and travel also go hand in hand, as people used to carry gourds of wine on journeys. Now let us get to the ‘New World.’ Many of the colonies belonging to Spain, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Britain were strategic outposts or refuelling stations along the trade-routes. When one is on a ship for months, it is impossible to keep water fresh in barrels. Though the Caribbean pirates may have solved the problem with rum, the Spaniards and the Dutch drank wine and fortified wine (brandy and port) to keep their thirst quenched whilst at high-seas. So, if we think about our ancestors, a rather apt image would be galleons of tipsy sailors, blindly navigating uncharted territories in the name of discovery and conquest, whilst getting progressively more enthused and courageous as they drank from their gourds, hence the term ‘Dutch courage.’

Jan van Riebeeck (South Africa’s equivalent of Columbus, except from Holland) is known to have planted vines he had been keeping on the journey on the very day he first landed on South African shores. In fact, many of the Spanish and Dutch sailors, though they left their wives at home until the second voyage, were sure to pack seedlings of grape vines on the first. In those days men survived months without a woman, but could barely go a day without wine. One can see evidence of this in New World vineyards, in that many wine producing regions are close to sea-ports (New York, San Francisco, Cape Town), and only later in the region’s history, do vineyards go more inland.

In my mind’s eye I sometimes envision myself and other wine-guys as a intrepid explorers, unsung hero of agriculture, straight from the colonies of the Old Empire, setting foot on American soil to flaunt fabulous produce and bring a taste of the world to your doorstep.

Going back to my days as a wine promoter, it was of course at the first appointment of the day when I was forced to taste my first glass of wine (retailers get suspicious when you appear to not be drinking your own product.) And true, even though one does their best to spit, it is impossible for the alcohol to not permeate into the body through the blood-rich tissue beneath the tongue. As the days progresses, the feeling of my sailing forefathers enters my body, and I feel like an intrepid explorer on the wild avenues of Manhattan, conquering restaurants with this mystical juice that comes with many tales of a foreign land.

Even though wine is no longer necessary to our survival, as Levi-Strauss would confirm, it has gone from having mythical status to entering the everyday vernacular, and from here on, wine is a part of our lives and engrained within our consciousness!

Perhaps I allow myself to get carried away on romantic flights of fancy that wax lyrical of what some people may see as no more than an alcoholic beverage. However, I wouldn’t be the only one to be seduced by the juice’s fancy, after all, over the ages red wine has proved to be a catalyst for poetry, imagination, philosophy, politics, civilization, culture and love.

The word ‘epicurean’ is frequently used in reference to wine, and I suspect seldom fully understood. At the height of classical antiquity, Epicurus established his Garden School on the outskirts of Athens and it was quite different from the Platonists, the Stoics or the Pythagoreans, in that the students lived at the school. Central to the school was their kitchen-garden off of which the entire community subsisted.

It is often thought that to be epicurean is to be hedonistic. But in fact, the truth is quite the contrary. In living off of the garden epicureans stressed that people should only take as much as they need and be grateful for everything they had, and gluttony was seen as the highest form of ingratitude. Appreciate of wine and nature was lorded but to be drunk or destructive was frowned upon.

Gardening was seen as central, because there is so much in maintaining a garden that relates to the fundamental laws of a balanced life: patience, care, cultivation and replenishment. It was thought that a man cannot have a full life if he is not connected to the earth. Especially in the past decade we have seen the disastrous effects of what can happen when we do not put effort back into the earth.

Epicurus stressed that men should seek the maximum enjoyment from the smallest pleasure. That life should not be boastful, and that people should seek pleasure in friendship, and that friendship should be enjoyed by sharing pleasure: food, conversation and wine. Boredom is ingratitude for the moment, and if one has good company and good wine, a moment should never be left in wanting more.

However, to be a good friend with good conversation requires one to cultivate themselves (have a fertile mind) through being well read and deep thinking. Of course the more friendships one has the more thoughtful and loquacious they will be. And an appreciation of wine requires you to sit with the wine, and be in the moment (quite the opposite of Tequila shots at the bar… although, there’s a time and a place for that too.)

This year, the buzz word around Napa has been ‘sustainability‘ and increasingly, in the cultivation of grapes people have been caring for the environment more and more.

There is no doubt then that an increase in vineyards due to increased wine consumption will benefit the environment by helping combat the build up of greenhouse gases; that spending more time with friends will improve your time and that drinking red wine will give you a longer life.

Drinking wine is not only an investment in a vineyard, its an investment in the earth, a stake in your own future and an opportunity to get to know more about yourself and those who are close to you.

One of California’s legends, Ernest Gallo, passed away on Tuesday. E & J Gallo Winery, founded shortly after prohibition brought American wine to the world and brought wine to all of America. The renowned Gallo sales-training, which I’ve heard referred to as ‘wine boot camp’ created a generation of Americans in the know and passionate about wine and was undoubtedly the catalyst which ignited the wine industry in the US.

Two out of every three bottles of wine sold in the USA are Californian and one out of every four carries the Gallo label. There is very little that we should take for granted regarding Ernest Gallo’s legacy, Gallo were the first wines to suggest food pairings on the bottle, which is now an industry standard. With the United States as the largest consumer in the world, and many countries having the US as their number one export destination, we can be sure that vineyards, winemakers and wine lovers around the world will take pause from their days to be thankful that such a man ever walked the earth.

For those wishing to express their gratitude and leave their condolences, an online Legacy Book has been created in his honour.

Ernest Gallo, Grape Thinking salutes you.

As many of you may know, we have been working for a while in creating some innovative solutions for wineries to help them reach their customers. One of the elephants in the room is Direct-to-Consumer and Direct-to-Trade sales.

We have recently spent quite a bit of time talking with wineries about some of our new methods, one of which being direct sales, and have received some very favorable responses, as well as some opposition.

One of the biggest “fears” expressed by wineries, especially the smaller ones, is they feel obligated to only use their current sales channel. Their fear is: if they were to begin selling direct, their distributors, who are fighting direct sales instead of asking how they can be a part of it, will take it as a slap in the face, and then either: A) refuse to continue distributing their wines; or B) become complacent in marketing the wines because they feel their efforts may be futile if the end consumer purchases the wine online. This is because they are not receiving any commission… because again, this particular distributor is not trying to find a way to become involved in direct sales, and instead is fighting it. Read the rest of this entry »