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June 8 2007
Jeff’s/Good Grape Note: I’m on a 10 day sabbatical from Good Grape, returning over the weekend of June 16th/17th
In lieu of wine-related posts, I’m taking the opportunity to pull a page from the, “To know a man, look at his bookshelf” school of thought, but instead of my bookshelf, I’m highlighting an RSS feed a day that I keep up with that is non wine-related—grist for the mill, so to speak.
See you back, recharged, invigorated with headspace de-gunked in about a week.
The Blog: Indy Undercover
Site URL: http://indyundercover.blogspot.com/
What I like about the site: Admittedly, this site has little to zero relevance to those outside of the Circle City, but this is another one of my fave blogs. The anonymous author(s) seem to be on the inside of the police department and this blog reads like a public watchdog manifesto combined with a true crime novel.
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June 7 2007
Jeff’s/Good Grape Note: I am on a 10 day sabbatical from the site, returning over the weekend of June 16th/17th
In lieu of wine-related posts, I’m taking the opportunity to pull a page from the, “To know a man, look at his bookshelf” school of thought, but instead of my bookshelf, I’m highlighting an RSS feed a day that I keep up with that is non wine-related—grist for the mill, so to speak.
See you back, recharged, invigorated with headspace de-gunked in about a week.
The Blog: Lifehacker
Site URL: http://www.lifehacker.com/
What I like about the site: In this day and age, most of us are blazing through the day trying to be at once progressively aggressive while maintaining some level of balance in equilibrium. If only we could be more productive with our time.
Technology tools abound around all of us, but we mostly use maybe 10% of the productivity available in a given technology. Lifehacker helps unlock the other 90%, giving quick, simple easy to digest tips along the way making us all a little more productive one tip at a time.
Posted in, Influences. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print |
June 6 2007
Jeff’s/Good Grape Note: I’m on a 10 day sabbatical from writing posts, returning over the weekend of June 16th/17th
In lieu of wine-related posts, I’m taking the opportunity to pull a page from the, “To know a man, look at his bookshelf” school of thought, but instead of my bookshelf, I’m highlighting an RSS feed a day that I keep up with that is non wine-related—grist for the mill, so to speak.
See you back, recharged, invigorated with headspace de-gunked in a week or so.
The Blog: Blog Maverick
Site URL: http://www.blogmaverick.com/
What I like about the site: Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA franchise the Dallas Mavericks, went to school at Indiana University and went on to make his millions with broadcast.com in the late 90’s. If anything, he has a knack for timing, understands the big picture and isn’t afraid to take a punch, or give a punch. I like him, or at least his provocative ideas and his public persona.
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June 5 2007
I’d love for this to be a Paul Harvey-esque, “Now you know the rest of the story” kind of post, but the reality is, I’m not sure where the inspiration for the California Association of Winegrape Grower’s (CAWG) newly announced public relations campaign came from and thus have no magic insight into the backstory.
I do know it’s clever and a man can speculate on its origins; great minds think alike, but more on that in a second.
The premise of the campaign is that the CAWG declared the state of California an “independent country where life is grape, citizens have the right to bear vines and Arnold Schwarzenegger can be President. The nation, whose credo is “One Nation Under Vines,” takes its rightful place alongside France, Italy and Spain as a leading wine-producing country. And its Declaration of Independence invites wine-lovers to visit onenationundrevines.com to explore wine country.”
Winebusiness.com noted in their article, found here:
Karen Ross, CAWG President, and a group of winegrape growers from throughout California unveiled the new “nation’s” Declaration of Independence, which says, in part “We, California’s winegrape growers, hold these truths to be self-evident: that California produces some of the best-tasting and highest quality winegrapes in the world; that California boasts an unrivaled diversity of climates and soils; that California is a leader in sustainable winegrape growing practices and innovation; and that life, liberty and the pursuit of great wine is the cornerstone of our society.”
It’s a fun idea. But, this post would be more impactful if I had already stolen some of their thunder, in a micro- blogging sense, by doing a post that I’ve had in my ‘rainy day, I’m not feeling creative, I don’t know what I want to write about and my wife is bugging me to get off the computer’ file for about two months. I recently bought a book called, “The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations.” My intention was to do an absurdist post about creating a sovereign micronation in my wine cellar, or something like that. It would have been funny and creative and …a clever idea … that is, until somebody, you know, like professional and all actually created a whole damn PR campaign around the same idea. Now, if I do it its derivative AND trite.
I applaud the CAWG for doing something daring, light-hearted AND FUN. There’s not much balance in the wine industry between serious and fun—usually you’re on one side of the fence or the other, and the fun side of the fence gets lumped in with the “critter” labels. This manages to do both, effectively.
If only I would have done it first …
If I had written a post first, I might have actually tied it into a recent article from The Globe and Mail, Canada’s more newsy equivalent to the USA Today. The article, found here, is titled, “It’s in the Vault, Your Man’s Secret Wine Stash.”
The premise of the article is guys that um, well, kind of keep how much wine they’re buying, like, you know, secret from their wife.
From the article:
James, a Toronto tax lawyer, has a very happy marriage. He shares everything with his wife - everything, that is, except how much wine he’s buying.
“I have stashes in lots of different places,” he admits guiltily over the phone from his Bay Street office (he agreed to be interviewed on condition that his real name not be used). “I have periodically spent thousands of dollars on wine unbeknownst to my wife.”
The need for subterfuge came about, he says, after his wife looked at a credit-card statement several years ago and told him, “No more wine for six months.”
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Though, admittedly, my buying is on a much smaller scale and definitely limited to a hundred bucks here and there.
But, I have had to answer questions about the wine that is multiplying exponentially in the basement despite my wife never actually seeing me bring wine into the house.
Try and explain that one.
My wife says, “Honey, why does it seem like there is twice as much wine in the basement then there was at the start of the year, but I never see you bring it in the house from the store. Where does it come from and what money is being used to buy it because it doesn’t seem to be coming out of the checkbook?”
This line of inquiry brings me back full circle to my desire to establish a micronation around my cellar—a micronation in which I am supreme dictator, suffering no fools and answering only to the inner voice in my head that says, “yes, you need another $20 Syrah that should be drunk in the next 3-5 years.”
The problem is, my wife, being the strong woman that she is, would stage a bloody coup and overthrow the gov’t of my micronation, deposing my benevolent dictatorship.
Working ahead of Paul Harvey, that would be “The rest of the story …“
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (1) | Print |
June 3 2007
On the heels of the Wine 2.0 event last week (see Tom from Fermentation’s review post here), I have to say that I’m surprised (real surprised) when I also read last week:
In a recent study by Internet Retailer Magazine, Wine.com was ranked the #1 online wine store for the third consecutive year. The company ranked #13 in the food and drug category and #199 among all online retailers, based on 2006 annual web revenues.
“We just completed a survey of nearly 1,400 of our customers, and 96% said they’d recommend us to a friend,” said Mike Osborn, Wine.com Founder and VP of Merchandising. “That’s the most important metric to us, and that’s the reason we’re among the top 200 largest web retailers in the country.”
Wine.com is the #1 online wine retailer for the 3rd year in a row!? All of their customers are happy to refer Wine.com to a friend!? Interesting factoids for sure and here’s the rub: Wine.com exhibits zero, zip, zilch in the way of Web 2.0 technologies—no blog, no community, no RSS feeds, no nothing. Half-baked user reviews provide marginal value and limited interactivity. While perfectly contemporary as far as online commerce goes these days, Wine.com certainly hasn’t moved the needle in progressiveness and could just as easily be a site circa year 2000.
Unfortunately, when contemplating this lack of progressiveness through the filter of wine technologists, bloggers and such, this news of Wine.com being the leading retailer should really give anybody in our little jet stream reason for pause.
Why? Because while we’re busy sniffing our own exhaust thinking about how we’re changing the wine world while Twittering our tasting notes from a comfy spot at a wine bar, the reality is that outside of our own convergence of technology wherewithal coupled with wine passion, there’s still heaps of people that just buy wine online and don’t do anything else. This group of people is significantly smaller, it should be noted, than people that just simply buy wine at the store and don’t do anything online short of checking email.
Read Tom’s excerpt from the above mentioned post. Then, re-read it:
I think my only real interesting contribution to the second panel, of which I was a part, was pointing out that the wine 2.0 phenomenon may be no more complex than a new set of technologies by which wineries communicate their story and product line to consumers, something they’ve been doing with some success with different technology long before the Internet. This would be the less reverent view of the wine 2.0 phenomenon. The most reverent view of this thing we celebrated on Friday would be the view that Online Social networking around wine will change the way all Americans understand the beverage and lead to a startling democratization of the beverage that will lead laggards to the party in the dust.
Tom makes a very, very critical and important point. While he doesn’t mine the gap between his open-ended question about Wine 2.0 potentially being no more complex than a new set of technologies for wineries to communicate and a larger view of Wine 2.0 being a social networking revolution, certainly Wine.com makes the current point for him.
In order for Wine 2.0 to mean anything beyond “point” solutions and one-off customer communities, no more advanced then bulletin boards, one of the pillars from the very earliest stages of the Internet, somebody has to build a bridge to sustainable, leading, cutting-edge wine commerce. Somebody has to knock Wine.com off their perch.
I hope we rise to the occasion.
Good Grape Update 06/06/07: My previous assertion that Wine.com doesn’t follow Web 2.0 practices wasn’t entirely correct. A couple of good folks from Wine.com have updated me and they do offer RSS Feeds. I always fact-check myself to make sure these sorts of corrections aren’t necessary, but in this case they are right. Thanks, as well, to the guys from Wine.com for being gracious about their mention.
Posted in, Around the Wine Blogosphere. Permalink | Comments (14) | Print |
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