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Wine Proof Pants

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

On a recent trip to the Benicassim Festival in Spain, I purchased a pair of quick-dry camping pants from Titanium for the trip. Walking to outside the festival grounds and sitting on our back-packs whilst waiting for the campsite to open, we took the opportunity to crack a bottle of Rioja we’d got on RENFE (a quick note on RENFE – if you’re on the site and can’t select English you need to select the drop-down labelled Seleccione su Idioma to make it so, which means you have to speak Spanish to get the site into English, go figure!)

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.

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Posted in Culture, Events, Lifestyle, Music, Passion, Wine | View Comments

Millennials Prefer Personable Eco-Friendly Brands

Monday, July 21st, 2008

The big brands will destroy the world if left to continue along their current course unchecked.” The future of the world thus depends on the little guy, the independent store and the niche label – and thus whilst the big brand peddling baby-boomers have been the antithesis of what the world needs, the mass label eschewing millennials will save the world.

The crux of the problem lies in what Robert Reich in his book Supercapitalism labels ‘socialised capitalism’: which is ultimately a form of capitalism that allows the rich to get rich with no obligation to share their wealth; and then when the rich go bust (ala Bear Stearns) then socialism kicks in and everyone shares in the losses. The essence of the open-source industry is akin to the blogosphere in that it is a platform upon which ideas are shared with no restriction. Ultimately, wine shares much in common with this ideology in that its wealth is often shared out along the supply chain more evenly than in say, the motor-industry where practically everyone from the production line workers to the environment gets a raw deal. (more…)

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Caveau Wine Bar, Heritage Square, Cape Town

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Caveau Wine Bar Caveau is a good escape from Long Street’s chiaroscuro of either uber-pretentious or super-scummy dives… I swear I will never set foot in Miam Miam again but Marvel also grows a little old once you tire of becoming a human bolus being masticated against the gyrating bodies of every tourist and pick-pocket in Cape Town.

Caveau is a breath of fresh air for the city centre, with an urban-rustic feel to it, combining class and elegance with a laid back environment. The design, lay out and mood leave you feeling like you’ve stepped out of Cape Town and discovered a more modern Franschoek. On the three occasions I’ve been there I’ve shared a bottle of their 2004 Spice Route Mourvedre. Accustomed to the Cape’s usual Noble varietals it’s amazing to see how well other cultivars benefit from the Cape’s rich soils. This is a nice big red that has a faint bloody-Maryesque note on the nose. It’s great to see how this Spanish wine has done – bring on Tempranillo!

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Posted in Restaurant Review, Travel, Wine Review | View Comments

Some Good Shit

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

MintyLike many a webworker – I’m addicted to Podcasts and am pretty much plugged in on a daily basis to the best of APM, NPR, Guardian News Media, Grape Radio etc. Robert Krulwich of NPR did a show the other day about the MIT Bioengineering faculty, and the dawn of a new species under the fostering care of some students with olfactory concerns. You can listen to the show here, but basically the show discusses how for bio-engineering students – life is spent in fume cupboards culturing e-coli in a petri-dishes, and due to the fact that e-coli smells like, er, smells like, well… shit, these students applied their trade to splice out the shit-smelling gene from the e-coli and replace it with the gene from Wintergreen that makes Wintergreen smell like Spearmint resulting in good smelling shit.

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Posted in Design, Millennials, Stories, Thoughts, Wine | View Comments

Obama’s Wine Millennials

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Sour-grapes for Hillary Clinton, whose rotting cynicism is no match for Obama’s sparkle. There’s no doubt that if politicians were wine – Hillary is vinegar and Obama is champagne.

Sour Hill

Champagne Man

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.

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