We’ve worked really hard over the past 6 months to establish our first client Tastevine as its own company, and feel very good about our work. We now feel it’s time to take what we’ve learned and become a more well rounded marketing and technology company. Holistic, I guess you could say… servicing the full holistic lifestyle.

Wine is a big part of this, and so is organic food, natural medicine, renewable consumer goods, social apps & games that bring people together. The whole deal.  We feel this represents who we truly are, as it represents the change we want to see in the world. Furthermore, with the clients we’ve been working with outside of the wine industry, it is clear that a holistic marketplace should be the focus of our services. In talking to people about this growth, we’ve received mixed reviews. Some say we should remain a wine company and others see us becoming something more.

Check out these rough mockups for our banner… a picture says a thousand words as they say. Click the images to see an enlarged view. One attempts to show a big evolution outside of wine and the other shows something more subtle.

Which one is in the right direction? What would you suggest?

Like 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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Pinot Noir is the McDaddy of wine grapes - and that’s supposed to be quite literally. Some time back I was listening to grape radio, and they featured a symposium on Pinot Noir where it was said that the oldest vines in the world, discovered in archaeological sites and then tested, were most similar to Pinot Noir - placing it in the same class as Australopithecus (perhaps a brand idea there. Australopithecus Pinot Noir. perhaps not!)

We take clones from vines, because the seeds will only produce a genetic mix of the plant the seed-bearing vine and the male plant which fertilised the seeds with its pollen. To get an exact replica - we need to take a cutting and graft it onto root-stock. Anyone who has ever tried out their green thumb at college whilst cultivating non-medical marijuana will be well acquainted with this process!

So, it stands to reason that nearly all varietals are derivative of Pinot Noir and have evolved over thousands of years of not only by natural selection - but farmer’s intervention as well. I’m sorry to break it to any wine-creationists out there that all the vines in the world didn’t just miraculously appear - but that’s what botany tells us anyway, and it’s generally wise to give science the last word!

As Pinot Noir is thought to be the source of all things winey, this particular article: The Grapevine Genome Sequenced, is rather interesting as it comments on the genetic sequencing of Pinot Noir. A few commentators weren’t quite sure how they felt about it - however, its been known for a while that certain farmers began splicing rat genes into tomatoes a while back in order to save tomatoes from being susceptible to frost (obviously this is part true, part urban legend.) I don’t see the problem really - for places like South Africa, which battle with leaf-roll virus - or others that are threatened by Phyloxeras or horn-beetle or harsh tannins etc. Imagine we could make all vines seedless - this would greatly reduce bitter tannins released in careless crushing. We could even make grapes less susceptible to oxidization and microbes, and reduce the need for using S02 - making red wines more accessible and less tannic.

However - where do we stop? Will wine-makers be Willy Wonkas, with Umpa-Lumpa’s crushing the grapes and fantastical scientists making wine that tastes amazing in curious and fantastic ways, with oenophiles waiting to get into the special wineries, where passage is given only to those who have a bottle with a golden screw-cap?

I’ve read a few articles about nano-technology’s potential implications on food and wine. Its hard to know what to say about this without getting into slippery slope arguments where people may forecast the end of wine as we know it if we permit too much tampering. However - if we consider that all wines are derivative of Pinot Noir, then it would seem that nature has done a lot of its own tampering, and its probably worth buying a lot of wine now and lying it on its side, because its going to be very interesting to compare the taste of now, to that of the rapidly approaching future.

The World Cup of Rugby is just around the corner and will be upon us in September. Now I know that American’s don’t really give too much attention to the amazing sport: but this year is perhaps a year to change your mind. As you may or may not know - France, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, Italy and New Zealand over and above being awesome regions for the production of wine - are also the world’s top Rugby players. In the rest of the world outside of America, we genuinely mean ‘world’ when we affix the term ‘world’ before a sports tournament - and thus watching one of theses series’ is about more than sport: it’s about international unity, global community and solidarity. This year the tournament is taking place in France (it only happens every four years) and so - for any of you curious globally oriented wine lovers out there, nows a chance to get yourself to France, participate with the rest of the world and get a taste of some great wines and some of the global culture too. For those of you unable to go - fear not - the World Cup of Wines , which is a virtual live wine-tasting taking place on September 1st, 7:30pm-9:30pm at the Virtual Wine website, where they’ll be pitting the wines of Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Argentina and South Africa against one another - so switch on, pull up a chair, get some wine and pick a side. The folks at Virtual Wine have done some pretty cool events in the past, which shows that this could pretty easily become a trend in the future of world wine tastings.

However - with the intent of drawing some attention to the of my passions - travel, wine and rugby - www.grapethinking.com in association with www.tastevine.com will be hosting our very own Wine World Cup for the month of September.

For every day in September myself and a handful of the wine blogerati (volunteers welcome) will be doing one review on one wine per day for each of the six countries. That’s 180 posts in total (and a lot of wine to be drunk.) I’ve already got 16 bottles which I will begin opening this weekend to start my reviews. At the end of each week we will decide on a winner - and at the end of the competition there will be one country and that comes out tops.

TasteVine is working on planning a few live wine world cup events in the south, which will be an opportunity to taste 6 wine regions at once, and an enormous variation in style, flavor and taste.

In addition we’ll be awarding prizes (details to follow) to people who make comments and having a random draw for people who subscribe to our blog during the duration of the competition.

I’ll be giving regular, brief updates of the goings on the the actual teams who are playing - and all in all this is a blog event which hopes to spark interest in global culture and give us all a good excuse to go out and try a lot of different wine!

The first post for the World Cup of Wine will appear at 10am EST on September 1st. We’re accepting reviews before then - and will be sure to feature any reviews we receive. Get tasting and may the best wine win!

One of the songs in the brilliant broadway musical ‘Avenue Q‘ is entitled ‘the internet is for porn.’ And today I discovered that that may well be true. Food Porn that is.

Food Porn promotes porn paraphernalia, food porn movies and they even have an array of food porn photos. For the dedicated Wino or Foodie however - the site has an excellent application called Food Porn Watch.

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