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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jake and Greg were at The Grape this last weekend, and over the past year or so in our brainstorms The Grape has come up time and again as a place that just gets it. Take for example their wine list and wine food recommendations - which is perhaps the first time I’ve ever seen a wine list that makes sense.

We know how different Shiraz can show, that Sauvignon Blanc rarely has the same face region to region and that Pinot Grigio doesn’t always go well with food - and a restaurant/ bar does its clientèle no favors by just dividing wine into Red and White, or they divide it into countries - and the emerging trend is to divide it into varietals.

The Grape does something unheard of to date: they divide their wine into taste. More than that they then give you a taste profile match on their menu, dish by dish. I have probably sampled less than a thousand wines in my life - and I certainly don’t remember all the names because I’m no Michael Broadbent. When I’m looking at a wine, I want to know its taste flavor profile - and if I’m paying $20 a bottle, I’ll be pretty ticked if its not what I want. This kind of a menu system is helpful to anyone… I know because when I’m out to dinner with friends they always ask me to help pick the wine: but The Grape allows people to choose the wine for themselves. What I further like about The Grape is that its more than a restaurant - because their venues are usually really good places to just hang out. It’s a destination brand - allowing dining, entertainment, exploration and with their innovative wine list: education. It’s really refreshing to see a mainstream brand that has begun to take its customer’s taste seriously.

allows you to design your own tasting flight of three or more wines from our One through Eight Grape classifications and from our Nine and Ten Grape specials. Choose from all wines with a “Grape Bunch” designation in our wine menu to create your unique tasting flight, served in our special glasses for your ultimate tasting experience. At The Grape, Your Taste is All that Counts.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Many bugs, many fixes… we’re getting closer to something good. Design, UI, functionality, aesthetics is more than half the prize. Check out this new mock-up…

Read the rest of this entry »

We did a site update today… tried to make it a bit tighter. We also got our Tastevine banner up, which just links to our splash page. Go ahead and sign up for the email newsletter if interested.

We’re going live with the site this coming Monday the 28th. It should be pretty cool. We’ve got 100,000+ wines with about a million tags, as well as thousands of recipes, so you can start playing around with as many search ideas as you can think of to find a wine or recipe that you’re looking for.

We’re also going to have TasteID user profiles where you sign up, rate the top wines for each of 12 varietals, and thereby personalize your Tastevine experience allowing you to get more customized recommendations based on your specific taste profile. This will be a really useful feature for you winos out there looking to discover a new wine that’s just right for you as well as those novices just getting into wine and looking to enhance their taste experience.

The food and recipes won’t have as advanced a rating system to start, but when you find a wine, there will be generally recommended recipes and foods for that wine. The key is to start using, contributing, and rating, which makes the system more valuable to everyone.

Once people have started to rate the same things, Tastevine will provide you with recommendations by matching you with your ‘taste budds’, who will be other members that have similar taste profiles. This gets around the problem of getting recommendations from one critic or reviewer who’s trying to appeal to all. Instead you get matched up to others like yourself. Hopefully, this will build a strong element of trust in the community fueled technology.

We’re really excited about this and look forward to everyone’s feedback.