On the Friday of Wine 2.0 we decided to treat ourselves and head to The Slanted Door. We had intended, naively, to go for supper - only to find that it was booked out for two weeks straight. As we walked in with the last of the luncheoners, we were able to wangle a seat - which immediately called for a miniature celebration in the form of two classic Austrian wines.

For Greg it was the Gruner Vetline Shmelz, and for myself I chose the Csersgezi Fuszeres, Hill Top. Both were smooth, floral, off-dry and crisp - perfect for an afternoon lunch, especially seeing as we had a conference to go to. A wine conference it may have been - but a conference none-the-less.

Crispy Imperial Rolls with *shrimp, pork and glass noodles* Amazing, we got this starter to share, and we were served five of the little suckers on a plate. The only thing better than a novel food - is a novel way of consuming food. Hence my personal preference to eating with chopsticks at restaurants; hand making tortillas; enjoying Mongolian stir-fries; eating Indian or Persian food with my bare hands; the occasional shot of tequila and of course - shucking oysters straight from the rock and eating them with lemon, Tabasco and salt. It’s all about the process and trying to make it all more tactile - and for being a day-to-day knife and fork person, any food or process that breaks the norm is a welcome addition to my repertoire.

We photographed the process of eating the crispy imperial roll which involves:

1. laying out a piece of lettuce
2. placing a piece of mint on the lettuce
3. adding a lump of noodles on top
4. inserting the Crispy Imperial Roll
5. rolling it all into a consumable ball
6. dipping it into the teriyaki and plumb sauce
7. stuffing it all into your mouth and rolling your eyes back into your head because its just so good.

The Slanted Door is an incredibly popular restaurant in San Francisco and they only use organic produce and ecologically farmed meat. It’s nice to see people’s taste buds moving in the right direction.

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.

Having just checked back in at Khymos’ site - I realize that I missed the boat for TGRWT #1 by somehow having thought that the deadline was tomorrow when it was actually May 1st. Anyhow - I’m going to have to go for it as a late entry!

The idea of tuna steaks was a little crazy, and it tasted crazier. I thought of creating a mocha sauce for a tuna steak based on a meal I’d had at a very eccentric restaurant some time ago in Cape Town. However - although it was palatable, it had far more of a novelty effect than anything else.

However, last night, with some advice from my mother, I think I managed to crack the formula. My mother reminded me that garlic, like onion, became sweet when it was roasted. My mistake with the Garlic, Chocolate and Coffee sauce was that I didn’t roast the garlic first.

So based on a recipe for chocolate covered strawberries on my resource for any recipe, www.AllRecipes.com, I set to work on the TGWRT #1 challenge.

The amazing thing about this recipe is how quick it is. Roasting the garlic takes around 15 minutes, and while its roasting the sauce can be made just as easily.

I grated 80% cocoa Green and Blacks into a double boiler along with 2 spoons of shortening. Once the chocolate had melted I added a teaspoon of roast Kenyan coffee beans into the mixture; and then proceeded to take each clove of garlic, skewered on a cocktail stick, and dip them into the mixture and setting it down on plate. All in all I had ten dipped cloves, which I put in the fridge.

In an effort to do a double duty we had the mocha-cloves as an after dinner sweet, together with the General Billy’s Syrah Grenache. The entire General Billy’s concept is great, but as this blog tries to stay faithful to small, country specific producers, it can’t win by ultimate pick for WBW.

However, the Gaullist undergrowth aromas and red berry flavours were a perfect accomplice to the mocha-dipped cloves. Altogether, although late, the TGRWT #1 challenge has been great fun, and really challenged my limited culinary faculties. The opportunity to combine it with Wine Blogger Wednesday has also been great. I wonder if Khymos could help us finding chemically related food pairings.

Who would’ve thought that a Languedoc Syrah/Grenache and a skewered clove of roasted garlic dipped in coffee and chocolate sauce would be such fine companions - bring on the White Chocolate and Caviar challenge, I think it’d go really well with Sancerre Rose.

Wine is such that even the most simple pairing can have a tremendous effect on its expression within the mouth… tarting the sweetness, accentuating the fruit forward, building its body, etc… There is a satirical piece by W. R. Tish (PN) at Wine For All about how one of the executive editors of Wine Spectator had some chorizo sausage and cheese with a Spanish wine he was rating and it complemented the Tempranillo so well that he gave it a 101 point rating, and then was admitted to the hospital for hyper-euphoria. The story went on to say (paraphrased) that food pairing has added such a dimension to wine, that an 85 point wine could easily become a 95 point wine, and vice-versa, and that because of this discovery, wine ratings will start spiraling out of control. Not necessarily a fan of the current rating systems, as they are not representative of how the wine rates to your/my taste, the message was well understood.

For many of those who are just beginning to adventure into the world of wine, one of the more overwhelming responsibilities is pairing wine with food. Even more burdensome is the thought that you may pair something so terribly wrong that the independently great meal or wine is inevitably ruined. This rarely happens of course, but that doesn’t mean the thought isn’t a source of stress for the uneducated. It’s such a great feeling to cook up a “gourmet” meal for your wife, friends, or family, using your Uncle’s famous recipe for lamb chops, or better yet one of Giada De Laurentiis’, Alton Brown’s, or Mario Batali’s recipes. Giada oftentimes recommends a bottle of wine with her recipes, as does Alton Brown, and to no surprise Mario Batali is a partner in Italian Wine Merchants.

Where does one go today to find a wine that matches a recipe your looking to prepare?. Some of the gourmet food sites such as Cuisine Solutions, recommends 4-6 different wines for each of their recipes.. (except the asian bbq ribs, as they feel beer is a better combination - anyone have a good wine recommendation here?) Epicurean.com touts themselves as the place for food and wine lovers, but yet wine is not suggested in the recipes. Food and Wine magazine has its gallery, but this is 2007… consumers don’t want pay for information especially with the plethora of free information out there. There are also others that try… MSN - The Wine Life, Wines and Recipes, Food Network…etc.

Wine and food, like Romeo and Juliet, belong together, and we are marrying these two lovers into one site. We just want finding a place to eat, a recipe to cook, and a wine to drink to be a simple, enjoyable experience.

Last week New York Magazine ran the special ‘New York vs. London‘, calling London ‘the other New York,’ an honour to be sure, and the article was accompanied with a glowing review of London - the undisputed capital city of Europe.

New York Magazine is obviously regional, and abroad, if one wants to get the pulse of a city there’s simply no substitute for Time Out, which has always been an invaluable resource to me - whether I’m in London, New York, Paris, or Chicago, I make sure to consult with the website and find out what’s going on, where to eat, where to dine and where to hang out. Time Out rocks plain and simple. Whether you’re in Helsinki or Hong Kong, Time Out’s got insider advice and is the Lonely Planet for footloose socialites.

But what about when you stop by to visit a friend in Raleigh-Durham or stop in to Atlanta, or Baltimore, Princeton or any other of the thousands of possible places you may be going? In this day and age, culinary expertise is becoming an international standard, and while Wolfgang Puck, Rocco DiSpirito,Todd English, Thomas Keller, Nobu Matsuhisa and Emeril Lagasse bang out their drum-beat across the international stage of fine-dining, there are many local gems with high-quality food and knock out ambience that the outsider will never find. Local dining sites, food reviewers and wine blogs are a dime a dozen, but up until now, there hasn’t been a community that embodies the the world within and around restaurateuring, specialty foods, dining, socialising, travel and wine.

Who better to tell you about a neighbourhood, specialty store, restaurant or new wine than someone who knows you? Whilst Amateur Gourmet, Friends Eat, Menu Pages, Chow Hound, Restaurant Spy, CIA, Accidental Hedonist, Amy, Rob, Food Goat, Epicurious and Fork and Bottle are all awesome resources, there’s something missing. My feeling is that these sites all have to be specifically book-marked or recommended, as I’m doing here, in order to be found. So many great restaurants, wines or food shops have that ‘we just stumbled upon it’ feel, but there’s something very pre-meditated about going to a blog such that one feels that the blogosphere is preaching to the blogosphere. Food blogs so often miss out on providing wine recommendations, whilst wine blogs seldom mention food and both rarely provide a tool for getting the food or getting the wine.

When I’m on Amazon or browsing the iTunes Store, I often come away with something unexpected, which is why I keep going back. Reading food or wine blogs however, is not much different to reading a food or wine magazine, in that’s it’s a one-way communication channel. Perhaps I’m too juiced up on the current digitial explosion, but the food and wine blogosphere leaves me wanting more: more content, personalisation, interaction, recommendations… more community.

In South Africa there is a word, Ubuntu, and it means ‘I am because we are,’ which is spirit of any community, and is perhaps less succinctly put by John Donne in writing ‘no man is an island.’ Indeed, then, no blog is an island - a food blog needs restaurants or recipes, and a wine blog needs wineries and they all need people to enjoy them. Isn’t it time then that there was a community which embodied food, wine, restuarants, vineyards, friends and wine lovers all in one?

Grape Thinking is working to build a platform to do just that - providing a community that will guide you to anywhere where wine is served, enjoyed, treasured and appreciated for everything it is. Through personal profiles and personal reviews, in the true sense of the word ‘community’, users, restaurants, and wineries will share personal knowledge and reveal the delights of their cities and hang-outs to the world.This is the ultimate goal of Grape Thinking, to bring wine and its surrounds together. We want grapethinkers to discover not only their taste: but to help a world of taste find them.