After reading both Tom Wark’s post last week about the coming implosion of the US wine wholesalers and the news released yesterday of Amazon entering the US wine market, I think we can all feel the change coming. We haven’t talked about it much in our writings over the past year+, but our main advisor/investor in our Tastevine wine project is on the board of directors of the recently merged R-NDC (Republic National Distributing Company). From our experience, change is ready.

We have learned so much having an inside viewpoint on the true nature of the industry, from the struggles, to the perceptions, to most importantly the arrogance that all parties use to mask their fear of change. Everyone knows where the industry is going and really wants to come together to bring about change, but no one is ready to compromise. As the direct movement continues to gain momentum and breakdown barriers, wholesalers continue to feel backed into a corner, forcing them to use their brut force and FUD tactics to make everyone else feel the stress that they do. Wark’s line is priceless tho –”Now, they whine like a little girl who just soiled their Sunday dress and run off crying to daddy asking him to put down his tools and stop doing his job, so he can clean the mess the little girl made all by herself.”– lol. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re looking for some cool young people from around the world to join the Grape Thinking team and become global liaisons for us. This will involve writing posts, discussing the cultural unifying power of wine, and most importantly, reviewing wines from your country or region of the world. You can write posts on Grape Thinking, put up reviews, and interact on our forum at World Cup of Wine. The perks of being on the Grape Thinking team are expense paid travels, free wine, and becoming part of a team that wants to help bring the world together. Ruarri has been doing an awesome job of rep’ing South Africa and the UK. Now we’re looking for people anywhere else in the world that would like to be a part of this — France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Argentina, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Romania, Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Belgium, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, India, China, Greece, Portugal, Slovenia, Turkey, Hungary, Israel, Indonesia, Tunisia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Morocco, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Peru,– just to name a few… However, the great thing about wine is that it’s in virtually every country in the world, so anyone anywhere interested, contact us.

Damn, this is getting tough. Great lessons to learn at a young age though. You think that you just put it out there and stand behind your positive cause and it magically happens… not quite. In light of Jeff’s post over at Good Grape yesterday, we would like to exhaust our struggles. In pushing for fund raising and our distributor alliance to come through, we’ve lost a little wind in are sails. Things just don’t move as fast as you’d like and you ultimately get to a point where you’re doing a hell of a lot of talking, and not much walking. Thus, the reason why I, for one, haven’t even written a blog post in 6 weeks. However, we’re back and ready to rock and we feel this thing coming together. At Grape Thinking, we’ve got some great client prospects and I know as soon as we seal up internal organizational issues, things will tip. We’re also working on creating a cool review aggregator for wine, food, recipe, and lifestyle reviews. Trying to get everyone pumped up about the World Cup of Wine too. Huge kudos to Ruarri, Jake, and Brad for busting their asses to make that happen and spark our aggregator. We’ve also hooked up with Doug over at Blog Soop, who’s aggregating restaurant reviews and doing it in an intelligent stylish way. Hope to join forces down the line and fuel the Taste engine. Ok, enough talk, time to start bringing some positive value to this industry.

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!

When I first read Tom Friedman’s ‘golden arches theory’ it just struck me how beneficial trade relationships and liberal democracy are to international relations. If two countries, no matter what their differences, are doing trade with one another, and benefiting from the relationship then there’s really a huge disincentive to go to war. We’ve already explored the fact that wine reduces your carbon footprint - but imagine a world where wine made the world more peaceful…

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