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Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

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As a wine drinker and wine lover it has been hard not to be rather cheered up by the images of Lehman Brothers employees walking out of their office with boxes in hand shouting trite like ‘you’re watching history, man’ at journalists. Call this bitter, jealous or misunderstood – but is wine not about sour grapes? And if it’s true that wine is sour grapes then it is also true that it is sour grapes that become more palatable over time, and like my seemingly cynical cheer at the demise of City bankers such an opinion will also become more palatable over time. The reason I believe this is because of one thing that society has temporarily forgotten: value.

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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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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 »