Then there was Evil, a Cabernet Sauvignon from Australia. I’m waiting for the right birthday to surprise a friend of mine with a bottle of ‘Bitch’ and a bottle of ‘Evil’. I know it sounds mean, but listen they’re still getting wine out of the deal. I guess because of the Yellow Tail success, Australian wines feel they have to be uber creative to make a dent. This brings me to the next Australian wine, Suxx. I haven’t bought this one yet, but ‘Suxx’ Syrah does sound tempting.

Sometimes it’s the artistry on the bottle that draws me in. Last week I had this fantastically delicious, angels dancing on your tongue wine. James Iafrati did the label art for ‘Jazz’. “The Jazz Quartet: Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah’ drew us in. From the Branham Estate Wines in Napa Valley, ‘Jazz’ is a bit pricier, but completely worth it. Did I mention that angels will be dancing on your tongue?

Don’t get me wrong, just because the label is awesome doesn’t mean the wine will follow suit. When I see a creative label, I think two things: maybe they are covering up their horrible wine with a cool label or possibly this wine is equal in its creativity and taste. Nine out of ten times I buy it because that’s how I do. Say it’s that one time I didn’t buy the bottle, well I’ll think about going and purchasing it until finally I go and buy it. I’ll let you know how that one tastes. What’s the lesson here? Just buy the wine. Buy those outrageous sounding wines and as always Wine Your Diet.

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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.

Festivals have become huge in the UK – and I guess the States is now picking up. Winemakers have a huge opportunity to sponsor music festivals – because the combination of music, nature, art and alcohol are what festivals are all about. Festivals have re-invented themselves since the days of Woodstock and are a perfect platform for not only entertaining people, but many organisations use them to spread awareness and raise money.

The Green Man Festival coming up next week is one of the most prominent indie festivals – where, much like the Big Chill – and both less commercially than Glastonbury, it promotes organic food, green living, sustainability etc. There’s a huge oppotunity in this concept and I’d really like to see some of the Oregon wineries putting on some music festivals and promoting their wines together with bands from Washington State and around. Many vineyards have acres of land and there’s plenty scope to host festivals on the vineyard grounds themselves. Once millennials cotton onto the benefits of wine and the contribution of viticulturalists to the environment and to local communities – it’ll certainly be the final push needed.

Now that I’ve found a pair of wine-proof pants; and have finally sprung for a decent festival tent whilst having fallen in love with festivals on the first night of Benicassim in a monent of sitting with my wife and two close friends, Will and Anin, drinking Rioja as a pre-game at the campsite with Sigur Ros about to play… I think it’ll be hard to go back to taking normal holidays.

Hopefully next year the Grapethinking team can bring some of the fabulous Tastevine collection to Bonnaroo and some of the other festivals in the US, and one day to the UK – we’ll provide a tent, picnic blankets and a selection of some of the best and most affordable wines from around the world… we’ll leave the music to the musicians though. Don’t forget to bring wine-proof pants…

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First of all, labels mean absolutely nothing, so when you go to buy wine don’t even look at the front label ignore it, there is more useful information on the back like a good importer. In this era of opulence and visually stimulated purchasing, Louis Vutton and Cadillac, take a more refined and dare I say classier approach. I am reminded of the movie Tommy Boy with the late great Chris Farley. Tommy is selling Callahan Break Pads; one of his retailers says there isn’t a guarantee on Callahan’s box. Tommy says you can put a guarantee on shit and its still shit, same thing with wine – creative picture means the winery spent all the money on a design and not the juice. Like a guarantee vs. the actual product. There can and often will be a cute picture on the bottle but the juice, more times than not, is still absolute Swill (a colloquialism used to describe wine not worth drinking).

Best quality indicator – a good importer. While there still are names in wine worth buying anytime you see them there are also many wineries out there that have sold the names to bigger corporations to take advantage of consumer’s name recognition. Cakebread is a great example of a wine that once was a great wine for a good buy and now its just expensive and not much to talk about, one can find better for half the price. Importers on the other hand like Robert Shadderdon, Kermit Lynch, John David Hendrick and Neil Rosenthal, use discretion when picking wines to promote and have built up a strong reputation based on their names.

In closing, to all those wine creators, make sure your brand is innovative, but when it comes down to it, build a rep for finding kick ass juice… easy enough

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Whilst I was in New York we had a really good friend who wasa graduate of Sotheby’s School in London. His parents are one of the wealthiest antique dealers owners in Brooklyn and once a week they hold educational sessions, where they talk about antiques (whilst serving expensive canapés and champagne) and 85% of the people who attend the evenings are under 30.

Hip Hop soon caught onto old-man WASP brands that no one ever thought the market would be attracted to. Now Hennessey, Courvoisier, Aston Martin, Polo and Brooks Brothers are falling onto themselves for this business. However, it takes no sophistication to purchase an expensive brandy; or to own an expensive suit, all it takes is an Amex or a Mastercard higher than silver on the colour scale. Wine on the other hand requires a lot more, it requires scholarship, an epicurean nature, an interest in history and geography, a passion for fine food and an appreciation of art.

No one wants to act like an amateur and the only way to avoid it is to elevate oneself to the position where they can differentiate between blatant branding and false equity from real value based on craftsmanship and tradition. A collection of wine is like a book-case. It tells a story not only about the life someone leads, but it speaks of what he has done at the same time that it alludes what he will still do. A cellar is the unification of a man’s past, his present and future. Just like you can judge a man by his friends, you can also know his life from the wine he keeps.Copy of Article Below

‘Just Send It’

For vendors, those empty shelves spell opportunity. In Los Angeles, retailer Wally’s Wine & Spirits began providing prefab collections as props for Hollywood studio shoots more than a decade ago, and now it fills a couple instant-collection requests a month, from $5,000 apiece to more than $1 million. The Wine Club, a warehouse-style store in Orange County, Calif., says overnight-collection buyers accounted for about 2.5% of its $40 million in revenue in 2006. At New York’s Sherry-Lehmann four years ago, a client fresh from a remodeling job asked for help filling his new wine room. “I put together a proposal for 400 cases of wine, anticipating him to say, ‘I’ll take this or that,’” says company chairman Michael Aaron. “Instead, he says, ‘I got the list. It looks good. Just send it.” The $700,000 tab remains the retailer’s largest instant-collection sale, Mr. Aaron says, but now the company says it fills about three turnkey-cellar orders each month.

Michael Lorber, a 27-year-old principal of a real estate agency, likes to buy wines gradually for the 400-bottle cellar in his New York apartment. But he took the express track for his new one-bedroom piede-terre in Boston, where he plans to entertain friends and business associates in a wine-bar area off his open kitchen. “Considering I’m only there two days a week, I can’t keep on top of it,” says Mr. Lorber. He spent a couple hours with a personal shopper at Gordon’s Fine Wines & Liquors, a chain in the Boston suburbs, spending $3,000 for 40 bottles, including Caymus from California, Bollinger champagne, Montrachet from Burgundy and some sweet French Chateau d’Yquem. “I completely stocked up,” he says.

Instant stashes have their detractors. Wine experts say the collections tend to be less diverse than those gathered over time because buyers are limited by what’s in stores or at auctions. Thanks to a recent collecting boom, the most desirable bottles have become pricier at retailers and auctions, while many bottles in stores now either won’t improve markedly with age or won’t be ready to drink for years. Simon Lambert, a senior sales manager at The Chicago Wine Company, a retailer that holds a monthly auction, says overnight buyers are practically guaranteed a sub-par mix. “At a one-stop shop,” he says, “it’s virtually impossible to get a good, well-balanced collection.”

Long-time oenophiles also don’t relish extra competition for already-pricey bottles, particularly from collectors who might not know their Domaine de la Romane-Conti from a Beaujolais Nouveau. It’s also, some say, an example of people buying the trappings of wealth. “It’s not that these people want to be considered rich, they want to be considered connoisseurs,” says Sharon Zukin, a sociologist at City University of New York who studies consumer culture. “It’s similar to buying books by the foot.”

Not all the new owners are depleting global stocks of Chateau Latour. Two months ago, Kurt Manley, 44 and his wife, Sara, 30, issued a challenge to wine store co-owner Kristen Kowalski: Their new house has a cellar with a vaulted ceiling and 18th-century French monastery floor tiles, and they had a week to fill it with 700 bottles, in time to host a fund-raiser for Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. “He was really complimentary,” says Mr. Manley, a real estate developer in Eagan, Minn.

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