For those of you who’ve been reading our blog for awhile, you know we’ve focused on wine as a unifier in the sustainable development of our lives. We’ve woven it into the core values of economic, social, and environmental health in an effort to exemplify its unifying power. The GrapeThinking passion has always been to create a sustainable world, and we feel the time is now to grow from our wine roots.

Wine, water, organic food, holistic medicine, and other natural supplements that create healthy bodies and minds. Renewable energy, green building, and recyclables that grow a vibrant environment. Information technology to ensure the establishment of a smart energy grid and a deep social connectedness among community. And most importantly, a rich understanding of the intense economic times we face ahead and the pragmatic ways by which we will turn our ideals into profit and pay it forward.

Book cover via Amazon

I remember conversations between Ruarri, Jake, and myself back in the summer of ’06 about starting our company. We talked in depth about the sustainability movement and how it’s going to change the world in our lifetime… usher in a new golden age if you will. This got us thinking heavily about the ancient philosophers of our past… Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. The greats that helped us gain a better understanding of life. In Plato’s well known work, Symposium, he attributes the rise of the golden age of Greece to the symposia, better known to them as drinking parties. Where society’s elite would gather and drink wine together. The magic started when everyone became equally inebriated on their elixir and the eros or arete as they called it would start to flow. Everyone would share ideas clearly and with intellectual humility and grace. They started feeling the connectedness of everything and each other beyond the realm of space and time, realizing it’s all energy. We share one life together and everything we do as individuals affects the whole. This collective awareness spread throughout society and created their golden age.

We found this fascinating and started believing in a mystical significance to wine. Something that inspires us and brings us together. That can help cultivate the tranquility and enlightenment that we need to build a sustainable world. We still haven’t quite figured out what it is and may never find the answer, but we do feel it has something to do with how wine is alive. How it ages and matures and becomes better with time.

These types of ideals and feelings are what drive the grapethinkers to their core, and we feel that as an organization, it is time to grow. We must address the sustainability movement and become a better way of living… a better way of thinking.

I just spent a week in Chicago in the wake of Obama’s historic Presidential acceptance speech and had a chance to attend the Midwest Alternative Energy Venture Forum. It felt great to represent Grape Thinking and promote it not just as a liquid but as a way of thinking. A better way to live and a better way to think.

To Ruarri and Jake, we’ve come a long way over the past few years since talking about how wine can save the world, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have such amazing partners and friends. What we’ve built is something that binds our deepest passions for life and I look forward to the road ahead.

Cheers guys

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Beacons of Hope

In 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president of my country, I remember an age of jubilation that was infused into children, adults and people from overseas alike. Backpackers would come to our country with Mandela t-shirts, and when we traveled abroad and told people we were South African we were somehow associated with a little bit of that Mandela magic and people were that little bit more welcoming. With Mandela in power, the dominant feeling was that no matter what happened – things were going to be okay.

In the past 8 years that formative optimism of the Mandela years had left me, and I found myself in the midst of a new generation of cynicism kicked off by the Clinton impeachment, followed by the stealing of the election in Gore v. Bush, and the subsequent anomalies of extraordinary rendition, water-boarding and the abomination that is Sarah Palin. When Gore released his movie, Inconvenient Truth, only then did the world realise what could have been – if only America had fought a little harder in 2000.

When I woke up on Wednesday the 6^th of November, after 18 months of watching this election, I realised the enormity of what has happened. As I showered a feeling of relief washed over me and I knew that the page has been turned.

Last night, drinking wine at a friend’s birthday party, by the end of the bottle and toward the end of the night, there was no more lamenting about the future of America and the ultimate waning power of the Western World. All the negativity and anxiety had been replaced by a palpable optimism. Progress will no longer be hindered by right-wing radicals who oppose any form of scientific advance or hope to pull society backwards – instead anything is possible. America has done the impossible and lived up to its name of the land of opportunity for the first time in many years.

From now until Obama is elected Americans have a reason to celebrate and raise their glasses in a toast to the future with their heads held high. I cannot describe the feeling of knowing that the Bush years are over. We no longer need to drink wine to forget what has happened… but can rather drink and toast to the future. Cheerz!

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There is no better way to gauge public interest online than to look at the web and information provided by Google Insight, Google Trends and Google Analytics; there are obviously more advanced tools such as Hitwise and Comscore – but for directional information something like Google Insight is good enough: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

‘Porn’ is just in because of the old Avenue Q song ‘the internet is for porn‘ – and it’s an authoritative bench-marks for public interest considering the recent court case where a high-court used Google as a measure of common values and interests. The interesting trend we see is that online there is demonstrably more interest in wine than in beer over the last 12 months. As a bench-mark of public interest – oddly enough at the time of the Iowa caucuses both Obama and Porn see a simultaneous spike in interest, which is the first time that Obama becomes more popular as a search query than both beer and wine combined. Disturbingly, porn becomes increasingly more popular throughout 2008 – and encouragingly Obama’s popularity online remains ahead of both beer and wine; whilst McCain’s only ‘More Popular than Beer and Wine Combined’ moment is only for a brief time at the end of January and then for a little tiny bit in August.

So it stands to reasons then that outside of a presidential year, politics takes a back seat and all people are interested in is porn, beer and wine… you animals!

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How dare Senator Clinton come out against Senator Obama, after his over rated comments about small-town America being bitter, with a series of photo-opportunities, going through the motions with a camera crew in tow – and in one audacious clip, pausing to have a sip of beer and drink a shot!

Oh sure Hillary, you drink beer so that makes you working-class.

The idea that a certain product can dictate one’s class is especially infuriating to a real wine-drinker, who recognizes wine’s essentially humble and agricultural roots – much the same as beer. That Clinton thinks that she can relate to the working class man with a photo-op drinking beer demonstrates that she is in fact far more derisory of the working class than she would dare let on. Although Obama may be on record saying that people cling to guns and religion because of economic uncertainty (which may not be entirely untrue), for Clinton to respond by taking a sip of beer and drinking a shot means that she thinks the best way to get the attention of the working class is to show an affinity for the bottle (which is slanderous.) Unwittingly, and thus tellingly, she implies that middle-class America are a bunch of drunks.

It is in follies like this that you can see the Rove-style politics at play, where there is power-play between the have’s and have-nots and well-to-do senators descend into the unwashed masses for the photo-opportunities and a quick ego-boost. However, with the recent Gallup ratings showing Obama’s new lead, we can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that our man Obama will most certainly win in Pennsylvania tomorrow night.

What the Clinton coalition will never understand is that instead of being like a fine wine and maturing with age, they,ve gone sour. Obama has the sparkle and fizz of youth, with the sophistication, complexity and dynamite of champagne. Every time he finishes a speech one feels like celebrating and toasting the future, whilst Clinton’s speeches do nothing more than make you want to imbibe ouzo.

Obama has a fight cut out for him, but I advise you go and buy some champagne today and have it at the ready to pop open tomorrow night: because 20 years from now, you’ll want to be able to tell your children that that’s what you did. Essentially Obama has allowed every citizen to become part of the citizenry. Unlike the last two elections where many Americans felt robbed. Obama, through grass roots movements like An Obama Minute, his crowd surging rallies, online-community, and a winning coalition of tech-savvy , wine-drinking, young and able people the world over has been able to win countless hearts and minds. Being an American president is not so much about experience, but more about being able to take big ideas, and like the epiphanies at the end of a symposium, make people excited about them. And if it’s inspiration America wants, I’d recommend champagne over vinegar.

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