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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They were playing sick music too, and I found myself getting really fired up. I’ve been to nascar and indy events before and found them boring because there’s rarely a photo finish, but with cycling they say there’s almost always a close finish. In this one there were about 15 guys tight together at the end and they pumped it out, with a Ukranian pulling out the victory. Great inspiration for the power and endurance of the human body. The second leg of the triple crown is in Redding and the 3rd leg in Philly on Sunday.

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Step 1 - What are you promoting? – Login to Facebook, then go to the Create Ad page and enter the url you want your traffic to go to. (For our clients, we customize a landing page for each ad in an effort to better convert the traffic).

Step 2 – Select your demographic – I love the functionality here. As you are selecting your audience, and using the auto-suggest for keywords, watch the top of the page. You will see it is construction a paragraph that explains your target audience, and displays the approximate market size for that demographic. I do wish there was a feature so you could choose all BUT high school students.

Step 3 - Create your Ad-Copy. Here are Facebook’s guidelines for ad copy. Keep in mind what you are trying to accomplish. If you just write something crazy in an effort to get traffic, your conversion rates will be low. If you are specific, and enticing, visitors to your site will know why they are there, and will be more like to join your site, or purchase your products. They will even let you upload a photo to attach to the ad. Your logo, or an image of the product works best here.. but mind the size, you don’t want a distorted image.

You can also specify social actions that relate to your ad here. If you are a member of a group, or have an application, Facebook will enhance your ad with associations to the actions of those groups or apps.

Step 4 - How Much Do you Want to Spend – The first choice you have to make is whether you want to pay based on the number of views (cost-per-impression) or on the number of actual clicks your ad receives. The cost per impression (CPM) is a good idea if you are just trying to spread awareness, as it carries an overall lesser cost. Keep in mind though, your ad can receive a lot of impressions on a site like Facebook, and just because it is loading on the page, doesn’t mean that eager eyes waiting to see your ad.

A good portion of Facebook users are going to be blind to advertising. This is why I generally recommend taking the cost-per-click (CPC) route, as you truly “get what you pay for”. Facebook will recomend a CPC price based on what others are suggesting, and as a general rule, put the most you are willing to pay for a click to ensure you get the best positioning.

You have a final option to specify if you want the ad to run continuously starting upon approval (Facebook does check the ads before they go live) or if you would rather the ad run only during a specified time. This is in case you only want to test out the service for weekdays, weekends, holidays, or special events.

Step 5 - Review and Pay – Alright… now just review the ad to make sure everything looks in order, enter your credit card information (if it isn’t already stored), and click Place Order. Facebook will review your ad, and unless you did something bad, like advertise for porn or ignore their guidlines, you’re ad will soon be sending traffic to your site.

You might also be interested in Millennial Marketing and Facebook Ads

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This is partisanship and politics like we’ve never seen it before since the days of Athenian democracy. The top-down model is falling away, and suddenly the average person can broadcast a message from his webcam straight to Hillary Clinton and receive an answer on CNN before a world audience. Hallelujah, the democratization of mass media is underway.

As mentioned this weekend, this trend is extending to wine, as this year for the first time, the World Cup of Wine will coincide with the World Cup Rugby as the wines of Rugby playing nations are pitted against each other in a taste-off between countries. Gary V. may do his bit to answer e-mail individually and factor in viewer requests to his show, but the beginning of a more two way communication medium is yet to emerge in the wine industry. As I’ve been saying, we perhaps need to see more of this in the food world. Jamie Oliver and the rest have done wonders for celebrity cooking, but has it gotten people at home cooking more, or does it just have people watching.

The key to the success of any movement is to motivate people into action. We’re already seeing this with Is My Blog Burning, but perhaps its times to step it up a little and provide an arena in which such competitions can be seen in multi-media, with more frequency. I figure that if we can get citizens involved in politics, it’d be ludicrous not to motivate people to become actively involved in something perhaps more socially rewarding and enjoyable, like entertaining and fine dining!

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Even the symbol of the continent of Africa has become somewhat reified in today’s media and is right up there in the realm of Cher and Mickey Mouse. Despite what all the cynics may say about celebrity involvement, I think that it is our duty to suspend our scepticism, lest we deter such influential people from bestowing their support on an entire continent in need. I think that passing proceeds along from products that Westerners buy every day is an excellent way of allowing people to contribute without requiring them to make too great a change from their lifestyle. In the words or the Red campaign

‘You make choices every day, from the clothes you wear to the music you play. Now making a choice means making a difference.’

So many young people feel frustrated at not being able to help the world, and I think that charities have the responsibility to make contribution easier than actually having to go out and join the Peace Corps.

Here are a few great ways to make a difference:
Run a marathon and get sponsorship from your friends. Many major marathons from the New York to the London Marathon and many in between allocate a certain number of spaces to people running for charity. Over here in London there are certain charities that have established partnerships with sky-diving companies, and if one is able to raise a certain amount of money through donations, the charity issues a credit to go sky-diving.

Once again, to quote Bono, what we call ‘charity’ doesn’t even fit the bill, because in most cases we’re ‘talking about justice.’ Quite simply it is not just that certain people should struggle to survive whilst others live in the lap of luxury. The key to this justice is not putting some small change in a rusty tin at the local bodega, but actual conscientious support. The charity I find to be the most inspiring is www.one.org, and I think that the more people who stand as one to make poverty history the better.

There is no doubt that with the proliferation of the Internet and the advent of the $100 laptop, with programs like Elance, Ebay, PayPal, Skype and so many others, as soon as Africa comes online we’re going to see a revolution. Quite recently I discovered a charity called ‘Infinite Family.’ This Charity enables families that live in surplus within the United States to interact with and provide support to orphans in South Africa using VOIP and e-mail. If one ponders the potential of programs like Skype in charity, then one sees the limitless potential for people in socially advantageous situations to reach out to people in disadvantaged communities. As the power of the internet grows, so to does our power as privileged people increase and enable us to make a huge difference to the lives of the people who most need it.

I urge you all to go check out www.InfiniteFamily.org and explore the possibility of becoming a Net Family. This weekend is their fundraiser, which has been sponsored by Madiba Restaurant, De Beers, Tall Horse Wines and Graham Beck. The event is set to be a great upscale occasion with African cuisine, musicians from the Paul Simon band and African wine all set in the fantastic locale of an upper west side loft. To add some sparkle to the evening, they will be selling Graham Beck Brut at $100 a glass, and in the bottom of one of the glasses one lucky participant will find a diamond from De Beers.

I feel lucky that we live in a world where people are willing to come up with such initiatives, and if we consider that this event is partly sponsored by Tall Horse and Graham Beck we can see yet another way that wine is changing the world.

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Wine is profoundly important in a way most of us can’t imagine. Reasons being: wine inhabits the same realm as literature and art. Literature and art are the only two things that separate man from beast. Literature and art save mankind from destruction and brutality, think that whenever a fascist regime comes to power first they outlaw the writers and the poets, and from there all other personal liberties crumble. The artist and the writer are the people who set us free and by implication, wine, being in the same realm as art and literature, is also an agent of freedom. Think of it this way, Budweiser and Miller represent corporate hegemony, whilst wine represents the individual and old-fashioned craftsmanship. One has to ask whether they would prefer a world that was ruled by mass markets and homogenized products; or whether they prefer an old-fashioned, time-honoured ritual that provides unique flavours free to be sought after and consumed by the individual that is so inclined.

Think about it, literature and art (and wine) are the only aspects existing in mankind that don’t exist in beasts. We have entrepreneurial animals; brave dogs (Lassie); birds and ants who weave and construct architecturally brilliant homes; elephants and monkeys that consume fruit that has become alcoholic and become aggressive; murderous monkeys; affectionate dolphins and the list of anthropomorphic attributes goes on and on. You name it, love, loyalty, humour, sadness, murder, happiness, bravery, persistence… pick a quality, any quality, and trust me, if you watch the Discovery Channel long enough you’re going to see some aspect of it in animals, everything except literature and art.

Art and literature are the only two things that raise man above beast. If we are to survive as humans we’re going to need every inch of humanity we can find, because if one thing is certain there is an entire industry out there promoting anti-humanity. Beer companies, FHM magazine, Hustler and Jenna Jameson, Oil companies, the CIA, fast food chains, MTV, Lockhead Martin, pick any array of multi-billion dollar organizations and chances are they are not advocating the furtherment and benefit of mankind. Most all big businesses provide a service that is generally detrimental to the world at large. Wine is not big business yet. In many respects the winelands of France, Italy and Spain are some of the last culturally pure and non-malicious organizations in the world whose soul purpose is to provide a sophisticated level of pleasure and enjoyment to the consumer. The only way this industry can survive is with the support and understanding of people in their mid twenties, who need to understand the wealth of benefits that wine can provide them, and more importantly, what may happen if they don’t start becoming discerning consumers.

As young intelligent people it is our duty to make informed consumer decisions. There are two types of company, one that would sell and market cigarettes with a smile (an item that is proven to kill you); and the people who would take time to inform and promote a product with anti-oxidant healing power. We need to start actively supporting the people who support us because there are people in this world that would have you believe that the death penalty is correct; that two people of the same sex that are in love do not have the right to commit; that it is justified for more Iraqi children under 5 at the hands of the American nation than the amount of people over 30 who died in an attack conducted by an independent group; that children in Africa should not receive anti-retroviral, and I’m going to stop there because the list goes on. These people I talk of are not wine drinkers, they know nothing of literature and have no understanding of art or philosophy. They are just glorified animals posing as humans who seek the destruction of our species.

Susan Orlean, in ‘The Orchid Thief’ relates a process whereby if a person focuses on and becomes obsessed with and truly understands one small part of life, it becomes possible that many other confusing components fall into place. What I intent to show in this blog is that wine is just such a component.

The entire world of wine is a microcosm whose intricacies mimic and go on to effect the world at large. In wine there are aspects of globalization, environmental issues, political debates, personal taste, family feuds, bad guys, heroes, villains, capitalist pigs, irreverent artists and every other kind of thing one can imagine. Moreover, I firmly believe that if any young person can learn to enjoy wine, they will learn to enjoy one of life, culture and society’s greatest pleasures, and I am willing to bet that they will understand life and the world we live in better with a fuller appreciation.

Wine has been a part of my life in so many ways and I’m so excited to express how it can help our world. If there is one beverage that could sustain a lifelong and interesting dialogue, it is definitely wine. I’ll be making weekly posts and coming back to answer questions some of you may be confused as to what wine has to do with people dying in Iraq; or how it can save the world, and I have my own answers to all these questions. This blog is intended to be a discussion, and online cocktail party that brings a diverse set of opinions to the floor with wine as the unifier. Thanks for reading! cheers.

- Ruarri

Read more: The Beginning

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