Help Out Without Really Trying!

We all can be better people. I like to think that if work, school, responsibilities and all that life throws at us permitted, we would all be more charitable beings, able to give endless volunteer hours to groups, run endless miles-of-tribute or donate more money to whoever needs our helping.

Ever since performing as the Ghost of Christmas Present (thanks Lori!) in my 7th-grade production of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," I've always wanted to be a better giver, Ebenezer Scrooge-style. Even though it is trending due to the holiday season, that story always gets me to the point of near-tears no matter what adaptation or revision it is, be it a Jim Carey-CGI-animated blockbuster or a knockoff-Tori Amos-ABC Family adaptation.

So why should you care? Charity and my middle-school theater roles have nothing to do with wine or technology (although I beg to differ.) I'm posting this because of a site that Natali Del Conte of CNet has brought to my attention; nonprofitshoppingmall.com. Non-Profit Shopping Mall is a great way we can all give back this holiday season while we select the gifts we will be sharing with our loved ones. The best part is, you don't need to do anything extra but click!

Non-Profit Shopping Mall works on a commission base, where each retailer listed gives a little percentage to an organization of your choice. Why is it so great? Because EVERYONE is in there. All the retailers you would have looked at anyway are there, from Bestbuy to Amazon.com, Nordstroms, Target, Gap, Home Depot, get the point? None of their prices are marked up in anyway. The best part about all that is you can give to a charity of your choice, and there are tons listed, including the Children's Miracle Network, ASPCA, American Heart Association, UNICEF and so much more. So you literally just shop and the big corporations (not you) donate the money and you do nothing you wouldn't have done in the first place!

Please, I urge you all to consider this option as Thanksgiving weekend comes to an end our holiday season starts to gear into full-swing, and please consider it every time you shop online. What a great opportunity for us to give back and better fulfill our social and ethical responsibilities to be better people.

If you have trouble deciding who you want to support, please consider Toys for Tots or the Children's Miracle Network, which are my top choices. This December 18-24 I will be dedicating most of my time volunteering for Toys for Tots through my unit in D.C. It will be grueling work, but just knowing that a child who wouldn't have gotten anything from "Santa" will this year makes it all worth it :)

Happy Holidays everyone, and please shop at nonprofit until you drop (or your wallet goes pop!) The link is provided below for you to explore this wonderful way to share your wealth and give to others who really need it.

http://www.nonprofitshoppingmall.com/

With Love and Cheers,
-Tatum
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Beer from up There

Sapporo, the Japanese brewery you may be familiar with if you frequent sushi bars in your area, has announced the release of their new "Space Barely," which uses barely that has been grown on the International Space Station... Yes, in Spaaaaaaaaaaace!

I was super excited to try this out when I heard about it, but it doesn't look like I, and most likely you, will be able to anytime soon. According to them, you must be one of the extremely lucky 250 winners who are drawn from a lottery. If you are selected, you get to pay $119 for a six-pack, limit one-per-lucky-winner... That's almost $20 for one beer... Sweet... So yeah, you have to win first, then you get a chance to buy some high-priced six-pack >.<

The barely was harvested from the ISS space station as part of a five-month space mission that experimented with growing crops in space.

Here's a Reuters video-press release linked below if you want to take a peek of it yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXKa1EV1J4Y

Does this intergalactic barely have any affect on the beer? Maybe they used martian water and moon yeast to brew it? That will be something we have to wait to find out. If you are lucky enough to get one of these beers, please chime in and tell me how it is. (And feel free to send a sample.) Until then, I think I'm going to try to secure a few cases of Brooklyn Brewery's Black Chocolate Stout before they run out!

With Love and Cheers,
-Tatum Read More!

Baby Steps

Growing up is far from a generic term for "becoming an adult." We all grow up in different ways, through different processes. Even once we are "adult," we keep growing; we can't stop that part of our lives.

I've started and restarted DeRanter many times in the year-or-so it's been created. I've come to the realization that I was too ambitious; here I was, a young writer and oenophile, who wanted to be like the greats. There's nothing wrong with ambition and goals, but we must know where we are in terms of achieving these goals. I wanted something that can bring wine and technology together; nothing original on my part, but something that genuinely interest me. But I came on too strong, too fast. It became work instead of interest. But as I've spent time away from DeRanter, I've learn to grow and realize how I, personally, achieve my goals. It's not by jumping right in. It's by research, reading and self-induced excitement on the subject.

I'm no longer concerned about being a "well-educated wine guy." Truth is, I'm not. (Obviously! :P) But I will try to become a writer with interest. Hopefully interest the same as yours. I want to try to convey this through tech-news and wine issues that I fully research and understand and really delve into. I can't promise anything regularly; with my hectic school, work and rehearsal schedules, finding motivation to write can be daunting. I can't even promise a unique approach to this whole wine-tech-blogging thing; I can only promise my approach to it, and hopefully this approach will be unique and interesting enough to keep you reading. So please, come back for more!

Cheers,
-Tatum Read More!

Biodynamic Wine: A first look

I wish I could go back in time to ask winemakers of past, "How do you think wine making will be affected by future technology?" They surely wouldn't know about our advances in computers.They might not mention the use of modern wine making trends like steel barrels, micro oxygenation, ultra-sound, computer chips in vineyards or extreme temperature control to make cheap wines palatable. However if I were to explained the new Biodynamic Wine trends sweeping the globe, they would think we have regressed back to medieval agricultural traditions!

For those not familiar with biodynamic agriculture, let me give it to you straight from the Wikipedia article: "Biodynamic agriculture, a method of organic farming that has its basis in a spiritual world-view , first propounded by Rudolf Steiner treats farms as unified and individual organisms emphasizing balancing the holistic development and interrelationship of the soil, plants, animals as a closed, self-nourishing system."

What this means is the vineyard is considered in it's entirety as a living thing and seen as an organism in it's own right, but one that is in consistent with lunar and cosmic patterns and rhythms and not merely a substrate for plant growth... Wheew...

Wine makers are taking weird, unconventional methods of viticulture and wine making and following a strict biodynamic calendar of harvesting, planting and etc. because they believe it will help their vines and ultimately their finished wines. These methods are broken up into several preparations that all seem a bit odd and skeptical. Such examples include Preparation 500 where cow manure is buried into the soil for a period of time, dug back up and spread over the fields. Other examples include fermenting yarrow flowers in a deer's bladder or oak bark in a skull of a domestic animal and applying them to compost or spraying the vines with horsetail tea, according to the biodynamic calendar. Weird stuff you thought you'd see on Taboo, huh?

But what definitely has the world in shock and awe is that no matter how medieval, superstitious or unreasonable these methods seem, the winemakers (all notable and renown in the wine making world) are producing outstanding wine with biodynamie. These producers include Domaine de la Romanee Conti, Zind Humbrecht, Huet, Beaux Freres , and Benziger among numerous others. (For a list of more producers check out http://www.wineanorak.com/biodynamic3.htm) I think what really has people going is because there is almost no way to prove this advantage scientifically... They just seem to be better. Here's an excerpt from wineanorak.com that sums up the whole thing:

Despite these problems, proper studies have been carried out, and generally they seem to suggest that biodynamics really does work. In 1993, Reganold and colleagues compared the performance of biodynamic and conventional farms in New Zealand, a report published in leading scientific journal Science. They found that the biodynamic farms had significantly higher soil quality, with more organic matter content and microbial activity. In 1995 Reganold published a review of the different studies that have examined biodynamics and have met basic standards for scientific credibility. The conclusion was that biodynamic systems had better soil quality, lower crop yields and equal or greater net returns per hectare than their conventional counterparts. But what could the mechanism be? A tantalizing clue is offered by some experiments carried out by a graduate student of Reganold’s, Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, on the effects of biodynamic preparations on compost development. In an experimental setting, biodynamically treated composts showed higher temperatures, faster maturation and more nitrate than composts that had received a placebo inoculation. Reganold is clearly impressed: ‘Of all the farm systems that I’ve seen, biodynamics is probably the most holistic.’

As I conclude I will state that biodynamie on vineyards does work... They seem to produce greater environments, grow superior grapes and make tastier wine. The hard thing to conclude is why does this all work? Ancient civilizations have planted, harvested and celebrated with the phases of the moon and the cosmos for centuries. Perhaps there is something there? Perhaps it is some sort of spiritual, holistic reason for this all to make sense. Or perhaps it's just with biodynamic procedures, wine makers are paying close attention. They are giving their land, their resources and their environment the attention it deserves; the close attention and observation that is needed to produce superior wine. That's something this world could never have too many of; devoted, passionate and dedicated wine makers who "listen" to their vineyards. For further research on Biodynamic wine I urge you to google up on the subject and be sure to check out http://www.wineanorak.com/biodynamic1.htm for a great resource on the subject.

Cheers to you,
-Tatum
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DeRanter's first Tasting Note... a beer?!

I posted this on the WLTV forums and I thought I'd share it on DeRanter as well. Why not, right?

This will be my official first beer tasting note... well actually, on this site, this will be the first tasting note of anything. Who knew that my wine blog's first tasting note would be of a delicious beer? Go figure...

A note on tasting notes; I usually try not to publish tasting notes myself. I take the side that the great Tom Wark, from Fermentation Wine Blog, takes; I leave the tasting to the ones that are good with it. Yes, I taste wine, but there are people that can be much more expressive, detailed and intricate than me. I'm just starting out... But I realized, I might try to post a few up here anyway. If anything, it will help my writing skills, and maybe I'd get a critique or two from my readers. (Wink, wink...)

I decided to buy a six pack of Brooklyn Brewery's Black Chocolate Stout because I needed a lift. A week of homework, test, group project meetings and just the overall end-of-semester woes. I wanted something to relax me a bit. It was good that I didn't have class today because coming in at 10% alcohol, this is not a school-night drink... well, maybe if you have just one...

Inky black color with a nice head of foam. It smells great too; roasted coffee beans and a hint of dark chocolate, but that's not it...

Shwooosh! The cold liquid flows out to cover your mouth with slight bitterness and opens up to reveal a world of roasted almonds (or some kind of nutty component), coffee, and rich, but subtle, dark chocolate. This is quite a filling, heavier stout, and I can see why it's their winter seasonal.

The finish was star of the show; the hints of charcoal cling to your tonsils until the next sip, and flavors of bitter chocolate, nuts and espresso chill on your taste buds until the last drop. Very delicious beer and one that can truly say, "Eat your heart out, Guinness..."

A few people have told me that this is not comparable to Guinness, but after review and another sip I feel it is... I might even say that "Guinness" would be a tasting component of this beer. I was very happy, sleepy and relaxed by the end of the night and, after two bottles, was able to drift off to sleep.

So what do you think? Maybe you might want to go out and try some of this stuff, it's great!

Cheers to you,
-Tatum
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It's our wine!... Time, I meant time...

My generation is a thirsty one, according to multiple sources like the LA Times, NY Times, Winecast and NY Sun. A number of articles have been written, numerous surveys have been tallied and hours of research confirm that the Millennials are taking center stage in the wine world. "They" are saying that our generation is drinking, appreciating and buying more wine at a much younger age than previous generations. So, what's all the hype? Statistics don't have anything to do with wine business, culture and innovation, right? Wrong. We are the future, and with our buying power, our passion and our numbers, but most importantly with our wires, we can bring change to an industry that has thrived for centuries... but will we?

For readers who are not familiar with what I mean by "Millennial," let me give a quick run-down: "The Millennials Generation" is considered the generation after "Generation X," and definitely after the "Baby Boomers" of post-WWII, whom were born between the 80's and the turn of the century. For the past decade-or-so this generation, my generation, has been turning 21. Among things like not knowing a life without computers and relying on the Internet to do everything, we are the biggest generation to be appreciating wine, and at a much younger age than our parents and grandparents. And at an estimated 100-million strong, we're a big generation! (Compared to 44-million baby boomers)

I've noticed at my WLTV gatherings that older generations seemed to have discovered wine at a much later age than me. Most people I meet in the wine scene are in their 30's and 40's, not having really appreciated wine until they were 25 or older. I was infatuated with wine knowledge, culture and practices when I turned 20. The only thing I wanted to do when I turned 21 was to buy that official bottle of wine, and sure enough I did, a 2001 Haut-Brion. I didn't care about the bars or the vodka, I just wanted the wine; people like me are sprouting up all across the world. They discover wine for what it really is, not just it's inebriating purposes...

It has been noted that our generation are not as likely to stick to the "big name" wines. For us, tasting wine is not as much of a class or status issue as before. Gary Vaynerchuk has been shouting to the world what the Millennials believed all along; wine shouldn't be a way to judge your wealth or power. It should not hold pretension and it should be enjoyable and pleasing. We are less likely to choose a wine because of the name of the chateau on the bottle, instead we choose it by varietal or region. We want to explore the world with wine, instead of sticking with the few "good ones." Playing it safe isn't our style; we take more risk, and a bad bottle of wine doesn't disappoint us as much. And don't forget that for most wine choices, we decide based on instant gratification, as with everything else in our modern lives, so we rather pick the $15 mystery malbec then buy Brunello for $80 and hide it for ten years. Does it mean I wouldn't buy a brunello to age? Nope, but sometimes I just want to taste wine now.

But what is the reason? Has wine become so popular that it's captivating drinkers at an earlier age? Not necessarily. It's the wires; the wires that stretch from country to country, wine maker to consumer and expert to novice. Now with the power of the Internet, wine knowledge is at our fingertips. We need only go to a search engine and type some keyword like "Cote du Nuits" and find pages of wisdom on these regions. This was not as available before, as hobbyist had to either buy a book or go to the library to read up on this. Now, we can gain knowledge without leaving the keyboard.

Social networks have allowed winos to find each other. Producers can send newsletters and design websites to inform consumers of futures, a novice can link up with a group of seasoned drinkers and learn the nuances of tastings, and winos everywhere can produce blogs, exchange tasting notes, reviews, plan and promote events, among other things. The way that the Internet has changed the wine world is tremendous, and the way our generation will impact it is even more so. In the words of Gary, this generation is "Changing the wine world, whether they like it or not." Because of our broadened cultural understanding, openness to change for the better, and our lack of support for traditions we don't deem necessary, we have already changed things tremendously. We have taken wine out of the glass and into plastic cartons. We have stopped using the corks and using screw caps. Every facet of wine is going to and will change with our technology and intuitiveness.

But will we change it for the worse? Not really. As our world grows faster and smaller, some might fear that the traditions and history of wine will be lost. I'm sure that will not happen. I'm sure that our great generation will innovate, inspire and dream and make wine their own. Wines will stretch the world over many times with the strength of the Internet and our social-technical intuition. New countries will become "wine countries" and drinkers will benefit from an open-minded, unpretentious and passionate society.

I feel that my generation will lead the way to writing one of the most important chapters in wine history, while ensuring that the romance, wisdom and love of wine is shared to future generations. May wine live forever.

Cheers to you,
-Tatum
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