I don’t really see anyone actively pursuing “green” as a strategy for selling wine in the state of Washington. In the November 2008 issue of Wine Business Monthly the “Direct to Consumer” offering is about teaching tasting room staff how to speak on issues of sustainability to enhance the visitor’s experience and make them feel even better about buying the wine. Whether it is pesticides, water conservation, migrant labor or fuel efficiency, the article argues that the staff interfacing with customers should be able to speak intelligently on the topic. I would argue that a winery’s PR and marketing should speak intelligently on the topic as well. If you can make your customer not only like your product but feel good about themselves for buying it, you have a customer for life. California wineries are taking this issue on and even have a conference. At which a California winery was awarded the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award. C’mon Gregoire, you’re not going to let the opportunity to promote a $3 billion state industry pass you by, right?

So, now we get to where the rubber hits the road – you and me aka – the consumer. What are we going to do to promote greener purchases beyond taking our shopping home in cloth bags? If you live in the state of Washington and drink wine from any further away than Oregon or the Okananagan Valley, you are not drinking green. If you are drinking from Europe or South Africa you need to rethink your priorities. Hey, I get it. I love a great Bordeaux, Nebbiolo, Rioja and even a Stellenbosch Pinotage but I would rather spend my carbon going to those places and drinking locally while I am there. Being on the left coast makes wines from Chile, Australia and New Zealand not exactly green, but greener than European wines; the opposite is true for our friends and family on the East coast. It is actually greener for them to drink the wines of Europe than California or Washington. A greater reliance on rail transportation over trucking and air might help balance that out but I am no transport specialist.

Oh, and if you live in a state that has a wine region, support it. Visit wineries, buy the wine in your local store, sign up for the club if you like their product. Buying direct ensures more profit for the winery and helps them to thrive so you can keep buying local and being green.

Now is where I tell you to get your nose out of the air and seriously consider alternative packaging. Twist top and artificial “cork” wines have less spoilage than traditional cork wines. The condition of the cork tells you the wine has survived its shipment and storage – that’s it. You still have to taste the wine in order to truly determine that it is in the condition the winemaker wanted it to be when it is served. So can all the silly cork rituals and taste the damn wine already. The fact that a cork can be a major failure point in packaging should be enough to move people away from its use. Unfortunately, the wine snobs of the world continue to vocally prefer cork thus promoting the continuing depletion of cork trees and the reluctance of wineries to move away from its use.

Another thing that needs to be seriously evaluated is the glass bottle. It’s heavy and cheaper to make from new material than from recycled. Not all wine regions have a good source for recycled material bottles (and by good I mean one that is local, competitively priced and with consistently high quality) so it undermines the purpose of paying more for recycled material and then burning a lot of fossil fuel to put it in the winery.

I think consumers need to seriously consider “the box.” After all when wine was first produced they put it into clay jars that were sealed with less appealing things than a cork. A 3 liter box of wine weighs the same as a 750 ml glass bottle of wine and all of its materials are recyclable. “Box” and TetraPak containers are completely capable of protecting wine without imparting any foreign taste to the wine. There are many quality producers of recycled material box components and shipping the packaging is significantly cheaper than shipping empty glass bottles. Yes, losing the bottle means losing the ritual and romance of opening a bottle of wine. Decant it, light some candles and get over yourself.

I doubt that we will see any winery anywhere in the next year announce that they are switching to all box or TetraPak containers. But if a winery was to announce to its club members that they will be doing exclusive alternative packaging vintages I would be interested to see the reaction. If you love wine and you love the planet, perhaps you can give up the bottle.

So go drink some local wine (if you are in a western state without a resident wine industry Washington wine counts as local) and make your voice heard on issues of sustainability in the wine industry. Here are a few of my local favorites:

Sleight of Hand Cellars – Spellbinder is a great red blend for $18
DaMa Wines – Their Riesling is a lovely little prize at $16
Ash Hollow – The Somana is a great white blend at $20
Spring Valley Vineyards – Their Nina Lee (100% Syrah) is one of my favorites and my go to gift wine – $50
Cullin Hills Winery – Thanks to Nabil at Seattle Wine Co for turning me on to their Viognier (sold out)

Cheers!

Don’t these people know about laser pointers???

I want to get a bird-feeder now just so I can watch squirrels get dizzy. The dogs would have a field day!

Verizon charged him 76 dollars. The problem seems to be that no-one at Verizon is capable of basic arithmetic. Their billing system is clearly set up to charge 0.002 dollars per kilobyte (0.2 cents / kilobyte), but the support reps consistently quote 0.002 cents per kilobyte (.00002 dollars per kilobyte).

He recorded the support call complaining about the overcharge, and all 27 minutes of it is a hoot. The guy has the patience of a saint, even when two different reps agree that 1 dollar is different from 1 cent, and half a dollar is different from half a cent, but somehow .002 dollars and .002 cents is the same thing.

This is the product of the American educational system. At one point the supervisor even complains, “I’m not a mathematician!”, but you don’t need to be a mathematician to understand decimal points and multiplication. This is grade school arithmetic, people!

First, I would offer what should be called the “gay male couple” corollary to the “the bigger the boy, the bigger the toy” rule. Pretty much all guys love gadgety stuff, from mobile phones to outdoor gear to expensive consumer electronics. Gay men (if I may generalize) are no different–but a gay male couple has to be every marketers dream because there is no wife to raise the issue of what’s commonly called WAF, or “wife acceptance factor.” Don’t get me wrong–I know lots of gadget-lovin’ gals, but women seem to retain their senses in the presence of silicon in a way that most men can’t. There was little negotiation involved when David and I decided it was time to buy a plasma. “A 42-inch screen, honey? Why not 50?” (As it turns out, 50 was too big for the room as we were both bummed to learn.)

I recently found myself in the Portland Apple store, lovingly contemplating a brand new 15″ MacBookPro when my traveling companion helpfully pointed out how much I’d save on sales tax if I bought one in Oregon. So–going out of my way to be a good partner and looking for a check on my technolust– I texted David a message so short and cryptic that I wasn’t even sure he’d know what I was talking about. He responded within seconds– “Sure– go for it!” I’m glad I asked, but it confirmed my diagnosis that we are gadget junkies. (It’s not a tough call as I’m embarrassed to admit that we have three TVs, three game consoles, two Nintendo DSs and five computers in the house. Clearly we need help.)

Sadly, all was not good in Mac-land… the MacBookPro had some mysterious issues that got worse over time, eventually leading David to declare it “crap” and make my impulse purchase seem foolish. So I dragged it off to the Seattle Apple Store and a Genius Bar appointment. After a 20 minute wait and maybe 30 minutes of tinkering, the geek-in-residence found and fixed a problem relating to file permissions. I decided to spring for another 512KMB of RAM ($100, which is cheap if you have any kind of historical perspective on memory prices) and went home with a machine as screamingly fast as all the ads promised. (Oh, and a laptop bag–another long story I’ll get to later this week). I’m now so happy with it that I don’t even mind the hiccup… it’s like getting a new Mac twice!

Which is a nice segue to a story about something else we are going to have to get for a second time. In a similar WAF-less fashion, pretty much as soon as we saw the Bose Sound Docks for the iPod that came out last year, we wanted one. It didn’t take long for us to get one, either– we just rushed out and plunked down the embarrasing sum. But it sounds amazing and we love it. Especially that tiny little remote.

But just as boys love toys, so do dogs. So imagine our chagrin when we came home last night to a panicked note from the new housekeeper, next to a little plastic tub full of thoroughly chewed up plastic and circuit board. She thought it was an iPod, which would have been… bad. Luckily it was just that lovable little Sound Dock remote. But we both expected a replacement to cost at least $50– it would have fit my preconception of Bose as good but damn expensive. David was irritated at the dogs, the housekeeper and (inexplicably) me. “If it’s more than 30 bucks, forget it!” So I popped open that super-speedy new laptop and Googled for a moment. Image my suprise when I landed here and learned that it was only $9.98 with free shipping!

I’m not sure what all that means, other than that we are hopelessly spoiled. But I suspect that realization lies smack in the middle of the carnival of modern man. If you’re spoiled and you know it, isn’t it the same thing as being thankful? Here’s hoping.

I won’t go into the details of the initial transfer, which involved porting my cellphone number from one account to another, but let’s just say that I spent at least 4 hours on the phone with T-mobile reps trying to get the mess they created sorted out, and lost much of my hair in the process. But it all got sorted out in the end, and I thought I’d put it all behind me.

I’ve had the phone for about 6 weeks now, so I’ve just seen the first bill for a full month’s service. Beyond the basic minutes plan, theres a $30/month charge on top so that I can access the Internet (and thereby my email) from the MDA. I love the way it syncs with my work’s Exchange server, much sweeter than the Blackberry, but $30 is pretty steep just for email, which is why I got the MDA in the first place. Anyway, that 30 charge is broken up two line items, cryptically described as “Discounted HotSpot Unlimited” ($14.99) and “VPN Total Int Addon”. Now, I don’t use a VPN for email, and I don’t use T-Mobile hotspots, so I thought I’d check if I could make things cheaper by eliminating one or both of these services.

No dice on that front: after calling T-mobile customer service the first rep I spoke with informed me they were bundled together (the “T-Mobile Total Internet” plan), and they were needed if I was going to get email on my device. Oh well.

Then I thought, well, at least if I can also use Wi-Fi on my laptop in Starbucks thanks to my T-mobile Hotspot subscription, it might be worth it. Let’s just check with the rep if that’s possible. She passed me onto another rep. He said I needed to transfer my SIM card into an Airphone card in my laptop, which I dont have. I said this seemed rather impractical, so passed me onto a third person who didn’t know if what I wanted to do was possible either. Finally I got transferred onto a Hotspot rep, who might have known but wouldn’t tell me, because the name on the account in their records wasn’t what she expected. (The phone account is in Jay’s name because we share minutes, but the Hotspot people only know about me, because Jay doesn’t have the Hotspot feature.) I was about an hour into the call by this point, and gave up. When I told that 4th rep I was out of time and about to hang up she casually mentioned all I needed to use my laptop in Starbucks was my phone number and the last 4 digits of the account holder’s social security number! At last! I haven’t actually tried it yet, but at least it sounds plausible.

I’m just not sure it was worth 60 minutes of my life, let alone $30 a month, though.

One of the items in our appetizer plate was a vegetarian pate, which, while tasty on certain levels, lacked the unctuousness and depth of real pate, and just left me sort of pining for a bit of good old duck liver fat. A yearning I could potentially find myself nursing for the rest of my natural life if certain people have their way. It’s not bad enough that California is due to outlaw foie gras production in six years, but Whole Foods is now trying to do in the foie producers even quicker by strong arming their duck supplier Grimaud Farms, also Sonoma Foie Gras’ processor, if they want to continue doing business with the grocery store.

That is so not playing fair. First of all, it’s completely disingenuous to make such a fuss about force feeding ducks as being cruel when the average American eats a chicken that’s spent it’s life with it’s beak ripped off, in a cage it can’t move around in, getting pumped with antibiotics because it’s upstairs neighbor has no choice but to poop on it day in, day out. Compared to the chickens in this country, future plates of foie gras live lives of luxury.

Second of all, if people don’t want to eat foie gras, fine. Don’t. But don’t tell me I can’t eat it either. I don’t tell you you can’t eat e. coli strewn ConAgra produced beef in your Big Mac, and again, it just as cruelly produced, and at least as unhealthy, without being nearly as tasty.

To quote Thomas Keller, a national culinary treasure:

“I hope I’m retired by 2012…If force-feeding a duck is cruel, then packing chickens in a cage is cruel, and then the veal and the beef. We are all going to be vegetarians soon if they have their way. We should probably start converting now.”

Never thought I would say this, but Whole Foods has officially lost this customer.

So here it is:  I have a Shark rechargable stick vacuum and I love it.  It is light, recharges quickly, and picks up everything from bits of banana on the kitchen floor to sand on tile to general dirt on carpet.  Very inexpensive at Target. 

My god, I went to one of the best law schools in the country and this is what I do with my days…but you know, who doesn’t have dirt?