The Twitter wine venture began last year with a tie up with wine maker Crushpad and the the non-profit Room to Read. The idea is to sell the wine in order to promote education and literacy under the name of The Fledgling Imitative.

In his blog post on the subject, Stone ponders “A world in which all children can pursue a quality education is something worth celebrating”. The post is definitely worth reading.

Here’s the lowdown:

The post Twitter launches wine, yours to drink in 140 sips appeared first on Wine Of The Week.

Interviewing a number of restaurateurs who have been experimenting with transferring their traditional wine menus to the digital platform, the paper claims the device has lead to a 10% rise in wine sales, though generally at the expense of beer and cocktails.

Diners are enjoying the ability to research the wine themselves and read reviews and descriptions without turning to the sommelier who, some may fear, is trying to palm off high-priced, hard-to-shift beverages with his advice.

As well as increased sales, the restaurants benefit from not having to turn out new print runs of their menus when there are changes to price or stock, and can keep the information totally up to date.

The iPad’s form carries the gravitas of a wine menu with its weight, size and respectability, but it also carries a hefty price tag so it may be some time before these are getting handed out willy-nilly at your local pub.

The post May I bring Sir the iPad? appeared first on Wine Of The Week.

And yet gaming is evolving. It’s no longer the preserve of teenage boys or men over the age of thirty who wish they were still teenage boys.

Gaming is everywhere. Whether it be entire families waving their arms wildly to the Wii or granddads trying to beat back dementia with brain exercises on the Nintendo DX.

For the rest of us there is social gaming. And it’s rapidly becoming our favourite waste of time.

Evidence is provided by the Facebook phenomenon that is Farmville. As of April this year Farmville had 78m users, accounting for 16% of Facebook’s 500m active user base. It’s estimated that Zynga (the creator of Farmville and Mafia Wars) will generate £500m of revenue this year from gamers buying virtual goods via Facebook.

So, what to make of ‘My Vineyard’, the new wine themed social game from Playdom? ‘My Vineyard’ is a Farmville style game that encourages you to set up your own vineyard, plant vines, harvest grapes and make wine. And of course buy virtual goods with real cash.

There are some nice touches to the game. For instance it allows you to name all your wines individually (I’m currently running a Shady Lane Chardonnay and a Moo Moo Merlot) and you can also ask your Facebook friends to rate the wines once you’ve thrown them out to the open market.

In the early stages the motivation to play rests on moving up the ‘Parkeresque’ 100 point ranking system. So far I haven’t had a wine score over 14 and have had my chardonnay described as tasting of ‘bacon fat’. Hmmmpf.

Finding people who may want to join you in this virtual viniculture can pose a challenge if, like me, you use Facebook mostly for friends and family.

Currently I need help building my winery but do not have enough ‘neighbours’ to complete the task (the only way to finish construction is to buy wine coins with REAL money and I simply refuse to go down that slippery road).

The real issue with all these types of games is that, unlike console games that lie in suspended animation when you pull the plug, social games never sleep. Even when you close your browser, stuff is still growing. Or in this case fermenting. You are permanently aware that you need to regularly check in and perform actions. This can be quite a problem if you have say, a life.

‘My Vineyard’ is a repetitive cycle of planting, growing, harvesting and fermenting for absolutely no tangible reward other than an opportunity to give your virtual products silly names. In the week that I gave up We Rule and Godfinger I just can’t be suckered into another instance of time theft.

I am not a social gamer. I am a free man.

The post Why building your own vineyard is a complete waste of time appeared first on Wine Of The Week.

WineOfTheWeek has been slurping on about the lack of innovation in the SmartPhone sector when it comes to wine brands for some time now.

Just as we were planning on opening up the iPhone SDK to create our own Frankenwine’s monster, along comes this super concept from Veuve Clicquot.

The idea is simple. If you are attending an event sponsored by Veuve you can use your iPhone to order champagne and have it delivered to your exact location.

You enter the type of fizz and the number of bottles you require and GPS does the rest. Within minutes, a Veuve branded golf buggy bounces it’s way to your destination and a lovely lady hands you your Champagne.

They call it their ‘concierge’ service and WineOfTheWeek witnessed it’s debut at the Gold Cup Polo finals last Sunday.

Yes, ok. You read that correctly. In what can only be described as a complete betrayal of our value system WOTW attended a Polo event. Can I offer up ‘we go to these events so that you don’t have to’ as a justification? Someone help me out here!!!

Putting my class prejudices aside, the concierge service is a good example of how to use the iPhone’s geo-location services to good effect during event marketing so we’ll give them a thumbs up.

The app also contains an events calender and invite friends function however the latter requires friends to also have the app installed for it to make it any use.

And the Polo? Didn’t understand a single minute of it. Although some bloke told me that, just as in football, there aren’t any decent English players. Very reassuring.

Now, where did I leave the latest edition of Tatler? Is that it there underneath my Boden catalogue…?

The iPhone4 may be a cr*p phone but it takes nice pictures

The post iPhone App delivers Veuve Clicquot via GPS. Say What? appeared first on Wine Of The Week.