Wine Video of the Week: Grape Stomping FAIL
No one was harmed making this video. Well, not hurt too badly. Well… no one died. Can we say that? Yes, it seems we can. Who new stomping Chambourcin grapes was so damn dangerous?
#McFail
After having some success with their Twitter hashtag campaign #MeetTheFarmers (which promoted the supposedly good ingredients that McDonald’s uses and the farmers that produce them), the wise social media sages at Mickey D’s thought it would be a bright idea to introduce a new hashtag, #McDStories, so Tweeters could tell their stories about how much they love McDonald’s!
As someone who has actually used Twitter (unlike, apparently, McDonald’s social media director, Rick Wion), on the other hand, a tweet such as “ate a big mac, sick all afternoon #McDStories” popped into my head almost immediately, without even taking the time to be clever.
How about “My 4 year old weighs 100lbs” or “”Watching a classmate projectile vomit his food all over the restaurant during a 6th grade trip,” or “Fingernail in my BigMac.” (Ok, I made up that first one, but the other two are actual tweets in response to this campaign.)
Though McDonald’s is claiming that only 2% of the tweet responses were negative, they also said that they knew of their mistake within the first hour of the campaign and are no longer promoting it. Twitter users, of course, have moved on to #McFail to keep things going.
New Year’s Resolution: Buy Wider, Buy Smarter
This is typically the time of year when we all engage in a bit of reflection: What we did right over the course of the past year, what we could have done better, and how we plan on making the most of the coming year. And if there’s one thing most of us can improve on in 2008, it’s to become more open-minded wine-buyers and more strategic collectors.
If you fall into the former category, then make 2008 the year you experienced one new grape varietal or region each week: The wine world is expanding at breakneck speed, and the more open-minded you are to wines from unexpected grapes or unfamiliar parts of the world, the more drinking pleasure you’re likely to have. And the more exciting it’ll be each time you pull something off the rack or out of the cellar.
If you fall into the latter group, then make 2008 the year you hedge your bets. Too many friends and acquaintances of mine buy a single bottle of such-and-such a wine and then simply hope for the best when the time comes to open it up. Which is the wine equivalent of a sky-diver not having a reserve chute.
Corks fail regularly, after all, or bottles age and fade before they’re expected to. For any number of reasons, there’s no guarantee that the juice in the bottle will be what you expect it to when you finally pop that cork. So buying double, as it were, is not a reckless expense; it’s just smart wine-collecting.
Of course, the most clever people will fashion their wine lives to fit into both those categories. So drink well, drink widely and wisely, and make 2008 a vintage to remember.
Epikur is a magazine about food and drink, with a focus on our hometown of Philadelphia.
