A friend of mine, that talented writer David White, recently gave a speech at the 2011 Nederburg Auction in South Africa.  The title of the talk: “The End of the Gatekeeper: How The Online Revolution is Revolutionizing Wine.”

Forgiving the potential redundancy in the title (a revolution does have to revolutionize something, by definition, at least I think it does but maybe we’ve revolutionized the definitions as well and I missed it), David’s speech (which you can read in its entirety) is chock-full of interesting tidbits regarding the state of the on-line wine world.  And if that speech has a theme, it’s this: gatekeepers are largely wasting their time, especially when it comes to wine.

One of the more interesting tidbits from that speech comes from David’s observation of the current market’s combination of social media and the long-tail of how we search for and eventually consume products…

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I know that a lot of people like to jokingly poke fun at New Jersey from time to time (c’mon… admit it… they even had a NJ joke in Madagascar 2 and that was a kids flik), but do some people really think that NJ’s citizens are actually that dumb?

Apparently, some of them do – including Joseph Cryan, Assembly majority leader and representative of NJ’s 20th Legislative District. Whoops!

Tom Wark alerted me to this little ditty, an Opinion piece published in the Times of Trenton (that’s in NJ, for all you West Coast people) and written by Cryan, in which he attempts to justify a bill that he sponsored – one that basically doesn’t allow direct wine shipping in NJ. Cryan also goes on to lambast a separate bill that I’m assuming he opposed – one that does allow for direct shipment of wine to NJ consumers.  Here’s an excerpt of Cryan’s OpEd:

“…in New Jersey, we have a three-tier distribution system in place to protect our great state’s citizens, children, safety and revenue. The system has worked since 1933, and we should not be bullied by out-of-state wineries that seek to destroy it. The three-tier system has led to 60,000 retail jobs in our state; if we were to allow direct shipping, those New Jersey jobs could all but disappear.”

Wow.  So, let’s get this straight: according to Cryan, if they allow direct shipping in NJ, then they not only succumb to the “bullying” of out-of-state wineries, but will lose upwards of 60K jobs, will put the state’s children into rehab (supposedly they’re getting smashed on La Tache at, like, $3K/bottle?) and will miss out on an ungodly amount of revenue?

Save the children! Board the windows!! Annie, GET YER GUN!!!…

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I seem to be in ‘book mode’ the last week or two.  I’m a bit of a bookworm, so it’s fun for me to mess  around at the intersection of wine and the printed word.  I still don’t own an eReader device, by the way – I prefer Book 1.0 – you know, the kind with actual pages that you can stick a bookmark between.

Anyway, here’s another piece of printed word that intersects with the wacky world  of wine.

David White’s Sippin’ on Top of the World: Toasting Good Times and Better Days, of which I recently received a sample copy, is a bit of a strange book. 

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s being misrepresented. 

Sippin’ on Top of the World isn’t so much a list of wine toasts (as the subtitle would lead you to believe) as it is a series of spiritual wine meditations.  Which makes sense when you consider that its author, David White, is the co-founder of the “WineSpirit Institute for the Study of Wine and Spirituality.”

Uh-ohhhhh.

At this point, your mind may be screaming “CULT! CULT!” and planning to run away as quickly as you can lest you be tainted by the odiferous funk of the religious cook.  It would be an understandable reaction, though one that I’d argue was totally incorrect.

In fact, depending on your point of view, dismiss Sippin’ on Top of the World too readily and you’d be missing out on some potentially enthralling conversation topics, not to mention possible sources of inspiration…

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