#winesmiths

[thedigitalmuseum]

The Brave New Future of the Recent Past

Screen-based media is today’s dominant cultural form, yet the technologies used to create and deliver culture are racing ahead of those that preserve it, and collecting institutions' expertise is focused on physical artefacts. Concurrently, digitisation and preservation of Indigenous culture, knowledges and metadata is vital to ensuring that Indigenous stories are stored and told authentically and appropriately. Join library, broadcasting, museum and archiving professionals as they forecast challenges and solutions for collecting and preserving contemporary culture now, for the future.

[fawntheloveofgod]

From grandmas diaries. Love this one. Undoubtedly Winesmiths Merlot cask. In a plastic camping wine glass with a little charm around the stem. They divorced the following year.

[notsocheezy]

Brain Curd #130

Brain Curds are lightly edited flash fiction - practically first drafts - posted daily (haven't missed one yet!) and sometimes written with the express intention of being terrible… but, you know, in an endearing way. Please like and reblog if you enjoy - the notes keep me going!

An unpaid intern shuffled down the hall holding three cardboard drink holders, each outfitted with their own four eclectic and customized coffee drinks for the voice actors and the recording engineers. She approached the door to the studio and paused. She was already using more hands than she had to hold the coffee, and now she needed to open the door. She stared at the knob, squinting at it, trying to convince it to open through her own sheer will. This was a fruitless endeavor, but the door opened anyway.

“What the hell took you so long?” The sound designer took his drink from its caddy, slightly throwing off the intern’s balance, but she narrowly managed to catch the other three cups. He sucked on the straw and gestured inside.

She set the drinks down carefully and aligned them on the table in a set order. Cast and crew alike flocked to take their drinks, and in the end only one remained.

The intern tapped the sound designer’s shoulder. “He ordered the most complicated coffee of the bunch and he isn’t even going to drink it?”

“Hey, remember what I told you? Don’t shit talk if you want a future in this industry.” He yelled out, “Hey! Does anyone know where the hell Winesmith is?”

Every person in the room shook their heads.

“Goddamn it.” He took a loud sip of his drink, slammed it on the mixing desk, and dialed the number.

“Hello?” Thomas Winesmith slurred, sounding as though his face were pressed against a pair of asscheeks.

“Where are you?”

“Hm…” He paused, trying to decipher his own location from context clues. “A motel room. Perhaps on Sunset.”

“We’re supposed to be recording…” The sound designer checked his watch. “About ten minutes ago.”

“No time to waste, then. Let’s get started.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can hear my voice, yes?”

“I guess so, but -”

“Then record it.”

A piercing headache suddenly accosted the poor man. “We can’t use telephone recordings in a big-budget animated feature, Mr. Winesmith.”

“Sure you can. That’s what they did for my last voice role.”

The intern butted in. “I saw that movie. His part was literally a phone call!”

The sound designer shushed her. “Your character is supposed to be in the room with the other ones. This is never going to work. Please get down here as soon as you can.”

“Fine… Would you kindly send a car to pick me up?”

The sound engineer locked eyes with the intern, who exhaustedly sighed.

[michaelcosio]

THE FEDERALIST

CABERNET SAUVIGNON

Made Like America: Bold

The winesmith never rests. From grape to barrel, this Cabernet is crafted to quench your thirst with bold blackberry and cinnamon spice. Roll up your sleeves and uncork American craftsmanship.

Bottle Size: 750 ml Apellation: Lodi Grape Varieties: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petite Syrah, Sangiovese Alcohol Percentage: 14.90% Fermentation: Different blocks were fermented separately to preserve ideal characteristics of each. Each block spends an average of 18 days on the skins Aging: 15 Months in 35% new Oak

[mulgatheartist]

The new @winesmiths Rosé and Cabernet Sauvignon with the limited edish reusable koala nozzleheads 🐨🥂🐨. ⁣⁣ ⁣ $1 from the sale of every Koala Nozzlehead box will help save koala habitats through the @australiankoalafoundation 🐨🙌⁣ ⁣⁣ 📸 @winsordobbin⁣ ⁣ #mulgatheartist #sacrificenothing #winesmiths #koalaart #wineart #artistlife #artlicensing #winelover (at Australia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CWoarZkBvgQ/?utm_medium=tumblr

[rezioenophile]

Clark Smith (his book Postmodern Winemaking) & Small Rezi (with his new present) - Moment when genius reads personal lecture for you 😅 One of the best & catchy meeting with great Winemaker, Scientist, (Inventor of Reverse Osmosis ) and writer. After i taste his gorgeous wines i can say that i know just few things (9%) about wine.! 🍷Clark adores Georgian Wine and Qvevri techniques, he also liked my present 🤷🏼‍♂️haha . . . . #rezioenophile #postmodernwinemaking #clarkashtonsmith #wine #winesmith #wine #winetasting #winelover #wines #winenight #wineo #winelovers🍷 #winetime #wineanddine #winetours #winegeek #amywinehouse #wineblog #california #californianas #californiawine #californiaadventure #californiawinery #sonomawine https://www.instagram.com/p/B3YgTQgH4w4/?igshid=peffrxgzi71b

[madlilsongbird]

Literally nobody will understand this post but I need to make it anyway

Talia Winesmith 25th November 1996 - 17 September 2018

[courtneyb-tv]

Wine night with wife ➕ @handmaidsonhulu. 🙏 Shoutout to #Winesmith on Central Ave. in #StPete. Cool guy. Amazing wine. Great prices. There's also a dog there. I prob should've lead with that. 🐶 He (the guy, not the dog) always recommends winners for @jk09 and I. Today is a dry Italian red. 🍷🍇👁#underhiseye #blessedbethefruit #maythelordopen (at Winesmith)

[glowsole]

crossing

loveyourchaos:

(by Susan Winesmith)

[wineanddinosaur]

Bourbon Barrel-Aged Wine Isn’t ‘Real’ Wine, and That’s O.K.

Bob Blue, Fetzer Vineyards’ winemaker and the unofficial baron of bourbon barrel-aged wines, famously describes his creation as a product of thrifty necessity. “I distinctly remember in the early ‘80s that getting French oak for wine was a big deal,” Blue is frequently quoted as saying. “Since there wasn’t a ton of capital, we used bourbon barrels.”

Fetzer’s bourbon-barrel-aged Zinfandel, 1000 Stories, debuted in 2014. In the five years since, production has skyrocketed from 5,000 9-liter cases to more than 140,000 annually. “We continue to see strong double-digit growth,” Rachel Newman, the brand’s marketing director, writes VinePair in an email.

The success of this product is not a fluke, nor is it alone. The spirits-barrel-aged category earned more than $91 million in 2018, up from $800,000 in 2015.

Every major American wine brand has a line aged in spirits barrels. Gallo entered the sector with Apothic Inferno in 2016. Constellation released a bourbon-barrel-aged Robert Mondavi Private Selection Cabernet Sauvignon the same year, and launched Cooper & Thief, a dedicated spirits-barrel-aged brand, in March 2017.

Terlato owns The Federalist, The Wine Group makes Stave and Steel, and Treasury Wine Estates offers a line of bourbon-barrel-aged wines through its Beringer Bros. brand. Even Sam’s Club is enjoying a slice of the pie with Batch No. 198 Cabernet Sauvignon Bourbon Barrel Aged.

“We had just five labels [of spirits-barrel-aged wines] a year ago,” Mike Osborn, Wine.com founder, says. “Today we’re selling 20.”

At this point, those who look down on the category might argue these aren’t “real” wines. They’d be right. Everything from the taste, to serving vessel, to packaging, to promotion moves these beverages as far from that thing stuffy people like to call “wine” as possible.

And so it’s not wine, at least not in a traditional or recognizable way. The thing is, that’s exactly why everyone making and buying it likes it so much.

Spirits-barrel-aged wines don’t taste like the whiskeys or rums that previously occupied their casks, nor do they taste like most Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon. Charred oak and smoky notes dominate both nose and palate, while rich berry compote and sweet vanilla are a distant and very faint afterthought.

Texturally, their tannins are so well integrated they’re practically unnoticeable. It makes for an extremely easy-drinking experience, despite the fact bottles regularly approach and often hit the 16-percent ABV mark. (It’s quite possible that someone buying a bottle of spirits-barrel-aged wine would want its ABV on the higher side, especially if they traditionally drink liquor.)

We’re meant to appreciate these nuances in a non-traditional manner. The Federalist created a “handcrafted” glass for its bourbon-barrel-aged line in 2018, which appears to be a standard rocks glass commonly used for sipping high-proof spirits.

On Stave and Steel’s website, a denim-clad model sits atop a pile of charred wood and a large rusty chain (awkward!) enjoying a glass of the brand’s red blend. He, too, sips from a rocks glass.

The physical bottles themselves also break from tradition. O’Neil Family Vineyards-owned EXITUS delivers its red blend in clear glass bottles. “We don’t hide behind tinted glass,” the brand writes on its website. “Why should you have to wait until your first pour to experience the rich crimson hue of our bourbon barrel aged blend?”

Cooper & Thief’s whiskey-barrel-aged line arrives in short, stocky versions of classic Bordeaux bottles, while Beringer Bros. is the most blatant at attempting to look like a spirit: Its bottles have a pronounced bulge on the neck, a style closely attributed to Scotch whisky.

Labels, too, are noticeably brown-liquor-inspired. Oak-aging statements, traditionally confined to the back of wine bottles, prominently feature on Cooper & Thief’s labels. It’s just that the bold number in red is a “3,” not a 10 or a 12, and it’s months, not years of aging the label’s proclaiming.

According to the websites of these producers, if you want to sell someone a spirits-barrel-aged wine, apparently all you have to do is bombard them with images of fire, barrels, and heavily tattooed men. And if you want to really speak to them, ditch traditional terminology like tannins and terroir, and replace them with words that evoke a sense of rebellion and star-spangled pride.

EXITUS claims to be “bold and fearless,” while “born from mischief” Cooper & Thief “challenges tradition” and “celebrates doing things differently.” These products are not made, they’re “crafted” — The Federalist apparently does so “with the same rebellious spirit that created a nation.” Those tasked with doing so are not winemakers, they’re “cellarmasters” and “winesmiths.”

“I definitely feel that bourbon-barrel-aged wines are a great introduction for those that have traditionally preferred other types of alcohol, like spirits,” Jason Dodge, Robert Mondavi Private Selection’s senior director of winemaking, says.

Jeff Kasavan, Cooper & Thief’s cellarmaster, agrees. “Bourbon barrel-aged wines are a great way for spirits and beer lovers to think differently about wine and explore the category by starting with a wine influenced by flavors they already love,” he says.

Meanwhile, the wines’ high alcohol content suits “those who are looking for something that blurs the line between spirits and wine,” Kasavan says.

It’s clear who these brands are targeting. Who’s buying is slightly less certain.

In an email to VinePair, an EXITUS representative wrote that, according to its research, “the bourbon barrel-aged category was most appealing to a younger (24-45-year-old), more affluent consumer.”

This is inconsistent with data provided by Wine.com. Baby Boomers and Gen-X account for two-thirds of the spirits-barrel-aged wine sold on the online platform.

“Whereas Millennials make up the largest share of our overall customer base, in this category, their parents seem to be making the difference,” Osborn says.

Wine snobs of all ages are unmoved. One writer tweeted that not only is spirits-barrel-aging a “marketing gimmick,” it’s also a great way to “mask the flaws of sub-standard fruit.” The tweet alludes to the fact that charcoal from heavily toasted spirits barrels could serve as a fining agent and fix faults like bad odors. “It’s like putting lipstick on a pig..” he writes. “It’s still a pig..”

The category’s legitimacy is beside the point, though. Yes, these wines and their branding are pretty one-note. And sure, fans might never “graduate” to “real” wines. The large corporations making these wines hardly care, though, and might not want drinkers to move on to other styles.

None of the category’s seven most popular wines retails for less than $15 a bottle. The Federalist sells for an average price of $22, while Exitus has a $25 average. Cooper & Thief’s entry-level blend starts even higher, at $30, and its premium Cab sells for $60.

Spirits-barrel-aged wines are marketed as everything and anything but fermented grape juice so that, if drinkers of this style do start to spend more money on bottles, it will most likely be vertically within the category, rather than on “traditional” wines.

So if the shade of lipstick on this particular pig’s mouth offends you, ask yourself: Is it you or the pig that has a problem?

The post Bourbon Barrel-Aged Wine Isn’t ‘Real’ Wine, and That’s O.K. appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/barrel-aged-wine-good-debate/

[whoweareinside]

#womancrush all day, every day, but especially on Wine Wednesday (at Winesmith)

[thedigitalmuseum]

How can we use artificial intelligence to augment access to the archives?

We’ve heard how artists and creators are making sense of, and testing the edges of artificial intelligence. In this session, we look at how different institutions are using the same technologies to augment access to the archives and activities. We will hear how experimentation with emerging technologies requires the ability to collaborate and be confident in the uncertainties that the experimentation brings. How do machines see and hear archival collections? What new possibilities emerge from the archive as a result?

Speakers: Dr Mia Ridge (British Library), Dr Keir Winesmith (NFSA), Simon Loffler (via Zoom) (ACMI), moderated by Jeff Williams (ACMI)

[mtdemocrat]

https://www.mtdemocrat.com/prospecting/bo-and-paul-parker-perform-at-the-winesmith/

Bo and Paul Parker perform at the WineSmith

Musicians Bo and Paul Parker are returning to the WineSmith, 346 Main St. in Placerville, on Saturday, Jan. 27 from 7-10 p.m. The duo from Portland, Ore., presents an eclectic range of folk, jazz, blues and rock featuring Paul’s muscular lead guitar and Bo’s solid rhythm guitar and vocals. Paul a...

[mcnaughtonmedia]

https://www.mtdemocrat.com/prospecting/bo-and-paul-parker-perform-at-the-winesmith/

Bo and Paul Parker perform at the WineSmith

Musicians Bo and Paul Parker are returning to the WineSmith, 346 Main St. in Placerville, on Saturday, Jan. 27 from 7-10 p.m. The duo from Portland, Ore., presents an eclectic range of folk, jazz, blues and rock featuring Paul’s muscular lead guitar and Bo’s solid rhythm guitar and vocals. Paul a...

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Can Social Tagging Deepen the Museum Experience?

Social-tagging results in a museum visit (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Established art museums aren’t really known for responsiveness to the individual wants of visitors. Theoretically, the best art exhibitions respond to the emotional and conceptual requirements of their time, rather than to individual tastes. In practice, it is beholden to the Patron (the elite group of funders who underwrite museums) and not the patron (your everyday ticket-holding museum-goer). To understand how and why museums make decisions, it’s often most useful, as the evergreen adage goes, to follow the money. Instagram and Tumblr have filled in some of these gaps, while the rise of a “Spotify for art lovers” streams visual art by theme. Now, an initiative from SFMOMA has art lovers texting instead of scrolling. Since June, a text message to the museum phrased “Send me _____” returns a work from its permanent collection related to nearly any word — or even emoji. “Send Me SFMOMA” has received 4.3 million text messages.

This initiative may seem like a one-off bid for visitor attention, but it actually comes out of a decade of art museum technology and research. If art museums were machines, we’d say their user interface has improved greatly over the last ten years. As it turns out, we have Steve to thank — and not that Steve.

An interaction with “Send me SFMOMA” (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

In 2004, an information architect named Thomas Vander Wal coined the term “folksonomy” to describe language that originates from the masses up. He and other information architects were observing this process on the internet through social tagging — users generating and pairing keywords to images to make them easier to find later. A folksonomy behaves like a taxonomy in that it is meant to assign meaning to things by classifying them. But while a taxonomy strives for scientific accuracy, a folksonomy is by nature imperfect. The internet has democratized cultural sectors whose vocabulary was defined by a small elite; the art museum community, inspired by Vander Wal, is one of them.

Susan Chun was on staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City when she read about Vander Wal’s work. At the time, the museum was aware that many people visiting its digital archives were struggling to find what they were looking for. It was a classic case of jargon vs. conventional language, Chun said. If the Met could just find a way to get the public to catalogue the archives themselves, then they would know that the system was user-friendly.

“Honestly, until tagging came along museums had so little access to how visitors understood works of art,” Chun says. Academically inclined by nature and training, staffers were insulated from the “glory, confusion, [and] distaste of the visitor.” In 2005, Chun banded with other like-minded museum professionals to found Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project. Funded by grants from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, they eventually developed an open-source software to make tagging easy for any museums who wished to participate.

Take this painting, for example:

Winslow Homer, “The Gulf Stream” (1899), Oil on canvas 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 inches (photo by David Torcivia via Flickr)

Winslow Homer painted “The Gulf Stream” in 1899; it hangs in the Met. The team conducting The Steve Project was surprised when multiple people tagged the shark-laden painting with the word “dolphins.” Chun was fascinated by the “imperfect image” — the passing impression that a visitor gets of a painting. “The real goal is to bring people to works of art, however misremembered,” she says. Vander Wal explains that tagging is a means of retrieval. The way we store things to come back to them later is subjective. Often these associations are shared by others — hence why social tagging works. But museum professionals eventually arrived at the conclusion there is no point in using people to tag works for elements that computers can detect, like color. It is better to have people describe things computers can’t detect, like how does the piece make them feel?

By 2014, when I first visited the topic of social tagging, it was a buzzword out of vogue, and trying to motivate people to tag was just plain difficult, unless they were already art enthusiasts. The Brooklyn Museum turned tagging into a game called “Tag! You’re It” and another game called “Freeze Tag” to remove inaccurate or  inappropriate tags. Both games were discontinued due to low participation rates.

Museum studies scholar Ross Parry argues that the idea of a technological museum isn’t newsworthy. He says we are in a “postdigital” museum environment, in which museums will be judged not based on whether they have an app but on how well “digital thinking” is applied to all levels of the organization.We now visit museums to see works that are already available online. What happens when virtual reality can recreate the artwork in our home?

Sebastian Chan, formerly director of Digital & Emerging Technologies at Cooper Hewitt,  now works at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). It’s a question ACMI has already grappled with, as all of the films in their collection can be viewed in a visitor’s living room. Currently, the most important job of the museum is to provide critical context. While machines tag films frame by frame, the curators interrogate bias and find references between directors that a machine would miss. We’re “tagging the museum’s stuff as well as tagging the world,” says Chan. “The museum is now much bigger than what you see when you walk in the door,” because of the wealth of information that lives online. He compares it to the TARDIS, from Doctor Who: police telephone box on the outside, expansive spacecraft on the inside. The postdigital museum allows visitors to extract more data from the collection (and the collection to extract data from the visitors.)

The Steve project ignited a “radical shift toward how visitors saw things,” Chan says. Chan was part of the team that launched the Pen at Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. Now, every visitor to the converted Upper East Side mansion is offered a rubber-tipped stylus the length of a toothbrush. By pressing the Pen to object labels, visitors can save the object to their personal collection, available online via the code on their museum ticket. (In the first 75 days of the Pen, it was used by 93% of visitors.) Cooper Hewitt offers info about the objects one engaged with — their colors, country of origin, and yes, their tags.

Folksonomy is far from a dead language. Social tagging proved a critical stepping stone for museums striving for Parry’s postdigital state. What was losing relevance in 2014, has shown by 2017 to be the germ of art museum democratization — whether through physical interventions like the Pen, or new iterations of the tagging system.

“We had experimented with Steve as a product suite and an idea, but we found that the ‘folksonomy’ didn’t provide the sort of connectivity and richness that you get from having a few dedicated staff [tagging],” says Keir Winesmith, Head of Web and Digital platforms at SFMOMA. The museum has been tagging its digital collection for internal purposes for nearly a decade, but a project as personal as the one just launched “wasn’t on the radar,” says Winesmith. The museum can only display 5% of its collection at a time, so “Send Me SFMOMA” was really more about “bringing to light the work in the collection that was largely hidden” than crowdsourcing a list of terms. However, Winesmith says they couldn’t have done it without the tags: “it would have been a non-starter.”

Of course, the museum is learning from the gaps between user desire and deliverability — and not just NSFW asks trying to trip the program up. 75% of the texts get a match. Subjective words, like beauty, have been hard to match —  as were emojis, initially. “We ran this pilot for four days in May and the first thing we learned was really we’re not very good at emojis and most of them didn’t match anything,” says Winesmith. “We actually gathered together a whole bunch of people that know more about emojis than I do and we kind of had an emoji workshop and they explained what all the hidden meanings were.” The museum now has 450 emojis in their system. About two thirds of users are sending words, and a third are using emojis.

Susan Chun can’t get away from tagging. Timed with the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, she implemented a program called Coyote at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago where she is currently Chief Content Officer. The museum staff committed to creating rich descriptions of every image on their website, as if they were describing them to a visually impaired friend. Chun was delighted to discover that the museum had some closet poets, but even moreso that visually impaired visitors weren’t the only ones to benefit. She calls Coyote a “powerful tool for people of all sorts who feel a little alienated in an art museum.” Language as emotional engagement and catharsis. As with Steve, Coyote is an open source tool.

The Brooklyn Museum, meanwhile, has shifted from the needs of the digital to the physical visitor. Sara Devine, the Manager of Audience Engagement & Interpretive Materials, is clear about this distinction. The biggest desire of museum visitors was to ask staff questions about what they were seeing, says Devine, so the museum launched the Ask app to allow them to do just that. There is no take-home component of the app, and users are anonymous. But while visitors can’t log in from home and continue to engage with the collection, their questions become a part of the museum’s metadata that informs how they organize the exhibits.

Economic restraints push museums to continuously re-evaluate their purpose, says Chan. “The business model of the museum has to include the public as well; technology is a means to deliver public value.” He echoes a thought he expressed when evaluating the initial success of Cooper Hewitt’s pen. “The Pen can only be seen as successful in so far as it enables the museum and its visitors to do more with our collection.” Even a physical intervention into the visitor experience ends with metadata about word association.

“There’s oftentimes language that is a barrier to people’s engagement with work,” says Winesmith. “That’s why [Send Me] is so ‘dumb.’. We didn’t want an expert way of using it, there’s just one way of using it.” The museum is in talks with half a dozen other museums around the world to adapt the program to their collections, including The Tate and the Auckland Art Gallery.

Writing for The Atlantic in 2015, amid buzz about the internet of things, Robinson Meyer deftly characterized Cooper Hewitt’s collection as things of the internet. The key to interpreting these objects or artworks lies not in the five senses, but in language. In this way, the pen is not mightier than the word. They need each other.

  The post Can Social Tagging Deepen the Museum Experience? appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[mulgatheartist]

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A post shared by Mulga the Artist (@mulgatheartist)

Another lil vid showing the Winesmiths x Mulga Casks 🍷😎. Collect all 4 from liquor stores nationwide or on the internets 🌐. ⁣ ⁣ Applications for the $5,000 'Sacrifice Nothing' Grant close tomorrow (20 Sep). It will go to one Aussie artist who pours everything into their craft. Apply via the link in my bio or tag an artist who you think is most deserving 🎨💪. ⁣ ⁣⁣ #mulgatheartist #SacrificeNothing #winesmiths #mulgaxwinesmiths #stopmotion #artist #artistsoninstagram #artistlife #art #artcollab #artlicensing (at Australia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CT-4hyPrFDW/?utm_medium=tumblr