I am totally in awe of Crushpad. It’s brand-y new boutique DIY winemaking awesomeness. They say they are democratizing the wine industry. I say f*ck yeah!
In their own words:
Who is Crushpad anyway? Well, we’re a combination of wine industry veterans and technology industry refugees who want to liberate winemaking from the stereotype of the 5th generation wine family living on the chateau with the Golden Retriever. By bringing winemaking to the city, augmenting it with education and support, and taking care of the time-consuming parts, we want to enable anyone with a serious interest in wine to participate in the magic of winemaking.
Basically, you get to design and make your own wine online in collaboration with experts and advisors online. Monitor the growth in the vineyards online, participate in the harvest if you want, choose your barrels, your fermentation techniques, everything. Here’s the very clear easy “how does it work” page. Explains it better than I can.
And what’s even better? I learned about them through a joint twitter and charity initiative. For every bottle you buy of their 2009 “Fledgling” wine, pictured above, they donate $5 to Room to Read, a literacy program that brings books to extremely impoverished children around the world and whose motto is, “world change starts with educated children.” Here’s a link to a video on how this all works.
So, as I’m starting to “get” twitter more and more every day, I am awed at its ability to take on projects like this one. Humanity. The more things change…
There you go. I bought two Fledgling bottles for my parents. So should you!
Life After 30 