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Showing posts from December, 2016

Like to know what's in Grange? Most years Penfolds has to break the law to tell you

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Grange. Australia's most famous wine. The red that put our country on the world's quality wine map. Yet most years Penfolds has to break the law to tell people what's in it. If you think that sounds like madness, well, yes, it is. Yet Wine Australia, the federal government body that controls how wine is labelled and promoted does, outlaw telling the truth about Grange and many other wines blended from different regions. This is the idiotic bureaucratic regulation that defines the offence: (Click to enlarge) And the section of the Australian Grape and Wine Authority Act 2013 that the regulation refers to: The problem arises because the grapes that end up in Grange regularly come from more than three regions as the company website explains. So Penfolds is in breach of the law with this reference in its tasting note for the 2010 Grange: VINEYARD REGION Barossa Valley, Clare Valley, Adelaide Hills, McLaren Vale, Magill Estate Oh no! Five GIs mentio

Tweeter-in-chief rewrites the media’s rule book

Tweeter-in-chief rewrites the media’s rule book : "Politicians should campaign in poetry and govern in prose, goes the adage. But Donald Trump has changed little in his shift from campaigner to president-in-waiting. He remains more polemic than poetic and is holding tight to his favourite tool for spreading bombast: Twitter. This week, it was as if the tweeter-in-chief was back on the campaign trail, the master communicator with smartphone in hand, setting the news agenda for a frustrated press forced into soul-searching over how to cover him. He used the messaging app to suggest that flag burners be thrown in jail; to moot scrapping the US-Cuba detente; to complain of fraud in an election he won; and to promote a gloating campaign-style rally where he mocked his vanquished opponents. “It’s genius and it’s frightening. It’s communications without the advantage of the frontal lobe. There’s no inhibition,” says Richard Levick, chairman of Levick, a veteran Washington communicatio