Swirls: Twitter wine, sweet German riesling, elephant crushes grapes

SWIRL: You’ll recall that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, recently announced a $100 million grant to the Newark, N.J. school system. Well now comes word of another literacy initiative  involving Twitter and wine. Twitter has teamed up with Crushpad, a California custom winemaking facility, to offer a pinot noir and a chardonnay under the Fledgling by Twitter label, each priced at  $25. For every bottle sold, $5 will go to a non-profit group that promotes literacy in developing countries. Read more about it here.

SWIRL: As a riesling lover, I was struck by Eric Asimov’s excellent column in The New York Times today on German rieslings, specifically the spatlese category, which refers to a ripeness level that allows the grapes to be made into sweet wines. Such wines can be sublime, and if the sweetness “is carefully balanced by other qualities, like a lively acidity,” Asimov writes, “you end up with a high-wire balancing act in which the tension between sweetness and acid is refreshing and thrilling.”

SWIRL: If some of the wine produced by one Oregon winery comes off as a little “heavy handed,” it may be understandable. That’s because Reustle Vineyards used an elephant named George this past weekend to crush some of its grapes. Read the full story here.

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