Wine is love

My first "wine lovers" bottleI’ve recently applied for the Francesco Zonin‘s (Cantine Zonin is one of the greatest Wine companies here in Italy) new marketing initiative named Wine is Love (more on this on the linked Francesco’s blog, in Italian only) where some wine lovers bloggers are going to receive premieres bottles from the wine maker just to enjoy them.

The first bottle I’ve received is a Primitivo di Manduria (note: the English version of this Wikipedia page does not exiest) produced by the Masseria Altemura (which is owned by the Zonin’s) and has layed a couple of months in my cellar waiting for the right chance to be opened. I’ve to say that I proposed to our friends on the upper floor to celebrate each of the bottles I’m going to receive with a special wine tasting dinner to give these wines the respect they deserve.

For the Altemura di Altemura we arranged a full black suite table with demi-ballons glasses, black water glasses and design cutleries.

The main course was a superbly coocked roasted guineafowl on a bed of spinaches and green beans. A bamboo cup of chinese rice boiled with garlic made the rest.

We started the evening by reading the birth of this wine from the words of its creator (I’m gonna ask permission to Francesco Zonin to have this published) while the bottle sat opened on the table for more or less half an hour; we decided not to read the organolecptic table but to desume them by ourselves (we prepared a couple of “technical” booklets where to annotate our feelings about this wine and the dinner).

Smelling (with my wife trying to make me laugh)

The wine is plenty with strawberry and mixed berries, with a round corpus and well balanced tannines (I’m absolutely not a technician in this field and my English vocabulary is lacking too many wine related words to going deep into the description :-) ); we thought it would have had a great benefit of another couple of years rest to reach complete perfection, but it was a marvellous wine indeed.

Just a final note about the last sentence we wrote down: “Immediately order a couple of dozens of these bottles“. I wasn’t able to find any ecommerce on the Zonin’s site; Francesco: can you help?

Things too cool to be silenced

It’s been really a lot this blog is now under silence due to my new home moving operations (more on this soon, promise) but I’ve recently been parte of a couple of things that are just too smart not to be written here.

Gabetti Real Estate map mash-up

Gabetti Map Search V.1.2

We just released the brand new map search for Real Estate listings on the Gabetti site; it’s a .NET application mounted on top of ViaMichelin API that you could use to look for an house in a specific area in Italy. The geodata are collected from the huge Gabetti listings database and placed straight on the cartography.

We’re actually in semi-private (you should be a registered Gabetti site user; registration at the site is public and free) BETA and are collecting users feedback to improve the application.

Uh, as a side note Gabetti is the first real estate company in Italy to have such an application.

Frontiers of Interaction 4

Frobntiers of Interaction 2008

This year the conference will talk about the more and more computerLESS World we’re living in. You can join us on Tuesday, July 1st from 9am to 5pm for a FREE DAY (lunch & breaks included) in Turin (Italy) (complete info on venue here).

My pal Leeander has really done a marvellous job for this year edition collecting a supa-dupa speakers frontline: Nicolas Nova, Bruno Giussani, Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo Inc.), and many more.

As said the conference is completely free but reistration is required; use your Yahoo id to subscribe on the Upcoming page.


My video introduction to Frontiers of Interaction 2008 from Matteo Penzo on Vimeo.

UPDATE: the conference has been a huge success; you can see all the talks video and the photos; we’ve been featured on a major Italian innovation newspaper and on Wired too!

Conclusions

I really feel bad not to have updated the blog in the latest weeks, but I had the chance to store a nice amount of things to say and still need to have the calm time to fix some aspects of my private life; that’s why don’t expect to find me here too soon.

Call to action: take part at Frontiers of Interaction and give a try to the brand new Gabetti Map Search.