TheSnackHound

Speaking of Wine, did you know that there is a wine that gives 50% of profits to charity? You heard me right. One Hope Wine does. Each type of wine is earmarked with a donation towards a specific charity, with the option of directing another small amount to a charity (from the list) of the purchaser’s choice.

More on the health benefits of wine, to make you feel good (in a different way, of course):

Presented By ONEHOPE Wine Online Fifty Percent of Profits Go To Charity

Cousin Lester went and borrowed a backhoe. He read that crop rotation is now important in growing grapevines for wine the organic way. He wanted to move a 40 year old vine to one end of the field and plant marigolds and corn in the hole.

Really? No. Crop rotation in wine making only involves the “cover crop” or beneficial plants grown alongside and intermingled with vines, such as daikon radish, barley and oats to replace nitrogen into the soil to prevent soil erosion.

The folks at Wine.com have broken down all of the ways winemakers are going “green” in a pretty graphic. Enjoy.

Presented By Wine.com, Purveyors of fine green Wine

(At left: One of the newfangled Michael Kors Watches from Bluedial.)

Recently, a friend of mine asked me to spy on her restaurant. She was really a friend of a friend, but she knew I had a mind like a steel trap. Somehow trusted me not to drivel about it to the world on this site. I needed to record the time it took for the staff to notice me, seat me and proverbially get the buns out of the oven.

Normally, I bring my cell phone. It’s pretty covert to pretend you are texting to take notes, but using the stopwatch feature and constantly resetting it looks a little suspicious. What a novel idea–I wore an actual watch this time.

Back in my sales days, someone checking a watch was checking the time, but someone checking twice was marking time. Some of these gestures are lost on folks who only wear watches as an accessory and forget to look at them in favor of a cell phone, or are not accustomed to them at all. My Favorite Guy in fact calls his a “pocket watch.” It’s amazing what happens when someone leaves their smartphone behind or their iPad or UPad or PeePad.

I was able to slip in and make my mental notes covertly while checking my sleeve or glancing down. No one was the wiser about my sweep second hand, especially those in the demographic of folks old enough to be my niece or nephew (of course only if my brother or sister was 20 years older than me).

Next time, I am bringing my Franklin Planner with me. I bet they’ll say “Is that a leather bound copy of Fifty Shades of Gray?”

I think I’ll be wearing the old watch more often. I think I’ll get a new one. Sorry smartphone.

Little did I know that grapes and carrots were not the only things that come in bunches. Apparently, according to Carrot Ink, ink cartridges are also grown in bunches, or at least they are grafted into bunches.

I am registered with so many coupon Apps that they are actually cancelling each other out. More on that later, but because I have been using more phone apps and have been relying less on coupon codes, I have been missing out on so many deals on the internet. While there are always the big gun sites for coupons, codes are popping up in the unlikeliest of places. Not only is GeekAlerts.com, which highlights all sorts of geekery, offering coupons (but in all fairness, they show off the best novelty kitchen gadgets out there), but sites that are a less shopping oriented, like SciTechDaily, ironically a science technology news site, are hopping on the turnip truck, too with Vistaprint coupon codes and the like.

There is competition out there. Vista is not the only game on the web offering business cards and professional labels to slap on your Vegan Strawberry Bacon-not Preserves. There is a $10 off of $40 coupon code for the aforementioned Carrot Ink, as well as many other resources for the basic supplies – less the food items – for marketing your wares.

Most of the coupons are not codes that you can copy, but automatically load to your cart when you click on the link from the coupon page, so be sure to have your cookies enabled.

What other surprising sites have you found lately where you have been directed to either a food related deal, or a deal related to storage and labeling?