The Wine Point

Australia’s personalised wine specialists. NSW Liquor License LIQP770017567 - come find me

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

An incredible bit of sports journalism by The Guardian here. A short summary of the playing style of all 48 World Cup nations and a short profile of all 1248 World Cup players. Bookmark and refer to the resources when watching the obscure matches: https://t.co/tdLGq8en0o

[Jacob Furedi @jacobfuredi]

Angus is one of the most exciting young food writers around.

For the past few weeks he’s been exploring the length of England for this fantastic feature on the slow death of fish and chips. Make some time for it. 👇

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

@9_Moley @newtownrlfc i had a delivery driver yesterday who mentioned his dodgy knees. I asked who he played for. Gary Stewart, debuted for Canterbury in '69 then moved to Cronulla and retired in 1975. Legs might be shot but his brain is good and he's still working at 75. Top fella.

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

Just when you think it can't get any worse... https://t.co/8miUW6BZbV

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

@DirkBromley the industry is rooted. And the roots have phylloxera.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

C.S. Lewis, this is what life boils down to at the end of the day

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

Astounding. Without any tender, Jillian Segal quietly hands a plum, 6-figure ‘consultancy’ to Scott Morrison’s former head kicker Yaron Finkelstein…

[josh Garlepp @JoshGarlepp]

If all industry awards in Australia are fake, why not make up your own?

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

Time to cancel AUKUS @AlboMP. We're not getting those subs.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The United States has just nuked its own arms export business. Not with a missile. With a phone call.

Pete Hegseth rang Estonia’s defense minister and told him the HIMARS and Javelin deliveries are on hold.

Indefinitely. Months, not weeks. No timeline. No alternative. Just: sorry, we’re busy bombing Iran.

And that’s it. Twenty years of patient alliance-building, vaporized in a Monday morning call.

Here’s what European defense planners now know for certain: American weapons come with an asterisk. The asterisk reads “subject to cancellation whenever Washington decides its own adventure takes priority.”

You can sign the contracts. You can train your soldiers. You can build your entire defensive posture around US systems. And then one day, the ammo stops. No warning. No plan B.

Estonia is already shopping elsewhere. So is everyone else, with the kind of focus that only comes from genuine betrayal.

The Americans think this is a pause. Europe knows it’s a divorce.

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

@sommecourt Grew up with that movie. Yes, some flaws, but when i visited Gallipoli in the later 80's it helped my understanding of how difficult it was for all there.

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

@IggyLama i reckon I'll survive. Did with all the others. No dramas. Never got sick. Didn't even spontaneously change gender. You should give it a spin.

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

@IggyLama funny indeed. I just got my covid vaccine. Long live science!

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

@IggyLama will endlessly ask you the same question. You are deluded and i don't understand why.

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

@SpursOfficial @EASPORTSFC Hoddle, Waddle, Lineker and Vinny Samways.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The cheapest electricity on earth is about to own the AI economy.

Here is the fact that rewrites the story.

In 2024, onshore wind produced electricity at $0.034 per kilowatt-hour. Solar came in at $0.043. Both are now cheaper than any new fossil fuel plant on the planet, by a margin that would have seemed like science fiction ten years ago. 91% of all new renewable capacity commissioned last year beat fossil fuels on pure cost.

This is not an environmental argument. It never was.

Global data center electricity consumption is projected to hit 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, nearly double what it is today.  Every single one of those terawatt-hours has a price attached. The operators who can source the cheapest power will undercut everyone else on inference costs, training costs, and ultimately on the price of intelligence itself. Energy is the new moat.

China spent $625 billion on clean energy in 2024 alone. That is 31% of the entire global total. Even adjusted for economic size, China’s energy transition spending reached 4.5% of GDP, compared to 1.2% for the United States.  Battery deployment tripled in three years. China added more battery storage in 2024 than the US.

74% of all large-scale wind and solar projects currently under construction are being built in China. The United States is building 6%.

Meanwhile the Trump administration has cancelled over $426 million in federal grants for renewable projects, stripped tax credits, and issued stop-work orders across the sector. The president has also signed executive orders designed to boost coal, a fuel that cannot compete on cost with either gas or renewables. The official position is that wind turbines cause cancer. This is the energy strategy of the world’s historically largest economy.

Battery storage costs have dropped 93% since 2010, reaching $192 per kilowatt-hour for utility-scale systems in 2024. That number is not a policy outcome. It is a manufacturing outcome. And China accounts for 81% of global clean energy supply chain investment. 

The factories that make the batteries, the panels, and the turbines are Chinese. The IP is increasingly Chinese. Chinese companies now lodge 75% of all global clean energy patent applications. In 2000 that figure was 5%. 

Europe is running full days, full weeks on clean power. France is selling nuclear electricity at prices that are drawing data center operators with long-term contracts. France, where roughly 70% of electricity comes from nuclear, is now marketing that stable, carbon-free baseload as an explicit AI competitive advantage. 

The Nordic countries have some of the cheapest electricity on the continent and a growing cluster of hyperscale data centers to show for it.

The logic is not complicated.

Renewables are the fastest-growing source of electricity for data centers globally, growing at 22% per year through 2030 and meeting nearly half of all new demand growth. 

The operators who locked in cheap renewable power purchase agreements five years ago are now running at a structural cost advantage that their competitors cannot close quickly. Building new gas infrastructure takes a decade. Building a solar farm with battery storage takes eighteen months.

The country that produces the cheapest, most reliable electricity at scale will host the data centers. The country that hosts the data centers will train the models. The country that trains the models will set the terms for what intelligence costs, who has access to it, and what it is used for.

That is not a climate story.

That is a civilizational competition. And one of the major players just decided that the most important strategic response was to bring back coal.
If you want to follow where this goes, subscribe. New analysis every week.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The Loneliest Superpower on Earth

America is becoming North Korea with a better GDP.
Sit with that. Not as provocation. As diagnosis.

A country that has torched its alliances, taxed its closest friends, threatened to annex its neighbors and walked away from the institutions it spent a century building has made a deliberate choice about its place in the world. Applauded at rallies, repeated in press conferences, performed for cameras with the confidence of people who have never had to live with the consequences of being wrong at this scale.

The choice is: alone.

And alone feels like strength right up until the moment it doesn't. By the time it doesn't, the damage is already structural.

Every single day before this began, billions of dollars moved across the Canada-US border. Every morning, trucks crossed, goods moved, money changed hands, relationships held. That is now bleeding out. Tourism has collapsed. The travelers who used to arrive with money and genuine affection are going elsewhere, to countries that did not threaten to absorb them. The weapons contracts that underwrote American industry and cemented American influence across three continents are being quietly reviewed in defense ministries from Berlin to Seoul. Nobody announces these reviews. They happen in rooms Americans are no longer invited into.

The military bases are the same story. Nobody publicly cancels a base. They stop renewing. They start asking questions. They begin building the infrastructure that means they will not need to ask America for anything next time. That infrastructure, once built, does not get dismantled out of nostalgia.

This is how empires actually end. Not with a bang. With a series of very reasonable decisions made by very serious people in other countries, each one small enough to dismiss, each one slightly irreversible.

There is a village in the mountains of every country in Europe that made this same choice, once. Not geopolitics. Just a village that turned inward, closed the market, pulled back from the road, decided it had enough and did not need the noise from outside.

For a while it felt like dignity.

Then the young people left. One or two at first, then more, because the young always follow the future and the future had quietly relocated somewhere with a road and a reason. The craftsmen followed, because craftsmen follow customers. The market that came through on Thursdays stopped coming because there was no longer enough to justify the trip. The houses did not fall down immediately. They just stopped being repaired. And the people who stayed told each other this was fine, that they preferred it, that the outside world was corrupt and they were better without it.

The outside world did not argue. It simply continued without them.

That is the mechanism by which America is currently operating, at a scale that would have been unimaginable two years ago.

North Korea chose this mechanism, because the alternative was accountability. The country that once produced steel and traded across Asia now produces propaganda and imports famine relief. The turn did not happen overnight. It happened through a thousand small closures, each one justified, each one making the next easier. The infrastructure of self-sufficiency became the infrastructure of imprisonment. By the time ordinary North Koreans understood what had been surrendered, the price of getting it back had become impossible.

Myanmar sealed itself away and emerged decades later to find the world had rearranged its trade corridors around the empty space where Myanmar used to be. Those spaces had been filled and were not available for reoccupation.

Cuba still drives the cars from 1962. Not as charm. As evidence of what happens when the compounding runs long enough.

These are not cautionary tales about ideology. They are cautionary tales about direction. About what happens when a country holds a position long enough to discover the world was not waiting. Isolation is not a destination. It is a direction. And directions maintained with sufficient conviction always become destinations.

In any other functioning democracy, a leader who had done this much damage this fast would already be gone, through the ordinary arithmetic of people who understand what hurts a country and what helps it. Europe remembers what international trust costs because Europe spent decades rebuilding from the rubble of losing it. The countries that clawed their way back from nothing remember exactly what it is worth and exactly what it costs to squander. America, having never rebuilt from rubble, is learning this for the first time. The tuition is enormous.

The researchers are leaving. The students are choosing other universities in other countries. The institutions that were magnets for the world's best minds were never great because of their buildings. They were great because of who wanted to come. That reputation is not a faucet you can turn back on. It returns, if it returns at all, over decades, when the conditions that created it are restored. The conditions are not being restored.

The allies have started building what they used to have no reason to build. Europe is developing defense architecture, which is great and irreversible. Canada is rewiring its trade toward Europe and Asia. China is walking, unhurried and methodical, into every room America has vacated. These are not acts of aggression. They are acts of adaptation. The world is making sensible arrangements in America's absence.

These are countries that named streets after American presidents, countries whose grandparents wept when the Americans arrived. Americans traveling in Europe now reportedly adopt Canadian accents to avoid the conversation, because the conversation when it comes is not gentle and Europeans are not known for sparing people from conclusions they find uncomfortable.

The country that liberated a continent, that fed Europe when Europe was on its knees, that built the postwar order with its own money and for all its failures largely meant it, that country's citizens are now pretending to be from somewhere else so they do not have to explain themselves to a stranger in a bar. That is not a data point. That is a civilization telling you something is wrong.

America was genuinely extraordinary. Not in the way its politicians perform it, hand on heart, flag in background, but in the actual unglamorous world-historical way. The Marshall Plan was the most strategically generous act in modern history and it worked.

The idea that you could arrive with nothing and become something was imperfect, frequently brutal, riddled with contradictions, and real enough that people crossed deserts and oceans and razor wire to test it. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, almost everything.

That America still exists. It has not been destroyed. It is being buried by people who have confused its confidence for arrogance and its generosity for weakness and its complexity for something that needs to be flattened into slogans that fit on a hat.

Buried things, left long enough, stop being things you can retrieve. They become geology. They become the sediment layer that future historians will drill through and hold up to the light and say: here, this is where it changed.

The people doing this call it winning.

The rest of America is sitting quietly, trying to find the words to explain to their children that this is not permanent, hoping they are right, suspecting in the honest 3am way that the window is smaller than anyone is saying out loud.

It can become permanent through compounding, through the slow arithmetic of a thousand reasonable decisions made by serious people in other countries, each one locking in a future with slightly less room for America in it than the last.

The village does not announce its own irrelevance. It just gets quieter, until one day you drive through and the market is gone and the young are gone and the houses are not quite falling down but not quite standing either, and the people who remain tell you they prefer it this way.

If this kind of analysis matters to you, subscribe.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Bruce Arthur @bruce_arthur]

JD Vance is lecturing the Pope on Catholicism and Pierre Poilievre is lecturing Mark Carney on economics and RFK Jr is lecturing scientists about vaccines and Donald Trump is lecturing the world on tariffs and Pete Hegseth is quoting Pulp Fiction and thinking it’s the Bible

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

@IggyLama you can't handle the truth.

[The Wine Point @thewinepoint]

@IggyLama happy to hear you come up with a remotely credible alternative?