Jun 22, 2006
What keeps you up at night? What keeps you excited after you wake in the morning and realize another day is yours? What is it about your work that makes you proud and motivates you? I was asking myself these questions the other day while conversing with a Zinfandel. In the end, my answer was not money, not prestige, not security. What keeps me proud and motivated about the work I do is my associations. Wark Communications has right now…
Jun 21, 2006
While California wines dominate cosumption of domestic wines, other states across the country have seen their wine industries reallly take off. A combination of high quality bottlings and the attraction of a local wine country seem to have spurred this "other state" explosion in wine production. The question is, how to get more people to try wines from "Other States". I like what Ohio did recently. They recently staged the Ohio Wine Challenge. Taking a page out of Robert Mondavi’s…
Jun 21, 2006
What a fascinating exercise the European wine producers and European Union is embarking upon. Europe appears to be in the early phases of a complete overhaul of their wine industry, from growing to producing to marketing. Yesterday the European Union’s European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development , Mariann Fischer Boel, made a statement that served as an introduction to the coming debate and staked out a rather progressive position on what needs to be done to make European wine…
Jun 19, 2006
Lest we forget that the wine industry is an agricultural industry, given to the whims of Mother Nature, the is now the 2006 Port vintage to consider. Apparently a storm that rushed through Portugal last Wednesday did extensive damage to what would have been the Port wine vineyards in that country. Initial reports had the loss in the neighborhood of 80% of the vines due to severe hail. Today the estimates of the loss and damage was said to be…
Jun 15, 2006
There is an interesting AP story making the rounds today about an effort to combat various wine grapevines…using genetic modification. They ask the right question in the story: will the wine industry and consumers happily adopt the idea of vineyards planted with genetically modified vines, let alone the wines made from them? The effort is taking place in Missouri at a place called "Center for Grapevine Biotechnology", where it turns out they are also part of the global cooperative project…