What Wine Do You Pair With Word Salad?
I assume everyone has read the important new “Essay” produced by the Center for Alcohol Policy entitled “Crisis De-regulations: Should They Stay or Should They Go?”
.…LOL….Sorry. That was a joke. Of course you haven’t read it. No one reads the reports produced by this wholesaler funded organization. Why? Because they are a collection of amateurishly researched and written word salads meant to sound authoritative but are really produced to exclusively benefit the bottom line of wholesalers at the expense of the rest of the alcohol industry and consumers.
But that’s why I’m here for my readers. I read these things so you don’t have to suffer.
Let me summarize the latest missive by the wholesalers: “All these consumer-friendly changes to alcohol laws that have resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic…DON’T MAKE THESE EMERGENCY LAWS PERMANENT…If you do, the earth will collapse upon itself.”
Here’s how the report puts it:
“Some states have temporarily suspended laws and regulations associated with enforcement of the three-tier system including relaxing credit terms between distributors and retailers and allowing returns of alcohol products to distributors. If these changes or other allowances became permanent, what will be the consequences?”
Can you guess what the wholesalers’ answer to that question will be? Again, from the most recent word salad essay:
“In early March of this year, the Center for Alcohol Policy published my report highlighting concerns of counterfeit alcohol within the direct to consumer marketplace by retailers.17 As the nation recovers from Covid-19, more avenues for selling alcohol will be explored including allowing retailers to ship directly to consumers. This will invariably include bad actors who will exploit the alcohol market with the infusion of counterfeit products that cause serious injury and even death. As recently as May 2020, 70 people in Mexico died after consuming counterfeit alcohol procured in response to severe restrictions enacted due to Covid-19”
Wholesalers have been on a roll basically trying to convince folks that interstate shipment by wine shipments will “exploit the alcohol market with the infusion of counterfeit products that can cause serious injury and even death.” However, in an entire report devoted to the evil of wine retailing shipments to consumers and how that distribution channel will unleash counterfeit and contaminated wines upon the public, and in this most current report, not once do the wholesalers and their paid writers mention that not once in 30 years has a U.S. retailer shipped a wine to any consumer in the United States that caused any health problem at all, let alone was contaminated in any way.
Here’s my point. Continue to not read these hack-generated, self-serving word salads being produced by pretenders to objectivity. You will learn nothing and you will need a bath afterward.
I drank a whole bottle of Ouzo one night in my 20s and ended up sleeping in a wastepaper basket. I didn’t perish, though I may have relished the prospect. However, I have always thought the product was genuine and this was the intended effect. In any case, it was purchased through the three-tier system, from which I infer that distributor scrutiny offers dubious protection concerning product purity, authenticity and toxicity.
Any retailer, who buys strictly from in-state wholesaler is the retail outlet for general public. Such retailer does not sell or ship anything directly to a consumer. Enough bullshit, bullshitter!
VVP:
Do you serve your own word salads with dressing or undressed.
Clark Smith, we hope you realize that a whole bottle of genuine Ouzo will put anyone to sleep in a wastepaper basket, salad plate, or whatever is found nearby. The well known expression suggests: “One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor…” Concentration of one liter of any 80 proof genuine ethanol alcoholic drink is the deadly intoxication for average human. If your Ouzo wouldn’t be genuine, then you wouldn’t write this comment.
We don’t have much against wholesalers (except probably two or three overgrown national behemoths), but even they don’t bother us as much, as your blog does on this subject. If you cannot understand what the direct to consumer market is, then it doesn’t matter how salad is dressed.
Thanks, very comforting.
Seriously, though, Tom is not arguing that distributors are bad people. The problem is they address the large, standardized national market, which they indeed should, which means they work domestically primarily with large wineries producing well-made Cab Sauv, Chardonnay and perhaps a dozen other important styles, well supported by well-paid marketing professionals from those wineries. These 65 bonded wineries represent a few hundred brands producing around 10,000 SKUs. The import situation is similar. Good for them.
The problem is that there are 10,000 US wineries averaging 2,000 cases who have no business in the three-tier system because they make Chambourcin, La Crescent, Norton and many other oddball wines understood and desired by a tiny following, some of whom are retailers and sommeliers in other States. Altogether they make over 500,000 SKUs in tiny quantities, nearly all of it DTC.
Tom is arguing, particularly in light of the recent Supreme Court clarification of Granoff v Heald, that distributors would be wise to allow this tiny, irrelevant market to flourish rather than greedily and aggressively hogging the ball in a marketplace it makes no sense for them to address. It’s not only pointless but contrary to wine’s yeoman farmer mystique on which we all depend.