May 25, 2021
The Wine Spectator’s Top 100 Wines of the Year is among the most anticipated announcements in the wine world every December. The wineries on the list promote their place on the list and consumers comb through the list to see which they’d like to try. It’s an important list. If HB 210, Delaware’s proposed wine shipping law, is passed, fully 71 of the 100 wines on the 2020 list will be banned from shipment into the state of Delaware. You…
May 24, 2021
You can sign for a bottle of Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir, but not for a bottle of Argentine Malbec. You can receive multiple shipments of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon at your door, but you can’t sign for a shipment of Austrian Riesling. You can get excited about that receiving a shipment of Oregon Chardonnay, but no shipments of Champagne will arrive to brighten your smile. This is the world of wine shipping imagined and promoted by HB 210, a proposed…
May 18, 2021
A clear eyed understanding of the wine industry is the prerequisite for the industry’s health and for success working in the industry. Too often I bump up against folks in the industry that don’t appreciate some basic truths about the industry. This, in turn, leads folks who want to succeed in the wine industry down a path that inevitably runs up against roadblocks. The five facts that follow are among the most important clear-eyed views of the wine industry that…
May 16, 2021
It’s a felony to lie under oath to Congress. However, it is not against the law to lie to Congress in a letter to its members. This is the only reason why the heads of the National Beer Wholesalers Association, the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers Association, the American Beverage Licensees and the American Distillers Alliance have not been brought up on federal charges. As part of their successful attempt to kill the amendment to the U.S. Postal Service Reform Act…
May 10, 2021
This is part two of my investigation (see part 1) into the claim of one Wine Influencer that Wine Influencers have been around forever, but they were different in the past. The public claim was this: “The wine Influencer isn’t new – the first ones were old white men without pretty pictures who wrote about wine in inaccessible language meant to stave off the common public- but they got the prestige of ‘critic’.” Who were these the wine influencers of…