Over the past two months, I’ve seen at least four examples of people arguing that banning out-of-state wine retailers from shipping into a state advances a state’s goal of protecting the health and safety of its citizens. The bans on retailer wine shipping do this, it is argued, because it helps keep lower-priced wines out of the states’ markets, which, in turn, lowers consumption of alcohol. This argument leads us to a very important question: What is the difference between…
Who in the wine communications industry deserves our respect and our amplification and how do we choose which voices to lift up. I was motivated to consider this question after writing the other day about the coming Wine Media Conference. Most of the communicators at this coming conference are not part of the “Wine First String” that gets most of the attention. But if the history of wine blogging tells us anything, it is that inside the contingent of writers,…
I think it must be clear to anyone to cares to take notice that today there is a far greater abundance of wine-related media at our disposal than at any previous time. I’m not talking about wine-related tweets and posts as these generally are devoid of any real substance or are links to or comments upon wine-related stories published elsewhere. I’m talking about the plethora of wine media offered up in the form of wine publications, wine blogs, podcasts, newspapers…
It’s one of my Top Ten Sentences of 2021 so far: “A huge step in the evolution of debauchery was the invention of agriculture because farming made booze possible.” I’ve never thought too deeply about the “evolution of debauchery” in general, but rather just my own. The story of my own debauched evolution is far less interesting than this little article at Phys.org, from which this awesome sentence originates: “When Did Humans Start Experimenting with Alcohol and Drugs?” While it…
Wineries’ use of fulfillment houses to store, pack, label boxes and prepare wines for shipment to consumers is illegal. Who knew?? Try to imagine the logistic of wine shipping if producers were required by destination states to store, pack and arrange shipments of wine to consumers from their own bonded facilities, instead of contracting with fulfillment houses. How much more expensive would this make DTC shipping? How much more space would wineries and bonded facilities require to undertake shipments? Sound…
