Archive for the ‘Culture and Wine’ Category
The wine industry in America is a trailing indicator of the culture and economy. It always has been. The top stories in wine in 2019 reflect this truism. Politics, powerful social movements, the economy, evolving modes of consumerism and natural disasters all came together to give us the industry’s biggest stories in 2019. These are those stories. Supreme Court Pushes Back on Protectionism Fourteen years ago the U.S. Supreme Court rendered an opinion in Granholm v Heald that created the…
Let me start by inviting anyone to try to paint me as a misogynist; to make the case that I’ve worked to protect the “patriarchy”; to argue that my perspective and my work and my writings have diminished the role of women in the wine industry. With that invitation issued, please someone tell me why I’m wrong to read the following and think to myself, what a bunch of crap: “What is the impact of mostly white men occupying these…
Pew Reseach tells us that the United States is rapidly on its way to becoming a minority Christian country. My question is what does this mean for alcohol consumption and for wine in particular? First the research. Since 2007 those professing to be Christians here in the United States collapsed from 77% to 65%. This is a fall off of massive proportions. Meanwhile, in the same time period, those who claim no religious affiliation have risen from 17% to 25%….
I’m not a fan of President Donald Trump. It’s concerning to me that he is the first president in my lifetime that I’m positive I could do a better job of running the country. But I’m also not a fan of petty wastefulness. And that is exactly what the attempt to revoke the liquor license at the President’s Washington, DC hotel amounts to. The claim was that President Trump’s liquor license at the Trump Washington, DC Hotel should be revoked…
Have you ever noticed that the best writing about wine isn’t really about wine? The New Yorker’s Troy Patterson Jr. is proof. His most recent critique of a niche culture comes at the expense of Orange Wine, “distinguished by what are conventionally considered imperfections: astringency, bracing bitterness, earthy funk.” Ouch! This is not the conclusion of, but rather a sidebar to, Patterson’s article entitled, “How the Orange-Wine Fad Became an Irresistible Assault on Pleasure” in the latest issue of the…
