Jun 18, 2020
Masked and hands sterilized to the hilt, my boy Henry and I took a trip to the bookstore yesterday. For him, we were in search of some new adventures from “Henry and Mudge” and a new tale of the “Magic Treehouse”. The boy is learning to read and these two classics keep his interest and motivate him. I was seeking something new to read on Thomas Jefferson, motivated as I was by a recent incident here in Portland that had…
Apr 27, 2020
The “Daily Constitutional” appears to be seeing a renaissance in the midst of our quarantined life. Here in our little neighborhood in Salem, Oregon, it’s not uncommon these days to see numerous families out taking their daily walk, usually in the late afternoon. I enjoy the daily walk myself. But perhaps my favorite thing about getting out and taking a stroll is what I learn about my neighbors’ drinking habits. Friday morning is garbage day. So, each Thursday we diligently…
Feb 3, 2020
It’s quite possibly the most consequentially negative headline I’ve read about wine in 30 years: BOTTOM FALLS OUT OF BORDEAUX PRICES It comes from a February 1, 2020 article by Wine-Searcher written by, “Wine-Searcher Staff”. It describes exactly what it says: “the price of bulk Bordeaux had fallen to less than a euro a liter, with a fair possibility that prices could crash even lower.” What does this mean for many of the producers of Bordeaux wine? “At this price,…
Dec 5, 2019
Is Oregon Burgundy? In a recent Yahoo Finance interview Silver Oak/Twomy Cellars CEO David Duncan was confronted with a positive comparison of Oregon wine to Burgundy wine. The conversation came in the context of a conversation on tariffs and the potential benefit tariffs on French wines will deliver to domestic alternatives. The Oregon/Burgundy comparison raises a question that begs to be answered: Is comparing Oregon wine to Burgundy a net positive association for Oregon wine? Of course, for those who…
Dec 3, 2019
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…