My position is a simple one:  When you publicly lie to consumers and lawmakers in pursuit of profit and at the expense of consumers and competitors, you should be publicly branded a liar. Case in point: The Wine & Spirit Wholesalers of America, The Wine & Spirit Wholesalers of California, and the Teamsters. Each of these liars is telling lies about California Senate Bill 620, legislation that would legalize direct-to-consumer shipments of spirits from distillers in California. Or, put another…

The recent cultural appropriation controversy over Pippa Middlehurst’s new cookbook exploring noodles and dumplings has some instructive elements for the wine industry. One of those lessons is that there is little if any chance of the charge of cultural appropriation being visited upon a person producing wine or writing about wine. But there are other lessons too. First the background. Middlehurst, 31, won England’s first “Best Home Chef” contest in 2018. She has been a food blogger for some time….

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,…

While I’m sure it exists somewhere, I can’t think of a more intrusive regulatory bureaucracy than the one that governs alcohol in the United States. Since its inception in the 1930’s following Repeal, it has only grown and grown. I think what has grown with it is the tolerance for intrusion by the regulated. Part of the problem with the outsized alcohol regulatory structure is that with the states being given the burden of regulating alcohol inside their borders with…