Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Come November, Colorado, Oregon and Washington residents will vote on whether to fully legalize and fully regulate (like alcohol) marijuana. What’s really interesting is that the backers of these initiatives take alcohol regulation as their model. In fact, in Colorado, the initiative (Prop 64) to legalize Marijuana is called “Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol“. Meanwhile, serious people in California are looking to get the “Regulate Marijuana like Wine” initiative on the ballot there. One wonders where the alcohol industry stands on…
Seven years and nine months ago this wine blog was launched. And it has taken that long to make it look relatively pretty. Working with James Marshal Berry of Sonoma, California, the goal was to make FERMENTATION: The Daily Wine Blog relatively good looking, more flexible in the way it presented information and owned by me, rather than Typepad. In reality there isn’t a great deal of change. The biggest of course in the new URL. It’s like picking up…
Reports from Shanken Daily News (SDN) are that H.R. 1161, the Community Alcohol Regulatory Effectiveness Act, often referred to as "The CARE Act, is "off the table". SDN quotes Republic National Distributing President Tom Cole as saying, “The CARE Act is officially off the table." SDN reports that this development came about when the Wine & Spirit Wholesalers of America met with the Distilled Spirits Counsel of the United States in Palm Beach, Florida in February and decided to pursue…
What makes American Viticultural Areas, like similarly demarcated wine growing areas in Europe and other parts of the New World, important is that they are among the few items that can legally be placed on the front of a wine label. As a result, they get tremendous exposure.In fact, after vintage and varietal, no other element of the label gets more exposure than the AVA. The 2010 vintage will get more exposure on wine labels over the long run, as…
I can’t recall an example within the wine industry where one product category was largely defined by its proponents’ denigration of competing products. Marketing-by-denigration isn’t actually common in any product category with the prominent exception of politics where candidates for office routinely denigrate their opposition in order to prop up themselves and their own candidacy. Proponents of the Natural Wine movement, however, seem to be the anomaly in the wine business: in order to gain attention for the wines, gain…
