It has been a while now since the wine direct shipping cases concering laws in New York and Michigan were argued in front the Supreme Court. If you read the transcript (pdf) of those oral arguments you really have to concluded that the anti-shipping forces had quite a hill to climb in convincing the justices that the states’ ban on interstate shipment of wine was constitutional. The transcript of the arguments seem also to indicate that many of the justices…

I received an email from John Kapon, owner of Acker-Merrall Condit Wine Auction House. Acker Merrall has been one of the fastest rising auction houses around. The email, however, was not about wine auctions, but about what was billed as “The Top 100 Wines of the Century Dinner”. John wrote up a description of what was essentially a 3 day, 4 restaurant, 100+ wines wine dinner! From the looks of it, it truly was the meal of the century. Frankly,…

Over the past 15 years I think I’ve overseen at least 50 photo shoots for clients. Some are more fun than others. Sometimes, you have a client that is willing to put themselves into an ad or brochure and they don’t feel self-conscious. In fact they want to have fun. They take direction well. They listen to the photographer. The shoot usually doesn’t take to long under these circumstances. But most photo shoots in my business are of simple bottles….

Wine Business Monthly is one of, if not the best, wine trade publication in America. Each monthly issue always carries a number of interesting articles on the state of the trade (they’ve even published me, but don’t hold that against them). The most interesting thing in the latest issue of Wine Business Monthly, however, is not an article. It is a small classified ad in the back of the magazine. It reads: “VERY RARE” FOR SALE-50 YEARS OF WINES &…

Oddly, in California events meant purely for trades people of the wine industry are few and far between. It’s odd of course because you’d think that given the size and importance of wine to California there would be more organized “give and takes”. We have meetings…boy do we have meetings! There are countless organizations. Appellation associations, political associations, promotional associations. But most of these organizational associations” events are for the public. From January 25 to January 27, however, California wines…