Archive for the ‘Wine Business’ Category
If you thought the cynicism involved in the political fight to allow wineries to ship direct to consumers was blatant, just wait for the battle over who gets to sell wine to retailers and restaurateurs heats up good. That’s what happened yesterday in a court room in Washington State. On the same day the Washington Liquor Control Commission issued draft language for a new direct to consumer wine shipping law that would allow anyone to buy wine from anyone, the…
Talk about desperate… Nearly all of the 6700 members of a Bordeaux wine producers union, it is reported, have voted to impose a "self boycott" that would keep most of their wines from being labeled Bordeaux and Bordeaux Superior. They are aiming their self boycott at the "traders" who buy, bottle and market the wine. The producers are unhappy with the prices they are being offered and suspect the traders of manipulating the market price for the lower end Bordeaux…
I’m an absolute sucker for these kinds of stories. Not because I tend to be a star struck type, but because it really helps to have a celebrity stand up and say "Wine is Good"…even if it’s for purely business purposes. So it is that Dan Aykroyd of Saturday Night Live, Blues Brothers and cinema fame has invested $1 million in a Canadian winery company with the hopes of getting more Canadian wines on shelves and making a buck. Now,…
I have a pretty good idea of how wines are marketed and how they are presented for sale. Having worked in wine communications for about 15 years I’ve had the chance to work with wineries of varying size, varying quality aspirations and from various regions. But one thing I’ve never had the opportunity to do is work directly with a classed Bordeaux property or an equivalently hallowed estate. I’m talking here about the Petrus, Cos d’Estournels, Mugas, Screaming Eagles and…
I was on the phone earlier today with a wine writer. They needed a sample of a client’s wine for an article they were working on (I obliged, of course, understand the basic truth "if they can’t taste it, they can’t write about it). In the course of our discussion that ranged from Terroir to Writing, we found ourselves bumped up against two "absurdities" that exist in the wine world. The recognition of both these absurdities rendered us both speechless…
