Archive for the ‘Wine Business’ Category
I’m always intrigued when I see someone write or say something I know they know is untrue. The game I play is, “Guess the Motive”. I played that game when I saw Jim Purucker’s editorial in Indiana newspapers that argued it is a strict three-tier system of alcohol distribution that prevents tainted alcohol from being distributed and consumed in the U.S. the way it has been reported to be a problem at Mexican resorts: “It leads you to wonder, why…
The modern American alcohol regulatory system was dreamed up and implemented in the early 1930s by a group of men whose most recent experience with alcohol was thirteen years of national Prohibition, violent bootleggers and the pre-Prohibition moral squalor of the “Tavern”. Eighty-five years later the system that was created when school segregation was the law of the land, when child labor was largely unregulated and when there was no constitutional right to a minimum wage. remains mainly unchanged. The…
Leave it to Rob McMillan to dig into the big questions: “What Will The Wine Business Look Like in 2028?” It’s an interesting read. In it, Rob is most concerned with how we (the wine trade) will sell wine. His primary observation is this: “I think we are coming to the end of the elevated growth in the tasting room and club models we’ve been managing for the past decade.” In support of this, he provides, among others, these predictions:…
There is a certain giddiness on display among those folks who are celebrating the legalization of recreational cannabis. It’s not the same kind of giddiness you see in old photographs of those celebrating the demise of alcohol prohibition. Its has more the feel of a victory dance. But it’s different in other ways. No one alive today lived in a society where cannabis was legal to use or abuse. Those who smoked it did it under the cover of surretitiousness….
On October 23 of this year, I wrote that wine.woot, the remarkably vigorous winery-direct retail outlet, would be forced to shut down, seeing as it was purchased by Amazon. Wine.woot would suffer the same fate as the AmazonWine marketplace that was forced to close after Amazon purchased hundreds of retail wine licenses with its acquisition of Whole Foods. And state laws don’t allow retailers of wine to take anything of value from producers of wine, which is what both AmazonWine and…
