Dec 6, 2012
Graphic Design has changed! When I entered the wine industry in 1990 at a small PR firm dedicated to serving wine clients, my first graphic design project was a newsletter for a client. I was pointed to a particular designer whose work was outstanding. Like most others, he did not use computers, laid out the design on a board, had film of the mock up made then passed it to the printer. It was a fairly long and detailed and…
Nov 30, 2012
How do you go about measuring and comparing wines and wineries based on the quality of the wine(s) Can it even be done in a reliably convincing method? To the latter question I’ve always answered, “Yes-sort of”. It’s the first question that takes some good reasoning. In an interview with The Shout, Treasury Wine Estates CEO David Dearle offered one means of measuring something like quality that is at the very least interesting and even a bit convincing. “Size matters,…
Nov 29, 2012
In France, still I think the undisputed center of the wine world, per capita consumption continues to drop. A new report out of France shows that the the average French adult now consumes not more than 1 glass of wine per day. This amounts to an annual per capita consumption level of roughly 53 liters. To give you a sense of the on going and historic decline in French wine consumption, consider that in 1965 average per capita consumption of…
Nov 26, 2012
Press releases are interesting tools. They are, even within the wine industry, almost in every case a matter self-aggrandizement. One rarely sees a company issue a release informing the media that “XYZ Winery Sales Suck” or “Administrative Chaos Reigns at XYZ Wine Company”. Rather, press releases are almost always issued to point the media and readers to a virtual smiley face the company issuing the press release has drawn. What follows is a tale of one such smiley face and…
Nov 8, 2012
Anyone who has ever spent any leisure time in Las Vegas must have noticed that it is a creation of monumental uniqueness: a city dedicated to promoting and encouraging excessive sinning where common sense and traditional ideas of decorum really have no place. It’s no surprise either that alcohol plays a central role in its presentation of the excessive lifestyle. Throughout the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Vegas was considered the “Black Hole of Fine Wine”, the place where…