Archive for the ‘Wine Business’ Category
Minors Don't Buy Alcohol On-line. And yet, this fundamental fact has gone unnoticed in the wake of a recently released study that looks at minors access to alcohol conducted by Chapel Hill North Carolina and funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. While this study shows that 8 students attempting to buy wine from 100 unknown on-line vendors demonstrated that 48 out of 100 orders were delivered, the study itself and the media coverage that has followed somehow failed to mentioned…
Barry Nolan over at Boston Magazine makes a point that flies in the face of what many politicians will tell us: "The business sector actually desires regulation and corruption." Interestingly, his primary evidence for this seemingly counter-intuitive conclusion is the wine industry, and particularly the Massachusetts regulatory scheme: "Massachusetts is one of the few states where you can’t get a special bottle of wine delivered to your house by FedEx or UPS. Some may try to tell you that this…
Almost all of my wine tasting education has been practical. That is to say, what I know about evaluating wine and how I evaluate wine has resulted from tasting wine a lot. Beyond that, my inquiries into the practice of wine tasting and evaluating wine has been done on a philosophical and aesthetic level. That is to say, I've done a good deal of reading and thinking about the epistemology of wine or what it means to embrace a "position"…
Over at The Eater, Talia Baiocchi is a bit offended, or at least disheartened, that America's most powerful wine buyer doesn't believe that wine is much more special than toilet paper or tin foil. Talia, a keen observer of the wine world and a very good marketer, has reason to be offended by this. Talia's moment of virtual head-shaking comes in response to a CNBC video featuring Annette Alvarez-Peters, Costco's head wine buyer, who responds to an interviewer's query about…
The wine industry is not overly prone to using gimmicks to sell stuff. Yet, it does conjure its share. The most infamous gimmick was the "critter wines", a trend in gimmickry that looks, thankfully, to be done with. Still, there are some old and new gimmicks in the wine industry that really should be done away with: 1. Natural WineI fear this one is with us for a long time to come, yet a gimmick it is with no real…
