Guns, Wine and Liability

Sunday I spent my afternoon at the annual Rhone Rangers tasting at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There was a lot of good wine (especially among the whites), the usual overdone wines (especially the Syrahs), and I had an OK time.

But it wasn’t the same—because I couldn’t pour my own wine this year.

For the past seven years or so, I’ve had the task of rounding up a handful of avid Rhone-grape home winemakers to do the Rhone@home table—not an email address, just an annual happening, featuring a lot of pretty darn good wine.  It was a treat for the folks who wandered up, thinking we were just another label, and then discovered we did all this in our garages; it was great for us behind the table, since it meant we had some barrier between us and the swarms of guzzlers.

This year, when I started to crank up the usual recruiting and logistical machinery, the new executive director of the Rangers emailed me to ask whether our organization had liability insurance. I had to break the news that not only did we not have insurance, there was no ”we”—just a yearly gathering of like-minded souls. She allowed as to how that would be a problem. We checked out the option of having the Rangers’ umbrella cover us, or having some participating winery adopt us, to no avail. Rhone@home faded into history.

Made me slightly nuts: here I was with three commercial-grade Rhone blends in barrel and no place to go. %$#!@!**! I understand how this form of paranoia spreads, one you say it out loud. You go for years, everything’s fine, nobody worries, then someone vocalizes the “L” word—Liability—and everyone freaks. What if someone ties into one of our wines, and drives into a tree on the way home, and sues? What if somebody chips off a sliver of glass opening a bottle, and it lodges in someone’s throat, and . . . ? What if a meteor crashes through the rood and lands exactly on the Rhone@home table?

Made me flash back (Blind Muscat does a lot of flashbacks) to the Unified Symposium wine trade show in Sacramento back in January, the largest wine industry gathering in the country. I wandered up to one supplier who provided bag-in-box wine containers, including 3-liter vessels for the new breed of upscale box wines (Black Box, etc.). I had a glass, but she couldn’t punch the tap to give me a shot; nor could I serve myself; only an official employee of the Sacramento Convention Center could unite box and glass.

The intricacy of alcohol regulations is far beyond insane. Just as the Rangers reminded me of the Unified, the Unified reminded me of my favorite brain-dead state regulation. In Tennessee, it is illegal to sell a corkscrew in the same establishment that sells wine. (Another argument for screw caps.) Which means, as I learned in Nashville, that every wine and liquor shop has a business of some kind next door—convenience store, gas station—with a box of corkscrews for sale prominently displayed on the front counter.

Life would have been so much simpler if Blind Muscat had decided to write about guns. Or maybe make a few in his garage and sell them to the kids at the junior high across the street.