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Wednesday’s installment of the email wine and spirits industry press release links from Business Wire carried two intriguing stories about wineries that are doing something for the environment, one flashy, glitzy and way cool, the other boring and mundane—and ultimately more important.
Further proof of the wonders of accidental information.
While working on some writing about Spanish and Portuguese wine this afternoon, I had occasion to go out to the Wine Institute website in search of some statistics on world wine production and consumption. The production rankings were familiar: France, Italy, Spain, the US, Argentina, and so on. But the per capita consumption figures made my day.
When both of you who read this blog last tuned in, I was promising to head off to a conclave of home winemakers in the Sonoma wine country. Sure enough, I spent Wednesday and Thursday with home grape maven Peter Brehm, touring vineyards in Sonoma and Napa from which he supplies grapes to folks all across the continent, and then Friday and Saturday inside the Sonoma Doubletree yakking with homies from hither and yon about the intricacies of doing it in your garage.
Blind Muscat hates it when he has so much paying work to do that he can’t get around to giving it away for free on his blog. Quel bummer.
But here’s a story worth ripping out of the wine world headlines: the fight to make sure home winemakers can deliver a bottle or two of their hard-won products to an off-premise (away from their garages) location and put them into competitions. Without, that is, running afoul of The Law.
