• Forbes picks Crane: The business magazine says Eileen Crane of Domaine Carneros is the most powerful woman in the California wine business. Crane is the company's founding winemaker and president, where she started in 1987. Crane says it has been a lot of fun, though the piece doesn't go into that much depth. And I wonder how Gina Gallo, the winemaker for several brands of her $2 billion family company, feels about this.
• Safeway cards everyone: And that apparently means everyone, in a California test program where customers who buy alcohol have to produce ID that the company scans into its system. Safeway says the program is designed to cut down on underage alcohol purchases, but customers who are in their 70s wonder why they need to show ID. Turns out that the stores doing the test are among those who have been fined by California alcohol regulators for license violations in 2006 and 2008.
• Bordeaux and En Primeur week: The Wine Curmudgeon, of course, is not in Bordeaux this week to write about wine most of us will never taste, let alone ever see a bottle of (though some of us are almost giddy about it). En Primeur is the Super Bowl of the Bordeaux wine business, and the wine magazines cover it the way the U.S. media covers the Super Bowl. So, if you want to find out what's going on, check out Decanter: blogs, articles and even coverage in Chinese.
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