• Wine critic gives up wine: Eric Asimov, the respected wine critic for the New York Times, went 10 days without drinking wine thanks to a broken nose. "To me, the trauma came not in the original accident, but in the cure. My nose had now been pushed, pulled, twisted and reshaped. ... Now, I really couldn’t smell anything. ... Not only did I have no taste for wine, I had little appetite in general. Physical discomfort has a way of altering one’s priorities." I wonder: Can he get a double tax deduction for this -- medical and professional?
• U.S. winery numbers increase 5 percent: So much for the recession slowing winery growth. Wines & Vines magazine, in its annual report on North American wineries, says the U.S. added 361 in 2009. Interestingly, the biggest percentage growth came in what the magazine calls "emerging winegrowing areas" -- sounds like something sociologists should study, doesn't it? The regional wine states with the biggest percentage growth since 2005 included South Dakota, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, North Carolina and Oklahoma.
• Box wine inventor dies: Australian winemaker Thomas Angove, who invented boxed wine, died last week. He was 92. Angove wanted to find a way to lower the retail price of wine, and came up with the first box -- what the Aussie call a wine cask. About half the wine sold in Australia is sold in boxes. "I do remember when I was about 15 and he brought home a prototype and I said to him: 'that's ridiculous, nobody is going to buy wine out of a cardboard box and a plastic bag'," said his son, John.
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