• Forget about tradition: California wineries, thanks to the recession, are looking for the cheapest quality closure they can find. And that means the closure decision has gone from a question of preference to a question of price, said an industry official. Some interesting statistics: There are 18 billion wine closures produced annually, and 69 percent are natural or agglomerate cork, 20 percent are synthetic stoppers and 11 percent are screwcaps.
• Wine woes for the Kiwis? This article, from a local newspaper, paints a grim picture of the situation in New Zealand: Growers using pesticides and chainsaws to destroy vines, wineries and land for sale without buyers, and farmers getting part-time jobs. Says one grower: "The wineries aren't making any money either. The only ones smiling are the supermarkets with their mark-ups and the Government with their taxes."
• More Americans drink, but still not a lot: One of the most contentious statistics in the wine business is the number of Americans who drink. The accepted figure is about 60 percent, which hardly anyone wants to believe. Now, we have an academic study to back that number up. Researchers from two Texas colleges compared data from two national surveys on adult alcohol consumption that were conducted roughly a decade apart, in the early 1990s and early 2000s. The findings? That about two-thirds of white men drank alcohol in 2002, compared with 60 percent of Hispanic men and 53 percent of black men. Among women, 47 percent of whites, 32 percent of Hispanics, and 30 percent of blacks drank any alcohol. Also important: White men drank the most, with about 22 drinks a month. Which isn't much, if you think about it -- about three six packs of beer. None of the female racial groups studied came close to that, with none having more than six drinks a month -- which is about a bottle of wine.
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