• More bad news for bubbly: Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse for Champagne, it did. Sales fell 4.4 percent the 12 months through December, according to the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne trade group. And Champagne shipments to the U.S. were down 25 percent in the first six months of last year, continuing that trend. And to think – it wasn’t all that long ago that the Champagne business was considering expanding the size of the Champagne region so they would have more land to get grapes from.
• Never underestimate three-tier: Abut a year ago, a federal judge ruled that a Kentucky law that banned grocery store wine sales was unconstitutional. So what’s advancing through the Kentucky legislature? A more constitutional version of the ban, reports wkyufu,org. Said the bill’s sponsor: “So we would have liquor in convenience stores, dollar stores, wherever they could get a liquor license. And that's something that nobody wanted.” Nobody, of course, not being the state’s wine drinkers, who don’t have the campaign cash to pay legislators to write bills for them. but the state’s retailers who want to keep grocers out.
• Amazon adds two states: And they’re not New York and Pennsylvania, which speaks volumes about how difficult it is to sell wine directly to the consumer in the U.S. If you live in Colorado or South Carolina, you can now use the Amazon service, which includes 15 states and the District of Columbia. Amazon usually doesn’t break out many sales figures, but we should be coming up the first quarter of its wine retail operation. The numbers would be fascinating.
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