? Bring on the red wine: Americans, apparently, drink more red wine than white. This is not news, though for some reason a writer at the Washington Post who doesn’t write about wine (and there seem to be so many of them) thinks it is. Red wine has traditionally outsold white, but a white, chardonnay, remains the best selling wine in the U.S. The people at the Post have one of the best wine writers in the world working for them; I don’t know why they insist on pretending to be experts when there is a real expert at hand. One other thing, as long as I’m being cranky: Given that online retailing accounts for just 5 percent of U.S. wine sales, is a survey from an on-line retailer a better source than Nielsen or the Wine Institute?
? Bring on the new brands: One of the great mysteries in the wine business is how many wines actually exist. It’s also a mystery why it’s a mystery, since wine is regulated and this should not be difficult to determine. But it is, and the best guess has been about 15,000, which includes different varietals but not different vintages. Turns out that may be just a fraction of the total, according to Ship Compliant, a company that helps wineries through the maze of regulation. It found that the federal government approved 93,000 labels in 2013. However, since that could include changes to old labels or old wine given a new name, as well as wines that were proposed but never made it to market, there probably aren’t 93,000 wines available for sale. Which, given the size of the Great Wall of Wine, is no doubt a good thing.
? Bring on the lawyers: The Wine Curmudgeon notes this item not because he expects anyone to understand it unless they are a liquor law attorney with a large staff, but to remind the world, again, of the pointlessness of the three-tier system unless you are a distributor or attorney. It details a court case in which a distributor is suing a producer even though the producer followed the letter of the law. Or something like that. Regardless of the outcome, it will make no difference to anyone who buys wine. Incidentally, this is a jury trial. I can only shake my head in sympathy for those poor jurors, and hope they have lots of wine at home for afterwards. Update: Hours — literally — after I posted this, the suit was settled. No doubt they were terrified the jury would laugh at them, go home, and open a beer.
Image courtesy of Houston Press food blog, using a Creative Commons license