Non-Vintage Champagnes

This quote about non-vintage Champagnes really brought home to me what marvelous alchemy a non-vintage Champagne can be, and how radically different it is from other styles of wine:

"Why non-vintage Champagne often ends up as the Rodney Dangerfield of the wine world, never getting the respect it deserves, may be related partly to its lower price and partly to ignorance. What other quality wine is prized for broadening rather than narrowing its geographic base, for combining wines from several years, fermenting them twice, issuing them without a vintage date and, in perhaps the greatest aspect of Champagne's magic, combining both red and white grapes to form a single, balanced entity?"

The quote is from an old article, so feel free to skip the marketing notes about selling and buying Champagne at the turn of the millenium. The quote can be found about 1/4 of the way down the page where it begins to get really interesting. If you don't know much about Champagne, this is an excellent place to start.

http://www.thewinenews.com/decjan9900/cover.html

Where's Huge Johnson?

One of my favorite wine blogs is Huge Johnson's World of Wine. Normally, when I talk about a wine blog, I link to it... but Huge's blog is gone! In its place there is another blog. I noticed this a while ago and figured it was some kind of Blogger bug, but since it has persisted for some time, I'm getting worried. What's happened to Huge?

Huge, if you're out there, I miss you!

Wine Storage Woes

So, my mother went out and bought 2 cases of Champagne for my wedding. I don't know what she got, but I trust the lady at the wine shop where she got it. (I honestly don't want to be picky, and it's a lovely thought for a gift.) What we would be drinking was quickly overshadowed when Mom told me where she had put it - in the garage. Argh!

Our garage goes through massive temperature fluctuations every day. Because it is warmed by the sun during the day, but not during the night, it gets warmer than the high temperature of the day, but just as cold as the low temperature every night. It can be 70-80 degrees in there during the day and 25 degrees at night. She wants to leave it in there until May! Argh! I tried to explain to her that the wine would be much, much better off in our basement (which is temperature-controlled along with the rest of the house) but she complains that the wine is heavy and refuses to move it. I could move it inside of 5 minutes, but I'm 400 miles away, and I simply can't take the time to drive there until after the holidays.

She seems to think I'm just being a pain-in-the-ass control freak bride. I just don't want to serve our guests ruined Champagne for the wedding. I've really, really tried to be nice about planning the wedding with her, but this comes just after I put my foot down about another thing she wants to do with the wedding that I felt was totally unreasonable. Now she thinks I'm just complaining for the sake of complaining.

I'm hoping the wine can take a few weeks of the temp bouncing until I can get down there and move it. Or maybe I can convince her to move it or someone in the city to come over and help her...

Big retail and interstate shipping

A good article on Costco and direct shipping.

The logic of the argument against direct shipping (as summarized in the article) boggles my mind.

"Costco says that under the court's ruling, it too should be allowed to buy directly. The state argues that the Supreme Court's ruling isn't applicable because it didn't deal with the enormous quantities at issue in the Washington case.

If Costco and other retailers are allowed to buy wine and beer from out-of-state wineries and breweries, Hankins suggested, then convenience stores would be able to order deeply discounted fortified wines and beers from shady establishments in other states. The distribution system in Washington helps track what alcohol is coming into the state, he argued."

I don't buy any of this. Not for a second. Let's see, what are the arguments here.

1. Alcohol is dangerous and needs central control - (what about the children?!)
2. Costco is different because it's big.
3. Inexpensive wine, beer and liquor are a terrible thing.
4. Those alcohol people rub me the wrong way.

There are plenty of other industries that ship legal but controlled substances between states that don't require mandatory government- approved middlemen. How exactly is it that the distributors are checking IDs? They aren't. The distributor system has nothing to do with keeping alcohol from minors.

And frankly, just because someone is selling fortified plonk doesn't mean they are "shady." Petty insults do not buttress Mr. Hankins' flimsy arguments.

Mr. Hankins insists it is the volume of wine that Costco ships that is the real problem. Still, Mr. Hankins insists it is the volume of wine that Costco ships that is the real problem. Really?

Of course, the white elephant in the room is tax collection. This is an effective angle the distributor lobby uses with state governments. Along with the arguments of MADD and various religious groups, you will see the tax collection argument spring up again and again, and it's not there as an afterthought or by mistake. (The Supreme Court didn't buy the idea that tax/policing would be impossible though.)

The funny thing is that the state governments are more likely to get the full amount of tax out of a big player like Costco than they are thousands of tiny operations, simply because Costco is big and hard to miss. Bigger operations are also going to be easier to police and track because their supply chains have to be so organized, etc. (On the flip side of the tax argument, I wonder if all the mandatory markups of the middlemen have the effect of increasing the base price of a bottle, and therefore might increase the amount of tax in some state codes?) The distributors and the states they've successfully lobbied can't go after the small operations, because the Supreme Court ruling was clearly about small wineries. Plus, it's the big retail outfits that will really hurt the distributors. They don't care a hoot about some Mom 'n Pop shipping a case or two here and there. Imagine Wal-Mart (or Sam's Club, which does sell alcohol) wading into this fight. That's the real reason that being big is different.

Non-wine blogger posts on non-cork closures

The American public's awareness of cork issues and the good quality of new wine packaging styles is growing. Here is a post from Instapundit (a very well-known and high-traffic blogger - well over 100,000 hits/day!)


Instapundit also mentions Professor Bainbridge's excellent wine blog.

It's nice to see that the word about non-cork closures and single-serving packaging is getting around.