Category:Wine news

This week’s wine news: The Napa wine train takes a hit, plus another bubbly lawsuit and Gallo makes more cuts

• Wine train: The Napa wine train, about as much a symbol of the California’s region as there is, has gotten bad marks. A study calls it the 13th most overpriced attraction in the world and 53rd biggest tourist trap (just behind North Carolina’s Biltmore Estates for overpriced). The report, from USA Today and a credit card rating company, analyzed more than 23.2 million Google reviews of the 500 most popular tourist attractions in the world, looking for terms like tourist trap, overrated, or expensive. To be fair, though, Elvis Presley’s Graceland was ranked No. 25 for tourist traps, which seems harsh. Yes, it’s expensive, as well as surreal, Kafkaesque and even corny, but hardly a tourist trap.

• More lawyers! The WC’s favorite Champagne litigator is at it again. Louis Roederer, which sued $7 Spanish cava Cristalino for infringing on its high-end Cristal bubbly, is suing a small London winery that uses “Crystal” on its bottles of pet nat pink wine. thedrinksbusiness reports that Renegade Urban Winery sells a £28 bottle of Crystal Pet Nat Pink wine, named after customer Crystal Lai (whose picture appears on a tag and bottle label). That was entirely unacceptable to Roederer, which says the product infringes on the trademark of its £300 Cristal. Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

• Hail Columbia? E&J Gallo, the largest wine company in the U.S., has closed its Columbia Winery wine club. This follows Gallo closing the winery’s Woodinville tasting room less than a year ago. Sean Sullivan reports that there is no indication that Gallo is closing the Washington state winery, which it bought in 2012. But the company did eventually close Covey Run, which it bought with Columbia, and laid off 355 employees in California earlier this year.

This week’s wine news: Texas wine pioneer Ed Auler died, plus a high-dollar booze theft and too high winery exec pay

• Ed Auler: Auler, whose Fall Creek Winery in the Texas Hill Country was one of the state’s first, has died. He was 78. Auler and Susna, his wife, were tireless advocates for Texas wine. They started a winery in a renovated garage in 1979, and in 1983, they opened the winery that is there today in Tow, northwest of Austin.  In the blog’s early days, when I spent much of my time writing about Texas and Drink Local, he and Susan were seemingly everywhere, telling the tale of their winery and Texas in general. Auler was instrumental in forming the Hill County AVA, and his work with the Texas Legislature to pass legislation was a key to the state’s growth as a wine region.

• Big-time theft: How does a theft totaling $1.6 million worth of alcohol, using tractor-trailers, from the country’s second-biggest wholesaler, sound? One would have thought it wouldn’t have been quite so easy, yes? The theft took place in July from a Republic National Distributing Company warehouse near Tampa. CNN reports that the thieves took 4,277 cases of alcohol, though the report didn’t specify which brands were stolen. The other thing I like? The trucks seem to have been stolen from a facility down the road.

• Too-high pay: Australia’s Treasury Wine Estates, one of several Big Wine companies with more than its share of problems, may be facing a stockholder revolt over executive pay. The West Australian newspaper reports that around “47 per cent of votes were cast against TWE’s renumeration plan after three proxy advisors advised against it,”  calling the vote “the biggest shareholder rebellions in years over management salary.” Treasury’s performance has suffered substantially over the past several years, thanks to the collapse of its $10 wine business in the U.S. and a Chinese wine tariff that clobbered its sales in China.

This week’s wine news: Buying wine is — shocking news — stressful, plus the failure of legal weed and celebrity chef Michael Chiarello has died

• Not a surprise: A British survey has found that we’ll pay up to one-third more for wine to impress someone and that almost one-quarter of us find buying wine “stressful.” That comes from UK retailer Lidl, which positions its wine regime as less complicated than elsewhere. Still, I don’t think that skews the results much. Similar surveys from around the world always show the same thing. My favorite part of this survey? “Almost half – 46% – don’t know how to identify a good bottle from a bad one and a third are ‘simply bewildered by wine jargon.’ ” Which is not surprising and hasn’t changed in all the years I’ve been doing this. How else do you sell a $15 bottle of wine for $30 without confusion?

• Hard times: Wine isn’t the only thing suffering these days. So is legal weed in Canada, which was supposed to set the stage for its growth in the U.S. Reports the CBC: “The biggest companies — Canopy Growth Corp., Aurora Cannabis Inc. and Tilray Brands Inc. — have shrunk their footprints, laid off thousands and grappled with balance sheets that reflect a turbulent market and a longer march to profitability than many once imagined. Others weren’t so lucky. They sold their business at bargain prices to a bigger rival, folded or declared bankruptcy.” The kicker, of course, is the cost. It’s still cheaper to meet someone in a parking lot, despite the seeds and stems, than to pay legal prices. Hope the wine business is paying attention.

• Michael Chiarello: Chiarello, who was a Napa celebrity chef during wine’s glory days — he even had his own computer software — has died. He was 61. Chiarello was part of the generation of chefs who made wine part of of what they did, including his PBS and Food Network cooking shows (which still show up on some streaming services). Eventually, he owned a vineyard and a line of cooking and houseware accessories, showing just how important this sort of thing was to the wine business back then.

Photo: “Wine Poured; Menu Perused” by mikecogh is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

This week’s wine news: Yet another wine lawsuit, plus a winery cuts tasting room fees and a wine writer takes Napa Valley to task

• Bring on the attorneys: Few things make the WC smile more than a good wine lawsuit, and this one is: Domaine Carneros has filed a trademark lawsuit against a Southern California winery, Chateau de Reve, over the name “Le Reve.” Wine Business News says that the former produces the sparkling wine named “Le Reve” – French for “the dream.” The name has been registered as a trademark since the late 1990s. Chateau de Reve, on the other hand, uses “Le Reve” and “Chateau De Reve” for its wines, “causing confusion among consumers,” according to the lawsuit. Also worth noting: Chateau de Reve makes still wine and not sparkling, so this should be much fun.

• Wow: Frankly, this was about the last thing I expected. Reports the Wine Enthusiast: High tasting room fees are “creating a barrier to people feeling comfortable to come in and taste wines.  If we want to attract the next generation of wine drinkers, we need to be able to show them the properties, teach them how wine is produced and explain to them why wine costs what it does. If we preclude that opportunity to take them from the age of 21 to 40, they may never come around.” Which sounds more like the WC than highly respected Pas Robles winemaker Matt Trevisan, who cut tasting room fees from $40 to $20 at Linne Calodo Cellars. The story adds that it’s “an about-face for Trevisan, who was once a leader in pushing prices up years ago.”

• Whoa, Napa: No, I did not write : “Napa Valley needs a reality check.” Tim Carl did on his Substack. And if the lengthy story doesn’t exactly live up to the headline,  it does show that Carl understands what is going on in the wine business. He says that a recent study that predicts more greatness for the U.S.’ predominant wine region may be more than a bit wrong. “However, this report — hindered by remaining limitations brought on by the pandemic — may underrepresent key challenges such as fluctuating tourism rates, economic uncertainties, demographic shifts, staffing issues and generational changes.”  All in all, it’s a well done piece.

This week’s wine news: A Canadian group says moderate drinking is OK, plus a really high-end wine auction and ancient wine refrigerators

• Thank you: Maybe next in the U.S.? “We are an informal association of concerned citizens and industry groups that is dedicated to providing unbiased information and education that encourages responsible drinking and reduces harmful consumption.” That would be the mandate for the Canadian Association for Responsible Drinkers, which wants to offer perspective for Canada’s health authorities about alcohol – as opposed to the “One drink will kill you!!!!” that we get all of the time.

• What an auction: How does an wine auction totaling 25,000 bottles, worth up to $50 million, sound? Then stay tuned — Taiwanese billionaire Pierre Chen will sell the wines over the course of a year through the Sotheby’s action house. Chen, says CNN, is one of the world’s great wine collectors, and is apparently going to sell the wine because he has too much to drink. Several of the world’s rarest wines are listed in the story, so any of you who have an extra six figures to drop may be able to get a Petrus.

• Keeping it cool: Did Roman soldiers have a 2,000-year-old version of a wine refrigerator? Apparently so, reports Ars Technica. “Archaeologists have discovered a 2,000-year-old built-in ceramic structure they believe was used to store wine and perishable foods. It’s a rare find and the second such ‘refrigerator’ to be discovered at a former fortress” at a site in what is now northern Bulgaria near the Danube. The refrigerator was made of ceramic plates, located beneath the floor of a military barracks. Which gives the WC a thought: Can I do something like this to replace my electric wine refrigerator, given Texas’ well known power grid woes?