Winebits 714: IHOP wine, Pierce’s Disease, wine capsules

This week’s wine news: IHOP is testing wine — and Barefoot, to boot. Plus a possible cure for the dreaded Pierce’s Disease and a move to abolish wine capsules

• IHOP wine? We’ve followed news of fast-food and casual restaurants contemplating wine quite seriously on the blog, so I need to report that IHOP — where it’s never too early to order dinner — is considering wine. USA Today reports that the chain is testing a “Bubbles, Wine & Brews” menu at select locations in New Mexico and California. That’s odd enough, given the IHOP menu. But the newspaper story left out the best part — the wines are all Barefoot, “produced by E. & J. Gallo Winery, the largest family-owned winery in the U.S.” No word, though, on how much the chain will be marking up those $7 bottles of Barefoot.

• An end to Pierce’s? Pierce’s Disease, which completely destroys grapevines, is one of the most horrible diseases the wine business faces. Only phylloxera may be worse. Now, researchers at Texas A&M may have found a way around it — a “biologic” that cures the plant from within. Currently, the only treatment is pesticides, which kills the insect that carries the disease but doesn’t do much for the infected wines. If this process works, and it has been about 60 percent effective in test vineyards so far, we have some much welcome good news.

• The end of the wine capsule? The capsule is the foil-like piece on most wine bottles that covers the cork or cork-like closure. Now, Wine-searcher reports, there’s increasing sentiment to get rid of capsules, given that they’re wasteful, expensive, and environmentally unsound. “What was once an underground movement appears to be headed for the mainstream,” says the story. Which is all well and good, but the Wine Curmudgeon must point out that those of us who advocate screwcaps have had no use for capsules long before it was even an underground movement. And, in the finest Winestream Media tradition, the story doesn’t mention screwcaps once.