Winebits 419: Cheap wine, wine crimes, wine tourism

? But if it tastes crappy. ..: The Tasting Table website offers advice about what to do with cheap wine that isn’t worth drinking, on the premise that “not everyone is a master sommelier.” It’s good to know that after publishing almost a decade of $10 Hall of Fames that a well-read wine site still assumes cheap wine isn’t worth drinking and that one needs to be a sommelier to choose wine successfully. Which, of course, is not true, as I have been writing about and teaching for more than 20 years. The other thing that makes me crazy about pieces like this? One of the suggestions is to cook with the wine. But if it’s not good enough to drink, why is it good enough to cook with? The best suggestion for bad wine? Throw it out.

? Shouldn’t she have cooked with it? USA Today reports that a Florida woman was arrested in Walmart after driving a motorized shopping cart through the store, eating sushi and drinking wine. The woman, says the story, was allegedly on drugs when she was arrested with a half empty bottle of wine in her cart. No word on what kind of wine it was or if it was chosen by a master sommelier, but my guess is that the woman enjoyed the wine, as bad as it may have been. Whether she enjoyed the part after the wine is a different story.

? Bring on the tourists: Napa Valley attracted 3.3 million tourists in 2014, up 12 percent from 2012 and putting the region’s current controversy over winery construction into perspective. Consider that just 140,000 people live in Napa County, and you can see why so many are so upset about so many tourists. On the other hand, it’s difficult to argue with the money the tourists spend, which may be more than one-half billion dollars.