Winebits 452: Wine advice, consolidation, liquor law

This week’s wine news: Why wine advice sometimes goes astray, plus winery consolidation and more silly liquor laws

• Way more than I need to know: Should wine be chilled? That’s a fair question, and one I get a lot. But does it need 700 words for the answer? I mention this not to be snarky, but to point out that one of the most common complaints I get is that the wine business makes wine too complicated. And writing almost 700 words about something that can be answered in three or four sentences is just one more example of that problem. How are we going to convince ordinary wine drinkers, who might buy couple of bottles a month, that wine is fun and that they should drink more if we can’t explain wine to them in simple, direct language? And, to add insult to injury, the piece in the link includes a recommendation for orange wine.

• Fewer and getting bigger: The mainstream business press has picked up on winery consolidation, and this article from Forbes does a good job of explaining what’s going on. It even focuses on the importance of distributor consolidation as part of the winery buyouts: “With better, more robust representation of specific appellations and regions under one ownership umbrella, larger groups of wine brands with the same ownership become more attractive to large distributors looking to expand their own portfolios.” In other words, the new big is about getting bigger, since it benefits both Big Wine and Big Distribution.

• What was your address again? No, the U.S. isn’t the only country with odd liquor laws. Right, Canada? “An Ontario winery no longer has to keep its location a secret after a tribunal ruled against the province’s wine authority.” The story details why the winery couldn’t put its address on its website until the ruling, which involves the a specific Canadian example of enforcing appellation regulations.