This week’s wine news: The ultimate take on glass bottles, plus more wine and Brexit woes and a new cold-hardy wine grape
• Take that, glass bottles! Paul Tincknell, the blog’s official wine marketer, offers the final nails to the glass bottle’s coffin, complete with charts and graphs: “Glass loses out on almost every metric of climate change.” Paul and I have discussed this many times; this piece encapsulates everything we’ve talked about and then some. Yes, the piece is long and gets a bit technical, but the next time someone throws “romance of the bottle” at you, you’ll know enough from reading this to tell them to stop being so quaint. A 40-pound case of wine isn’t very romantic.
• Call it Brexit-tier: The Wine Curmudgeon, who would not wish the three-tier system on anyone, can only sigh when he reads of the continuing Brexit-induced woes for Britain’s wine business. The latest (via drinksbusiness.com), from a leading importer: “I have experienced first-hand just how terrible things have become post-Brexit. … Just from a bureaucracy point of view, the paperwork … I’ve imported and exported wine for 30 years for leading wine companies. We just see delays, we see paperwork problems, everything has become so much more complicated. … It really is a joke.” Where have we heard that description before?
• Cold hardy: Call it clarion, the newest cold-hardy grape from the viticulturists at the University of Minnesota. Its parentage includes seyval blanc, pinot noir and the cold-hardy frontenac, producing a dry white wine with “fruity attributes of citrus, pear, melon, apricot and chamomile. Some evaluators describe the wine as being similar to southern hemisphere sauvignon blanc.” Plus, it’s resistant to the dreaded downy mildew, a serious problem in the Eastern U.S. due to humid and rainy summers.