Tag Archives: IHOP wine

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.

Winebits 566: Wine delivery, IHOP wine, wine taxes

wine deliveryThis week’s wine news: Total Wine takes on wine delivery, plus an IHOP that sells wine and the British government sticks it to wine drinkers

• Home delivery: Total Wine, the chain that wants to become the first national wine retailer, will offer same-day and scheduled delivery in select markets. Currently, the chain only does this kind of delivery in 13 cities in Virginia. The news release, written mostly in tech-speak, is difficult to understand, but the implication is that Total will roll out delivery where it’s legal as soon as it can. What makes this different from the recent rush of retailers announcing delivery? That Total isn’t doing delivery through a third-party service like Drizly or Instacart, but will apparently provide the service itself. That’s a tremendous undertaking in this era of outsourcing, but also speaks to Total’s close to the vest approach toward retailing.

• Wine with your Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity? A Phoenix IHOP has added a full-service bar, serving beer, wine, and cocktails. So yes, IHOP mimosas with your pancakes. The chain normally doesn’t let its franchisees do this sort of thing, but the IHOP is in a former Lone Star Steakhouse, and the bar was already in the restaurant. So why not take advantage of the situation?

• Raising wine taxes: The British government, trying to balance the budget while it leaves the European Union, has found one solution: Raise the import duty on wine. The Financial Times reports that the new rate will increase the cost of a bottle of wine by 7 pence (about a dime in U.S. dollars). What makes this story so odd is that the government isn’t raising the duty on beer or spirits, even though wine is now the most popular alcoholic beverage in the United Kingdom and it’s the sixth biggest wine market in the world.