Tag Archives: Pierce’s Disease

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 401: Randall Grahm crowdfunding, grape diseases, craft wine

crowdfunding ?Crowdfunding success: Randall Grahm, the Bonny Doon impresario, raised $167,857 in his crowdfunding attempt to develop 10,000 new grape varieties, beating the $150,000 goal. Which isn’t quite the same thing as the Wine Curmudgeon being named editor of the Wine Spectator with a mandate to eliminate scores, but is close enough. Most crowdfunding projects fail, and it’s even more difficult for projects that aren’t tech related (as Grahm and I discussed here) to reach their goal. That he did it speaks to the passion surrounding wine and Grahm’s skill at getting out the vote. And then there is this — how can one not appreciate a Salinger allusion?

? The end of Pierce’s Disease? Next to phylloxera, which almost destroyed the French wine industry a century ago, Pierce’s Disease is probably the most dangerous threat to the wine business. It’s spread by insects which inject bacteria into the vine, and the bacteria blocks water from going through the plant, which kills it. There’s no cure or treatment, and the only preventative is pesticide, which brings its own problems. Now, though, Texas researchers may have found a solution, using a combination of viruses injected into the vine to kill the bacteria. Much work still needs to be done, say researchers, but this is among the most promising developments in fighting Pierce’s in decades.

? It’s all about the adjective: Our recent discussion about craft wine brings this, from the Harris survey people, about how consumers react to terms like craft and artisan. The survey found that almost six in 10 think handcrafted or handmade “strongly or somewhat communicates that a product is high quality.” Artisan and artisanal and custom are next at 46 percent, while craft is at 44 percent. The most interesting part? That save for handcrafted, most of us recognize these terms for what they are — marketing jargon with no real meaning.