Tag Archives: podcasts

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Winecast 58: Dave Falchek of the American Wine Society and wine drinking during the pandemic

dave falchek
Dave Falchek: The new normal may be be quite as normal as we hope.

Dave Falchek:  We drank better wine during the pandemic, because we needed that to boost our spirits

Dave Falcheck, the executive director of the American Wine Society, is a keen observer of the U.S. wine drinker — not only from his tenure with the AWS, but as a long-time newspaper wine critic. Hence, Dave’s thoughts on the past year are worth listening to, and especially when he wonders if the return to normalcy will quite as normal as many want or expect.

“I think it’s going to be impaired,” he says. “No matter how good things get from a public health standpoint, there are going to be people who are going to be afraid, and they are not going to be willing to travel the way they did.”

Among Dave’s other observations:

• We bought wine from places we might not have before, including third-party wine clubs and off-price, on-line retailers. We were more concerned with trying something new, and if it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out.

• We probably spent more on wine during the pandemic, but that didn’t necessarily benefit smaller and regional producers. The biggest wineries did well, thanks to their supermarket and chain distribution, but smaller producers suffered an may suffer for a while.

• Younger drinkers are not necessarily wine drinkers, but are willing to try other things besides wine, including legal marijuana.

• Canned wine is here to stay, and the pandemic gave it a significant boost.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 10 minutes long and takes up 6 megabytes. Quality is mostly excellent – Zoom cooperated for the second time in a row.

Full disclosure: AWS members get a discount if they subscribe to the paid newsletter, but I would have interviewed Dave for this anyway.

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Winecast 57: Patrick Mata of Ole & Obrigado and imported wine during the pandemic

patrick mata
Patrick Mata, right, and Alberto Orte of Ole & Obrigado. “American companies are paying the tariff. How does that punish Europe?”

Patrick Mata:  U.S. companies are paying the wine tariff – how does that punish the European Union for airplane subsidies?

Want to make sense of the European wine tariffs, which seem to make no sense at all? Then listen to Patrick Mata, whose Ole & Obrigado is one of the leading Spanish wine importers to the U.S.

“I thought we might go out of business,” says Mata, whose company specializes in importing quality, $15 or less wine from Spain and Portugal. “Our margin is 30 percent on a bottle of wine, and the tariff is 25 percent. How were we going to stay in business?”

The good news is that Ole & Obrigado did, despite the tariff and the pandemic (which clobbered its restaurant business). Sales fell only 20 percent in 2020, which Mata considered a victory of immense proportions.

Mata, a long-time friend of the blog, was open and honest about how the tariff and the pandemic have hurt the wine business. Among the topics we talked about:

• Why raising prices to cover the tariff doesn’t work, and why it especially doesn’t work for the $15 wines that Ole specializes in.

• How to give back during a crisis, and why there should be more to the wine business than just making money.

• What Americans are drinking during the pandemic, and why it’s a victory for Big Wine at the expense of small producers — another unintended consequence of the tariff.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 15 minutes long and takes up 9 megabytes. Quality is mostly excellent – Zoom didn’t act up this time.

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Winecast 56: Tom Wark, three-tier reform, and buying wine on Amazon

tom wark
Tom Wark: All is not lost in our efforts to buy wine over the Internet.

Tom Wark: Some say the Supreme Court only takes an alcohol case every 15 to 20 years. Let’s hope that’s not the case

This month, the Supreme Court dashed the hopes of anyone who wants to buy wine on the Internet when it declined to hear a Michigan case that might have allowed us to buy wine on the Internet. So I asked Tom Wark, who knows more about this stuff than most attorneys, to talk about the chances of three-tier reform to make it easier to buy wine on-line in the wake of the court’s decision.

Wark is the executive director of the National Association of Wine Retailers, a trade group for independent retailers who want to sell wine on the Internet to all 50 states. As such, he is has worked with lawyers and lobbyists to try to figure out a way around the antiquated and obsolete three-tier system.

In this, the podcast is in English, and we hardly speak legalese at all. The topics included:

• Why the Supreme Court declined to hear the Michigan case, and why some attorneys think we’ll have to wait 15 years before we get another chance to overturn the three-tier system.

• Why Wark doesn’t  think that all is lost with the Supreme Court.

• Why reforming the three-tier system would make it easier to buy quality cheap wine, and especially imports.

• And that wine drinkers should contact their state legislators to ask them to allow out-of-state retailers to ship into their state.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 15 minutes long and takes up 10 megabytes. Quality is good to excellent – Zoom still acts up when I least expect it.

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Winecast 55: Wine America’s Michael Kaiser and helping small wineries make it through the pandemic

michael Kaiser
Michael Kaiser

Michael Kaiser: I haven’t been to a winery in nine months, and it’s my job – so you can imagine how difficult it has been for wineries that depend on visitors

Wine America, a trade group for U.S. producers, has played a key role in helping small wineries survive in the first nine months of the pandemic. Michael Kaiser, the group’s vice president of government affairs, has played a key role in that effort.

Foremost among that was passage of something called the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform ACT, a long way of describing a bill to change the way the federal government taxes alcohol producers. Yes, it’s a bit esoteric, but the bill’s passage means small wineries will face a more rational tax system – especially helpful during the pandemic.

We also talked about:

• What else can be done to help for regional wineries, both on the state and local level. Because, if the pandemic continues, Michael expects to see increasing numbers of wineries close.

• The tariff, and why it’s still with us. Michael makes a fine point: The wine tariff was intended to hurt the European Union, and it has. So, maybe, just maybe, we could see some progress in getting rid of it by the end of the year.

• New laws about can wine sizes, which should make it easier to make canned wine. This might sound esoteric as well, but it means we can finally buy canned in the same size can as we buy beer and soft drinks. And you didn’t know there was a difference, did you?

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 25 minutes long and takes up 16 megabytes. Quality is good to excellent – you’ll probably notice three or so bits where I had to edit the recording because we lost our Zoom connection.

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Winecast 54: Melanie Ofenloch and wine’s #MeToo moment

Melanie Ofenloch
Melanie Ofenloch: Yes, wine has a good old boys network.

“It’s something that is so pervasive and such a part of the fabric of how men feel they can take things. It’s just not right.”

• Melanie’s post about the podcast and the sommelier sex scandal

Melanie Ofenloch writes the Dallas Wine Chick blog, and is well regarded for her work. But that’s not her day job — she is a long-time top-level marketer, and she has traveled the world for a variety of multi-national companies. As such, she lends a unique perspective to wine’s #MeToo moment.

And, not surprisingly, says Melanie, the Court of Master Sommelier sex scandal is no different than anything she has seen in the business world. The surprise is that so many people accepted it as part of the culture. But the stories that have come out, she says, don’t even scratch the surface.

So why were people in wine so complacent? Why did it take so long for this to come out? Why did it happen in wine, which prides itself on being different? And what can be done to fix it?

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 13 minutes long and takes up almost 9 megabytes. Quality is mostly excellent.

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Winecast 53: Doug Caskey and Drink Local during the pandemic

doug caskey
Doug Caskey and his spiffy Colorado wine Zoom background.

“The situation isn’t good, but it’s difficult to make a monolithic assessment. The situation depends on where you are, and it can be all across the board.”

Colorado’s Doug Caskey has been one of the leaders in the local wine movement for almost as long as there has been one. He has been the executive director of the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board since 2000, and has served in a variety of roles with the Wine America trade group. As such, he is well-placed to discuss how the pandemic is clobbering regional wine.

Perhaps the biggest problem, Doug said, is that state laws classify wineries as bars. This means they suffer from the same restrictions as places people go to pick up girls and boys and to get drunk. Which, of course, is hardly the case with a winery tasting room. In addition, local wineries depend on events like weddings and concerts to stay in business, which are also limited by pandemic bar restrictions.

Among the topics we discussed:

• The recent spike in coronavirus cases doesn’t bode well for Drink Local, since wineries that have been able to re-open their tasting rooms may not be able to keep them open.

• The pandemic hasn’t been a boon for Drink Local at retail, despite all the glowing sales numbers. Consumers seem to be buying the best known brands instead of trying lesser known regional labels.

• The Trump wine tariff, advertised as a help to Drink Local, has actually been a tremendous hindrance. It has wreaked havoc on the wine supply chain, making it more difficult for local wines to get on store shelves.

• Yurts, as a solution to outdoor winter dining. Yes, yurts.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 13 minutes long and takes up almost 9 megabytes. Quality is mostly excellent. And yes, I was able to post Doug’s Zoom background.

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Winecast 52: Jessica Dupuy, The Wines of Southwest USA

Jessica Dupuy
Jessica Dupuy

Her new book, “The Wines of Southwest USA,” is a candid look at wine in Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico

Jessica Dupuy, through her work with media outlets like Texas Monthly, has been fighting the good fight for Drink Local for more than a decade. Her latest effort: “The Wines of Southwest USA” ($40, Infinite Ideas). It’s a candid assessment of regional wine in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. We’ll give a copy of the book away during the blog’s 13th annual Birthday Week, beginning Nov. 16.

Overall, she says, wine quality is much improved — but that is still much room for improvement. “We’re still not at the point where people see local wine the same way they see local spinach from the farm down the road, or peaches or whatever. So in that respect, we still have a lot of work to do.”

Among the topics we discussed:

• Arizona may offer the highest upside among the states in the book, thanks to a core of impressive young producers.

• Colorado remains one of the most fascinating states in the country, since so much of its grapes are grown at altitude.

• The pandemic has hit regional wine hard, and there remains doubt about how well it survive when things return to normal.

• And finishing a book during a pandemic, with home schooling, is not the easiest thing in the world.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 16 minutes long and takes up about 11 megabytes. Quality is mostly excellent.