Tag Archives: tannins

Winebits 684: Drizly, tannins, wine lawsuits

drizly
How much wine can you fit into an Uber car?

This week’s wine news:  Uber buys booze delivery service Drizly ($1.1 billion!), plus tannins may work against Covid-19 and yet another terrific wine lawsuit

• Uber-Drizly deal: And yes, the exclamation point in the subhed is warranted. Some five years ago, I interviewed one of Drizly’s co-founders, Nick Rellas, and $1.1 billion was about the last thing on his mind. We spent much of the time talking about how Rellas started the company by delivering booze for a Massachusetts liquor store to get an idea about how delivery worked. But there it is, one year into the pandemic — the company is worth $1.1 billion to Uber, the ride sharing and delivery service. The wise guys and analysts can debate and pontificate about the deal as much as they want, but that an alcohol delivery service is worth that much money in a country where alcohol delivery is still illegal in many places is difficult to believe.

• Bring on the tannins: One more reason why health news is banned from the blog, save for stories to show why it is banned from the blog: Taiwanese researchers claim that tannins in wine can help fight Covid-19 by inhibiting the activity of two key enzymes within the virus. This is, of course, exciting news, save for one thing: How are we supposed to get tannins into Covid-19 patients?

• Let the lawyers loose: The Wine Curmudgeon has long had an almost Pythonesque fascination with wine lawsuits, the sillier the better. So consider this: Rapper Drake is suing two retailers for discounting his $400 Champagne. The details are — pun fully intended — priceless, with the rapper and his partner alleging conspiracy on the part of the retailers and the brand’s former distributor. Their goal? To destroy Drake’s bubbly top benefit the competition. The WC has just one question: How surprised was Drake that the wine business was just as nasty as the record business, which is infamous for being nasty?

Photo: “uber” by stockcatalog is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Winebits 469: U.S. wine consumption, corks, flavored tannins

U.S. wine consumptionThis week’s wine news: U.S. wine consumption lags the world, plus corks make a comeback and fake tannins

• 16th is pretty sad: U.S. per capita wine consumption, a little more than a bottle a month, is 16th among the word’s 21 biggest wine consuming countries. Which is depressing enough, since we had a wine revolution in this country over the past 20 years. But even more depressing – that figure has been flat since I started writing the blog 10 years ago. We can talk about how much the country drinks overall and we can talk about how much we spend, but as I have written many times before, Americans aren’t all that interested in wine and most of the wine we drink is consumed by a hard-cord group of frequent wine drinkers. And until we make wine more accessible and easier to understand, that will continue to be the case.

• A technologically perfect cork? Talk to winemakers, and they’ll tell you that advances in cork manufacture have all but eliminated cork taint – the chemical compound that gets into wine from a flawed cork and ruins the wine. This story from Reuters expands on the subject, and talks about how cork is making a comeback with producers at the expense of screw caps. Cork is used on about 60 percent of wine bottles in the U.S. and around 70 percent worldwide; the remainder are plastic and composite corks (10 percent) and screwcaps (20 percent). Even this, though, is much less than the late 20th century,when cork controlled 95 percent of the market. The story misses one point, which goes to the heart of the U.S. wine consumption problem. No matter how good corks are as a closure, they aren’t as easy to open as a screwcap.

• Just like fake oak: Tannins occur naturally in wine from the tannic acid in the grape’s skins, stems, and seeds, and well-made wines at any price must take tannins into account. But adding fake tannins – literally, a bottle of tannic acid – is not uncommon, as this news release demonstrates. “Oenotan is an all-natural, water soluble, freeze-dried, tannin crystal made from 2 year air-dried French oak. … is available in three distinct profiles, Authentique, Vanilla and Mocha.” Yummy, huh? And people wonder why the wine business doesn’t want ingredient labels.