Tag Archives: Tom Wark

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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.

Winebits 674: Holiday season wine snobs edition

wine snobsThis week’s wine news: The wine snobs celebrate the holiday season

• Ice in a glass of wine? VinePair asks sommeliers when it’s OK to put an ice cube in a glass of wine, because we need guidance on this subject from people with initials after their names. The post, believe it or not, includes a section on how to properly add ice. It’s pieces like this that make me wonder if I’ve wasted the past 13 years writing the blog. How about this advice? Add a cube or two when you feel like it. Which, in Texas in August, we feel like a lot.

• The kindness of strangers? Mary Margaret McCamic, MW, writing on the Karolus Wine Imports blog, notes that “many of the most exciting bottles that I have enjoyed were the result of the generosity of collectors.” How does one respond to that? Does this mean that when the Big Guy comes over, and we dip into the wine closet for my latest $10 find, it’s not exciting? It’s pieces like this that make me wonder if I’ve wasted the past 13 years writing the blog.

• No affordable wine? Megan Krigbaum, writing for Punch, laments the loss of affordable Beaujolais on restaurant wine lists. She defines this as Beaujolais costing less than $100 a bottle. It’s pieces like this that make me wonder if I’ve wasted the past 13 years writing the blog. $100 is affordable? For whom?  This also begs the question of Beaujolais’ availability on restaurant wine lists, and especially in the middle of the country. But what do I know? I put ice cubes in un-exciting $10 wine.

Winebits 673: Wine.com sales, restaurant wine, tasting notes

wine.comThis week’s wine news: Wine.com reports 217 percent sales increase, plus restaurants are headed in the opposite direction and another critic ponders the need for toasty and oaky

• Wine.com sales: Wine.com, the U.S.’ biggest on-line wine retailer, ended the first six months of its fiscal year with a 217 percent sales increase compared to the previous 12 months. Can anyone say pandemic? Even without the increase in on-line retail caused by the coronavirus, sales for the previous 12 months were up 102 percent. One key to the jump: repeat sales from customers who pay $49 a year for free shipping, similar to Amazon Prime’s free shipping. Sales from those customers increased by about one-fifth more than overall sales for the past 12 months, as more of those customers bought more wine on-line. This raises the question again: How, once the retail world returns more or less to normal, will we be able to go back to thinking of on-line wine as something special, and not something we buy every day?

• Not so good news: Tom Wark, writing on the Fermentation blog, asks: “Do we allow a huge swath of restaurants across the country to simply disappear in the wake of COVID and state’s restaurant shutdown orders or do we act to aid these institutions?” This has been the elephant in the room as the pandemic continues, with restaurants — rightly or wrongly — bearing the burst of government restrictions. I don’t know that I agree with all Tom writes, but his piece is well worth reading.

• No tasting notes: Guy Woodward, writing in the British trade magazine Harpers, pulls no punches: “Who reaps the benefit, for example, of reading that a wine has notes of  ‘gentian, elderflower, seaweed, mussels, salt spray, chicken stock, sage, fennel, peach kernel, lemon, alkali and wet stone’?” This is the second British shot over the winespeak and tasting notes bow in recent weeks — quite a surprising development, given how entrenched the two are. Again, reason for optimism that some in the wine business understand the need to make wine more accessible.