This week’s wine news: The mainstream media pushes a $10 wine. Plus Rolling Stone – yes, Rolling Stone – looks at wine and sports, and does the WC have a doppelganger?
• Shock and surprise: The MarketWatch website, which mostly covers business news, will sometimes run a wine review. So imagine my surprise when I saw this: “Here’s a great $10 bottle.” The review was an ode to a wine sometimes seen here, the Argentine Trapiche malbec. The Trapiche is a little softer than I like, but it’s widely available (supermarkets, even) and it tastes like Argentine malbec. So why did it appear, given how almost everyone, winestream or mainstream, consigns $10 wine to websites and blog like mine? Could it be that others are fed up with this premiumization thing? I can only hope.
• “No matter how hard I try. …” I can’t get away from sports, even though I haven’t covered it since Bill Clinton was president. Hence, this long and almost too detailed piece in Rolling Stone, looking at the relationship between wine and sports — “fine wine is surprisingly significant in the world of sports.“ In one respect (and has been noted here), this is not surprising. Athletes make as much as tech moguls, so why not? And (as also noted here) — sports have discovered premiumization, too. How about $200 for a ticket to a Boston Red Sox baseball game? The biggest surprise to me is why this story appeared in Rolling Stone, which still focuses on music.
• WC doppelganger? The New York Times reports that a leading researcher says that “ ‘there are so many people in the world that the system is repeating itself.’ It’s not unreasonable to assume that you, too, might have a look-alike out there.” In other words, a doppelganger. For which the WC apologizes ahead of time to whoever might be stuck with me. The story notes that the reason for facial similarities is partly genetic and also partly a mystery, but that the similarities seem to extend only to the way we look and not the way we act. For which the WC is most grateful; does the world does not need another cranky wine writer?