Tag Archives: wine capsules

Winebits 753: Wine foil, younger consumers, drive-thru booze

man holding wine bottles
“Man, it sure would be easier if we had drive-thru liquor stores in this state.”

This week’s wine news: That annoying foil that covers the cork may be going away, plus an intelligent take on the pursuit of younger wine drinkers and the history of the alcohol drive-thru

• No more foil? Dave McIntyre in the Washington Post bids a fond– and overdue – farewell to the annoying foil closure on top of wine corks. Writes Dave: “The capsule, also called the foil, is one of those anachronisms of wine, a relic of centuries-old tradition that hangs on because wine lovers like to think of themselves as part of a centuries-old tradition.” The foil, already a dinosaur, is a victim of wine’s drive for sustainability, as well as the extra cost. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention two things: First, it was wasteful decades ago, not that anyone cared, and second, screw caps don’t need foil.

• Where are the young people? Tina Caputo takes an intelligent look at wine’s seemingly endless hunt for younger wine drinker on the SevenFifty trade website. Says one observer: “I actually think it’s a super exciting time, because there’s a massive hole in the market and the old guard botched it.” Why do so many people who aren’t cranky ex-newspapermen keep sounding like the Wine Curmudgeon? Captuo’s take is sharp-eyed (if a bit long) and offers some much needed perspective. But why not? She is a fine editor, who has bought lots of stories from me about the wine business over the years.

• Drive-thru booze: The first time I saw a drive-thru liquor store was in a small town in Louisiana, when I was in the newspaper business. We may have had Al Capone in Chicago, but not beer barns. Laurel Miller, writing in Punch, explains how and why they came to be, and talks about the challenges facing those that remain. “A more literal approach to the term ‘drive-thru,’ “ she writes, “these businesses required customers to actually drive through the building, where they were assisted by an employee without ever exiting their vehicle.” In Texas, reports a west Texas native, they were especially effective in allowing Baptists to buy beer without anyone seeing them do it.

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.