Tag Archives: wine tourism

Winebits 696: Wine tariff, Walmart, wine tourism

wine tariff
Could the end be in sight for the EU wine tariff?

This week’s wine news: More good news on ending the EU wine tariff, plus Walmart will sue Texas to open liquor stores and mixed news for wine tourism

• More good tariff news: The new U.S. trade representative says she’s “hopeful and motivated” in resolving the airplane parts dispute that led to the Trump wine tariffs. Bloomberg reports that U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai told a Senate committee last week that she is “very committed” to ending the tariffs by July, which would put an end to the two-decade long dispute over the subsidies. “I am at this point very motivated and hopeful that we will get the traction that we need with our trading partners,” Tai told the Senate panel. Which is the best news we’ve heard about the wine tariffs since the U.S., the EU, and Britain announced the four-month tariff suspension in March.

• Suing in state court? Walmart, whose several federal appeals failed, will change direction and sue Texas in state court to overturn a law that says it can’t open liquor stores in the state. The Alcohol Law Review Blog reports that the retailer “will pursue its litigation strategy in the Texas state court system under Texas state constitutional claims.” This comes after the Supreme Court declined to decide the case and Walmart was rebuffed twice by a federal appeals court. The company wants to overturn a state law that says only privately-held companies can sell spirits in Texas, on the theory that public companies can’t guarantee the public health and safety as well as private companies when it comes to selling gin, bourbon, and the like. Ah, now to be in Texas that three-tier is here.

• Return of wine tourism? Wine Business News reports mixed news for a revival of wine tourism, based on a recent Wine Market Council webinar. Dale Stratton, the group’s president, said the wine industry must continue to monitor consumer sentiment about health and safety. “First and foremost, it’s the consumer in the end who decides what recovery looks like,” he said. In this, expect wine tourism growth to come from people who live in the same regions as the wineries, and wine country destinations in rural areas will likely benefit the most.

Regional wine and the wine tourism conference

wine tourism conferenceDrinking local at the wine tourism conference

The Wine Marketing and Tourism conference was a revelation. I wrote in October, partly in jest, that we had won the battle for regional wine legitimacy because restaurants were marking up regional wine as much as they were marking up everything else. Why do that unless there’s a market for drinking local?

The conference, though, showed the truth in my jest. I tasted an amazing chambourcin red blend from New Jersey. I talked to the director of the Kentucky wine association, whose group has 70 members. I found out that a small north central Texas town, one more victim of rural flight, was trying to revive its economy around wine and wine tourism.

We’ve come a long way since the time only a handful of us wrote about regional wine, and the audience seemed even smaller.

Why the change? That too, was part of what I learned at the conference (where I moderated a couple of panels about promoting local wine):

• The idea that wine isn’t just for old white guys. The two generations younger than the Baby Boomers are finally moving to wine, and state and local tourism officials see an opportunity to reach these increasingly younger consumers through the idea that wine is local, in much the way the Gen Xers and Millennials see craft beer and spirits are local. This is a revolutionary change in approach, the idea that you should drink wine not because it’s wine, but because it’s made near you.

• The opportunity cost. Wine tourism as economic development isn’t as expensive as traditional economic development – no giant companies to steal from another state, no costly tax incentives, no wining and dining corporate executives. This means even smaller, less wealthy regions – and local wine is mostly found in less wealthy rural parts of the country – can do it. If you have a enough wineries for a wine trail, some hotel rooms, and a couple of restaurants tol work with you, you’re ready to go.

• The improvements in winemaking technology over the past two decades, so that it’s possible to make professional wine from odd grapes in non-traditional parts of the country. In the early 1990s, when I started writing about local wine, this wasn’t the case, and I’ve tasted the regional chardonnay to prove it. I had a pinot blanc from Michigan at the conference that was as good as any pinot blanc I’ve had from anywhere in the world. That wine couldn’t have existed 20 years ago, when no one was quite sure how to grow pinot blanc in Michigan, much less make wine from it.

Winebits 419: Cheap wine, wine crimes, wine tourism

cheap wine ? But if it tastes crappy. ..: The Tasting Table website offers advice about what to do with cheap wine that isn’t worth drinking, on the premise that “not everyone is a master sommelier.” It’s good to know that after publishing almost a decade of $10 Hall of Fames that a well-read wine site still assumes cheap wine isn’t worth drinking and that one needs to be a sommelier to choose wine successfully. Which, of course, is not true, as I have been writing about and teaching for more than 20 years. The other thing that makes me crazy about pieces like this? One of the suggestions is to cook with the wine. But if it’s not good enough to drink, why is it good enough to cook with? The best suggestion for bad wine? Throw it out.

? Shouldn’t she have cooked with it? USA Today reports that a Florida woman was arrested in Walmart after driving a motorized shopping cart through the store, eating sushi and drinking wine. The woman, says the story, was allegedly on drugs when she was arrested with a half empty bottle of wine in her cart. No word on what kind of wine it was or if it was chosen by a master sommelier, but my guess is that the woman enjoyed the wine, as bad as it may have been. Whether she enjoyed the part after the wine is a different story.

? Bring on the tourists: Napa Valley attracted 3.3 million tourists in 2014, up 12 percent from 2012 and putting the region’s current controversy over winery construction into perspective. Consider that just 140,000 people live in Napa County, and you can see why so many are so upset about so many tourists. On the other hand, it’s difficult to argue with the money the tourists spend, which may be more than one-half billion dollars.