Winebits 717: Winespeak, DoorDash, supermarket wine

This week’s wine news: Wine Scholars Guild says it will try to make winespeak easier to understand. Plus, DoorDash expands booze delivery and a look at the supermarket wine store of the future.

• No more toasty and oaky? The Wine Scholar Guild, a leading wine education group, says it wants to change the way we talk about wine. Or, at least I think that’s what it wants to do. The story describing the effort is so full of PR-speak, education-speak, and some -speak that I couldn’t decipher, that it’s difficult to say for sure. To quote: The project would “empower the individual to taste and describe wine with an enriched and universal lexicon.” In addition, it would “dive deeper into assessing the qualities of a wine’s building blocks” and look “into the nature of a wine’s personality.” Sigh. This is probably worth a separate post on the blog; I’ll try to follow up and see if I can make any sense of it.

• Bring on the booze: DoorDash, the restaurant delivery  service that has branched out to groceries and clothing, is expanding its alcohol delivery effort. Customers will be able to place orders for beer, wine, and spirits (with or without food) from participating local restaurants and supermarkets in select markets in 20 states. We’ll ignore for a moment the company’s infamous reputation (and that the Wine Curmudgeon has all but stopped using it, since half my orders are wrong in some way). Instead, let’s focus on what this news means: Another chink in the armor that restricts alcohol sales in the U.S. That the company would have done this two years ago is doubtful. But the pandemic changed all that, and that DoorDash thinks it can make money with wine delivery speaks volumes.

• Even in Iowa: We’ve written a lot on the blog about how important supermarkets are to the future of wine, and here’s one more example — a regional grocer has built an upscale market in suburban Des Moines, Iowa, with “a Hy-Vee Wine & Spirits department offering a walk-in beer cooler, a walk-in wine room and a walk-in humidor.” In Iowa? In addition, the story reports that building the store required a $26 million investment, and that it is its “first entirely reimagined grocery store.” What does that say about what Hy-Vee’s bosses think about selling wine in supermarkets?