Winebits 724: Happy 14th birthday to the blog

This week’s wine news: Stuff that makes the WC shake his head, because some things never seem to change — even after 14 years

• Hooray for Texas wine: No less than the Wine Enthusiast — about as Winestream as it gets — sings the praises of Texas wine: “Over the last 30-plus years, Texas winemakers have honed their craft and the state’s wine has established regional and national esteem.” Wow. Who knew? (Yes, sarcasm.) What’s most annoying is not that Texas wine deserves recognition, but that every time an article like this appears in a major wine magazine, it seems like big news. Which, of course, to those of us who have been advocating for Drink Local, it isn’t. Right, gang?

• Love those chateau: Talk to winemakers and marketing types, and they still insist that putting a castle on a wine label is a smart thing to do. Now, a British study reinforces that approach, because premiumization: Consumers judge the quality of wine by how much it costs and what the label looks like. In blind taste tests, however, they couldn’t tell the difference between £6 (about US$8) and £36 (about US$48) bottles. As if that isn’t depressing enough: Corks and heavy bottles are thought to denote quality, and one-third of those surveyed ranked a £10 wine (about US$13) with an image of a French château on the label as more premium than one costing almost 10 times as much.

• Where is Romania? Here’s a long story blaming the woes facing the Romanian wine industry on the Cold War, when too much of its wine was cheaply and poorly made. The problem with that excuse, as we’ve seen before: Who buying wine today remembers that? Communism fell more than 30 years ago — two generations in wine drinking time.  The reasons aren’t complicated: Declining wine consumption, lots of wine from lots of other places, and the reluctance of importers, wholesalers, and retailers in the U.S. to handle something that no one has ever heard of.