Winebits 802: SVB, “champagne,” ancient grapes

This week’s wine news: Perspective on the SVB failure, plus more fake champagne and 1,300-year old wine

Circle K wine update: No luck in finding the convenience chain’s private label wine, as noted last week. The store near my house didn’t have any, and no word from the company’s media types about where I could buy it. But I will persevere.

• SVB: Bill Meagher, writing for North Bay Biz, offers some perspective on the Silicon Valley Bank failure: “An old cop source of mine used to say, ‘You want to see how people are for real, grab them by the wallet.’ … in March eating your young became a bloodsport in Santa Clara.” His description of how Big Tech, which sucked at SVB’s teat to get started, tuned on the bank is eye opening. It’s also worth noting that “local wineries began getting calls from SVB rivals anxious to help the failed bank’s clients find a new home for their deposits and banking business” almost as soon as the bank’s woes became public.

• No. not Champagne: The WC can’t get enough of the Champagne/champagne stories. The latest? French border police destroyed 35,000 bottles of a Haitian soft drink called “Couronne Fruit Champagne.” The BBC reports that the bottles were seized two years ago, and that a court last year ruled that they could be destroyed for violating EU laws for geographical designations. All together now: “Only sparkling wine from the Champagne region of French can be called Champagne.”

• Ancient wine: Researchers may have found 1,300-year-old grape seeds in Israel that can shed light on the origins of a ‘mysterious’ Gaza wine and the history of grapevine cultivation in the desert. The seeds, or pips, were found at an ancient Byzantine monastery in the Negev desert and were likely from a white grape — potentially the earliest of its kind documented anywhere in the world. The archaeologists say it could be linked to the sweet white wine – the Gaza wine – that there are many references to in historical records but have never been found. The wine was shipped across the Byzantine Empire, as well as to Germany, France and Britain,where it is thought to have been enjoyed by the nobility — the 1 percent wine of its time.