Winebits 816: Gallo, France, sex

This week’s wine news: Gallo buys two high-end wineries, plus the French will pull vines and a wine sex scandal (because aren’t we tired of reading the rest of this?)

• Gallo goes high end: E&J Gallo, the world’s biggest winery, has added two distinctly non-Gallo brands to its portfolio. Last week, the company that owns Barefoot and Apothic and focuses on wine that most of us can afford to buy, bought producers who do just the opposite – Rombauer, best known for its oaky chardonnay, and Massican, a Napa house that makes pricey whites. In one respect, this makes perfect sense, given wine’s sales slump (and especially the decline among labels costing $15 and less) and wine’s addiction to pressurization. But, in another, it’s almost baffling. How can two wineries, whose production is less than 1 percent of the Gallo total, make any difference to the company’s bottom line? I’m going to write more about this on Thursday, parsing the numbers and trying to make sense of it all.

• Less grape vines: Grape growers in in the Bordeaux region may rip out as much as 15,000 acres of vines as part of a French government plan to reduce the amount of wine the country makes. The story in the link repeats many of the same arguments I’ve heard in the some 20 years the French have been trying to solve this problem: The country makes too much wine and the only way to solve the problem is to grow fewer grapes. Which, if you check the world’s production numbers, hasn’t solved much of anything. The French still make the most wine in the world, alternating the title with Spain and Italy.

• Sex! Ordinarily, I wouldn’t use this bit, but as the sub-headline notes, at least it’s not more grim wine news. In this case, reports thedrinksbusiness.com, “The former mistress of Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger has been convicted of harassment after chasing him with a knife and threatening to cut off his penis.” Tattinger’s family controls the self-named Champagne house, so there is apparently lots of money and time for this sort of thing. The story includes hints about sex clubs, another mistress, and unnamed “sexual proclivities.”