The 2008 Philadelphia Wine Festival is today. The beneficiary this year is the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), one of the best children’s hospitals in the country.
Lots of good wineries present - and an extra-special liquor store set up by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, one of the most over-bearing and ridiculous monopolies in […]

[Read more →]

Following up on our previous entry about the on-going “Champagne” controversy, we spotted another news items in the NY Times.
A biscuit maker in Champagne, Switzerland is being forced to cease using the brand name (”de Champagne”) his family has been marketing since the 1930s. In exchange for landing rights for SwissAir - a […]

[Read more →]

Tom Wark over at Fermentation had a really interesting post on the state of the wine economy as measured by wine club memberships.
Tom did an informal survey of wine clubs and found that they are anecdotally reporting a drop in memberships larger than they have ever experienced in the past. With the price of […]

[Read more →]

Can good marketing make even a lousy product a hit? Will good marketing for wine mean that we will all eventually be drinking swill?
We’ve been thinking about this ever since the research from Stanford & CalTech came out that shows that people enjoy wine more when they pay a higher price for it. […]

[Read more →]

Two interesting wine stories crossed my path today.
The first, courtesy of NPR, deals with efforts by members of the European Union (EU) to stop American wine makers from using the term “Champagne” to describe sparkling wine made in America.
The topic is actually not a trivial one. American producers have spent millions of marketing […]

[Read more →]