More good news about the potential health benefits of moderate wine consumption. A recent study in the journal Hematology reports that adults that consumed 1 glass of wine per day had half the risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) compared to non-drinkers.

What is even more intriguing, to me at least, is that people that drank 12 oz. of beer or 1 oz. of liquor per day had a 4-times higher risk of NAFLD compared to the wine drinkers. Still, there is no evidence that drinking more than a single glass of wine has any benefit.

Hat tip to the Washington Post article “Daily Glass of Wine Cut Risk of Fatty Liver Disease“.

The economy might slowing, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing down wine consumption in the USA. The United States is now the second largest wine market in the world, recently surpassing Italy but still behind France. My liver not withstanding, we still lag in per capita consumption.

All this care of a recent story in Wine Spectator.

Amazingly, we consumed about 9 liters of wine per adult in 2007, way behind the 52 liters consumed by a French adult. I am amazed by that - 52 liters. That is a lot of grapes.

A while back we discussed the impact of the economy on the wine industry. Specifically, is a decline in wine club membership indicative of an economic slowdown? We still do not really know the answer to this question, but based on the Wine Spectator report wine consumption is poised to keep growing in the US.

Remember the movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise?

It was a pretty good science fiction movie, made before Tom Cruise went publicly off the reservation (so to speak).

One of the great things in the movie were the billboards that could recognize the person walking by and tailor the advertisement to make it more relevant to individual. It was quite creepy.

Well, the future is now. Recently a few billboards have started showing up with small cameras in them that identify your age, gender, and how long you looked at the ad. They can also detect your race, but claim not too. The camera-enabled billboards then show one ad to a middle aged woman, and another to a teenager.

Quite impressive, if you think about it.

It is amazing how much advertising has changed. Today, one of my favorite writers, Stephen C. Fehr, at The Washington Post accepted the voluntary early-retirement package. In the good-bye editorial by Fehr, I read a stunning fact: The Post lost $77 million in traditional advertising in its print edition last year, and replaced that with only $6 million in on-line advertising. I had always wondered why newspapers were taking such a bath. In some respects, I would have thought that on-line advertisinig could bring in more revenue.

Let’s face it - an online advertiser can know so much more about you compared to traditional media advertising. What city you are coming from, how you arrived at the story, how often you visit the site, what key words you used to search, the operating system and browser you prefer, how often you click on the ads, and which ads you find most palatable. And yet, actually, newspapers moving on-line can’t make as much money as they used too.

Maybe there is too much competition? Too many news sources for the size of the audience. Certainly this is a problem in the wine world. We have decent traffic, but it is only a teeny-tiny fraction of the total wine-review traffic on-line. And fighting for more traffic through advertising is tough. We depend mostly of word of mouth.

In some respects, I like the new advertising world. I generally see ads that are more relevant to me; sometimes they even provide information I am looking for. In other respects, I (like most people) am afraid of how much “the man” knows about me. It is innocuous enough now, but what about 10 years from now?

Anyway, I’m sad to see Mr. Fehr “retire”. I’m sad to see traditional news sources suffer, as I still think they provide a great service. Not many bloggers out there are really contributing news from scratch, so think we all lose a little something as the newspaper industry staggers toward collapse.

I have been hiding under a rock for some time, so I somehow missed the controversy about Illinois banning wine shipments from out-of-state retailers. Fortunately, I happened upon At First Glass, a great wine blog, that blogged about the issue.

I’m sorry to hear that Illinois has joined the nightmare that I have found myself in for some time, being a resident of the alcohol-hostile Pennsylvania.

Tom Wark over at Fermentation wrote an aptly titled blog entry, “Getting Bent Over in Illinois“.

At first I thought that maybe people were over-reacting. Sure, it sucks, but it didn’t appear to me that it was unconstitutional. My guess was that if you couldn’t have wine shipped from out of state, you probably could not have shipped within the state either. You certainly cannot here in PA. It appears that I was mistaken though, and it does make you wonder how this does not violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. I’m sure that, eventually, SCOTUS will tell us how.

Has anyone ever created a wine loyalty program? You know, like those awful (and I mean awful) shopper’s card you get at the grocery store.

I don’t know of any such program. I wonder why? I would think that retailers certainly would benefit from this, and I suspect there are some retail programs out there. But has an individual winery had such a program? I suppose, in a way, wine clubs are such a thing.