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Archive for July, 2006

Top 10 Wine Myths

( Top 10 )

1) Wine goes bad and starts turning into vinegar about a day after popping the cork.
FALSE: A freshly opened bottle can last more than three days, and typically the wine gets better as time goes by. Independent Studies by the Wine Institute have shown that wine drinkers actually prefer a wine the longer it has [...]

Great Wine PR: Ravenswood in the SF Chronicle

Last week Morgan mentioned that the Chronicle would be doing a story on Ravenswood and his dad Joel Peterson, the winemaker and co-founder. Well, he wasn’t kidding. The Chronicle pulled out all the stops for the feature and even threw in a podcast. Nice!
There’s a bunch of interesting info in the article that, in a [...]

Distribution Dirty Tricks

From Decanter:
Constellation bosses have been caught red-handed trying to boost sales of the multi-billion dollar company’s wines in a major UK pub chain.
In an astonishingly bald email, senior managers of the company’s European arm beg employees to get down to the pub to buy as much of their wine as possible. It can be claimed [...]

Jess Jackson: lawyer, farmer, patriot

Last night I attended the second of what will probably be many open forums on the proposed amendments to the Sonoma County general plan. At issue is whether or not the county should extend Riparian corridors 100 feet from each bank of designated creeks, streams, and rivers, whether biotic habitat zones should be enacted where [...]

Silicon Valley Bank Small Winery Data - OIV Day 12

Today Yesterday Jim Lapsley presented some recently aquired aggregate (and anonymous) data on small privately held wineries. The accounting data summarized in the slides to the right shows that, on average, 10-20K case wineries seem to offer the best combination of size and profit margin. The data, gleaned from P&L’s supplied to Silicon Bank from [...]