This quote-unquote-news, while published I suppose to publicize a celebrity’s excess (because that’s unusual), makes me wonder various things:

What Illinois wine was Johnny drinking?

Why didn’t he just direct his entourage to purchase some CA wine, rather than shipping from France?

Or was California wine the “local wine” that the source in the article was really referring to? Was this a sort of slam against all US vintners, or Illinois vintners only?

Is French wine unavailable in Illinois, requiring one to ship in one’s own?

Did Johnny expect that drinking Illinois wine would be so delightful that he would not possibly need to pack some French bottles with him for his sojourn, and was subsequently dismayed to find himself mistaken, or what?

Yet another point to further my contention that celebrities are, in reality, robots and not actual people.

Happy Humpt-Day, the ancient celebration of putting a broken egg back together again. Good luck with all that and good night.

What they found was rather interesting, though scientists have no explanation for it. Evidently, women who reported drinking wine regularly were 40% less likely to develop dementia, even though they tended to live longer, thereby giving them more time to do so. Even more dramatically, women who reported drinking only wine (that is, no beer or hard liquor) were 70% less likely to develop dementia. Women who drank liquor exclusively had a higher chance of developing dementia. Sorry, cosmo gals.

This being said, there is counterbalancing evidence about wine and women’s health: Reuters reported Sunday on a huge San Diego study indicating that postmenopausal women who consume one to two drinks a day are 32% more likely to develop breast cancer. Postmenopausal women who consumed three or more drinks a day were 51% more likely to develop a hormone-sensitive tumor. Granted, it doesn’t matter what kind of alcohol was drunk.

So… we women wine drinkers will be completely sane as we desperately try to chase the cancer out of our boobies? Thanks for sharing, Science!

Thus, British supermarket chain Waitrose is debuting a line called Vin à Deux, consisting of eight premium French wines in 50 cl (that’s 500 ml in Britain) bottles. They’ll also expand their selection of wines in 250 ml bottles, while phasing out 375 ml — your typical half bottle — altogether.

Is Waitrose saving the British public from their own sot-like impulses? Gracious, but it seems to me that we have more than enough options for wine containers, especially that of the wine “box,” in which the plastic bladder-like container never allows air in and thus never lets wine go bad in the first place. If having a 5-liter box of wine in the fridge doesn’t lead to “overserving,” at home, then why on earth would having three-quarters of a liter in a bottle? This is the perfect opportunity for a new poll, don’t you think? Please direct your attention below and share your opinion via a few clicks or, certainly, a comment!

Professor Steve Allsop, whose National Drug Research Institute study concludes that larger wine glasses mislead wine drinkers, says this causes consumers to drink more than they intend to, as reported in an article in Australia’s Herald Sun.

Australia’s Department of Health defines a standard glass of wine as 150 ml, about 5 ounces.  Maximum recommended alcoholic intake for a woman is 2 glasses of wine; for a man, it’s 4.  The study showed that when people poured what they considered an average serving of wine, they ended up with 6 to 10 ounces in the glass.   Thus the Australian public over-serves itself with blithe ignorance, especially women.  I can only assume it’s especially women because we’re not supposed to drink as much as men.  Certainly it couldn’t be because we’re out of control and need male scientists and politicians to teach us how to modulate our behavior.  Great, glad we cleared that up.

Australia’s federal government is jumping into action to address this problem of heavy pouring by including a standard drink logo on bottles of wine to tell people how many servings are in the container.  That works really well with Americans and snack food, as anyone who counts out one 10-cracker serving of Wheat Thins for their afternoon snack knows.  So it’s good to see we’re setting a good example for the world with our abstemious approach to food portions.

I agree that it’s easy to pour a little heavy at home, especially into a glass big enough to swirl your wine in, but can we just cool it with the puritanical hullaballoo?   If we can trust women enough to assign them the job of feeding our children and patriarchs, surely we can trust them to pour the perfect portion of wine for every occasion.  Can’t we?

Evidently, some pub chains in England used to offer three different sized pours: small (125 ml/4 oz), medium (175 ml/6 oz), and large (250 ml/8 oz). Mulholland himself used to work for a pub chain which did away with the 4 oz. pours, saying “bigger glasses equal higher prices and more profits.” So now most pubs only sell 6 and 8 oz. servings, forcing people to drink more wine than they normally would, to Mulholland’s mind.

Am I a moron, or do the Brits just do it differently than we do? Back when I was helping restaurants set their prices, you wanted as small a pour as you could get away with, so you could sell more glasses from a bottle. A 750 ml bottle will serve five 5 oz. pours or four 6 oz. pours. If an 8 oz. pour is the norm in England, then those pubs are only selling 3 glasses per bottle. Either their glass prices are ridiculously high, or they’re doing it wrong.

For those of you who’ve never looked inside of the pricing structure of a by-the-glass program, SOP is to charge half the wholesale price of the bottle, plus a dollar or so. At least, that’s what I always recommended to the restaurant owners that I worked with.

So if a bottle of Brancott Sauvignon Blanc costs a bar owner $8, I would tell her to price a glass at $5 per glass if she’s selling a 5 oz. pour. If she’s selling a 6 oz. pour, I would recommend $6.50 per glass. Thusly, a bottle of 5 oz pours nets a $17 profit, and a bottle of 6 oz. pours nets an $18 profit.

This is not a lot, compared to the profit on a bottle of well liquor, which should run $40+ per bottle (figuring $4 well drinks), you’ll notice. This is another reason that the best way to make a small fortune by opening a wine bar is to start with a large one.

If you’re pouring only 3 glasses of wine from each bottle, you’ve got to charge about the value of the bottle for each glass to turn any kind of profit. Customers hate that, by and large. So there could be a number of things going on here: (1) pub owners are selling wine by the glass that their customers can’t buy in a store, (2) pub goers don’t mind paying the same money for a glass of wine in a pub as they do for the same bottle of wine in a store, or (3) pubs pay wholesalers less for wine than wine stores do, or wine stores have huge mark-ups in England.

It all strikes me as very strange. For one thing, that a British lawmaker would be as puritanical as American lawmakers are wont to be about wine. Also, that somehow it would be a good business decision for a pub to sell fewer, larger glasses of wine. It just doesn’t add up. Between this and the French judge’s recent decision that all wine reviews and recommendation articles must be considered alcohol advertising and thus must be accompanied by health warnings, I’m feeling like a fool for lauding the free-thinking European perspective on wine for so many years. Oh, lalalala!

Ironically enough, Washington prosecutors have no jurisdiction over out-of-state retailers who ship to Washington despite stupid protectionist wine laws that prohibit such activity.  The only people who could be in legal trouble from Washington state authorities would be people who actually ordered the wine, breaking the law while actually in Washington state!  Wut?

No company with this much of a rat-like approach to business, coupled with a severe lack of cognitive processing ability, should be allowed to have a link on this site.  Wine Scamp is no place for snitches, nor for tattle-tales.  So I’ve taken their ad off the site, and I hope you’ll join me in a boycott of wine.com for here on out.  Mostly for being morons, and then also for being wine law vigilantes.  Oops, I repeated myself.

I must join Tom Wark in directing your attention to the supreme response to wine.com’s perfidy, that of Emily and Stephan at Winemonger.com — it’s both brilliant and hilarious — located near the end of the comments to the post on Vinography.

I voted in favor of wineries being a family friendly, not because I love having whiny kids running around the place while I’m trying to taste through a flight at a crowded counter, but because I believe that if America is ever to overcome its Puritan roots, we must Think Of The Children!

Our national subconscious revulsion toward alcoholic beverages leads us to fetishize booze for children, leading to teenage drinking patterns that only further reinforce our cultural belief that alcohol is inherently sinful and dangerous. I loved Tom Wark’s article reviewing a Chicago Sun-Times article addressing how to raise your kids to have a healthy relationship with alcohol. You should know by now that Tom’s blog Fermentation does a great job of attacking our country’s culturally institutionalized hatred of alcohol, particularly wine, regularly, and now there’s even more to be found at his new site Wine Without Borders. His comments on the ridonkulous Juanita Duggan and her work at the WSWA are priceless, really.

When I was a wine distributor rep, pushing the juice all over my little territory in the Caribbean, one of my best and favorite clients would taste wines with me with her baby on her hip, behind the bar of the (closed at the hour) restaurant. Baby X was very well-mannered, and yet had great curiousity about what his mommy was paying such attention to, and would reach for the glass in her hand regularly. After being allowed to sniff the glass, if he were still obviously begging for a sip, my client would wet his lips with the interesting wine in question. I need to tell you, too, the kid had impecable taste, and he loved him some red wine!

What seemed so normal to me in the alcohol-permissive Virgin Islands would be scandalous and actionable here in the continental US, a fact which never ceases to discombobulate me. (Another aspect of alcoholic culture shock which I can’t seem to get over is that you can’t buy alcohol in Texas before noon on Sunday, which is when I usually do my weekly grocery shopping. I consistently get turned around at the checkout line, smacking my head with the palm of my hand…)

As my husband and I talk about our plans to procreate next year, I confess that I already it all planned out how I will serve my kids watered wine at the holiday table, and let them taste both the wort and the finished product from daddy’s current batch of homebrew. I really look forward to teaching them about the miraculous intersection of biology and chemistry that is wine, and take them to the wineries around my home and around the world!

I’m tempted to do a poll, but I feel like I could so easily over-use that little plug-in that I could start calling this place the Wine Poll — so I’ll make it harder for you: if you have kids, do you let them taste wine? If you don’t have kids but plan to, do you plan to let your kids taste wine? Confess all in your comment!

This is a barely-restrained pet peeve of mine. I want everyone to be able to enjoy red wine, heaven knows, but come on now — as less than 1% of humanity is allergic to sulfites, and as an allergic reaction to sulfites results in anaphylactic shock, and as sweet white wine is just as sulfite-ridden as dry red wines….. I have a hard time scraping up any sincere faith in your alleged sulfite allergy, dear one.

A few other debunkings, as I brought up the issues: European wines also have sulfites in them; they just don’t have to say so. You see sulfite warnings on American wines because red wine headache lobbyists got regulation passed in 1986 to require wines that have sulfites in quantites of over 10 ppm to put “Contains sulfites” on the label.

Sulfites result naturally from the winemaking process, and sometimes they are added to stabilize wines and prevent spoilage. People making organic wines do not add sulfites, so but the still contain them from the natural winemaking process.

But the fact is that some people get headaches from drinking red wine. We know it can’t be laid at the door of sulfites, so what could it be?

Current research supports the theory that biogenic amines are the culprits: this group of chemicals include histamine, seratonin, dopamine, epinephrine and tyramine, among others. Seratonin is said to trigger migraines in migraine-prone people. Histamines were thought to be the culprit, but red wine and white wines have been shown to have equal levels of histamine. Tyramine, found in many fermented beverages and foods, could be it, as it seems to cause headaches and increased blood pressure… flushed cheeks, anyone? Most likely, though, it’s a combination of many biogenic amines that cause headaches and other discomforts associated with red wine.

The reason I’m dragging up the whole sordid mess again is that research chemists think they have come up with a solution: a device that tests for biogenic amines in wine. The thing is about the size of a suitcase right now, but once engineered for smallness it could be used tableside, to test wine before the demon juice has the opportunity to wreak havoc on your body chemistry. Scientists suggest the device could be used to include amine levels on wine labels. I suppose that would be better than labelling for sulfites, but I hate to throw another labelling law at winemakers.

What do you think? Please take my poll and share your opinion with the rest of the world-wide interweb.
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