November 19, 2008 – 8:21 am
As the economic crisis deepens and spreads, most of the news about the impact on the wine industry is not so good — falling sales and lower prices as consumers pull back and trade down. I’ve written about this in How Will the Economic Crisis Affect Wine? and Trading Down: Wine and the Recession.
GOOD News [...]
November 11, 2008 – 7:46 pm
To jump the shark means to go ridiculously over the top in a desperate attempt to stay relevant. The term derives from a famously terrible episode of Happy Days where a character called The Fonz jumped over a dangerous shark on water skis (Fonzie wore the skis, not the shark, in case that wasn’t [...]
November 8, 2008 – 10:00 am
We live in the age of Celebrity. People are celebrated for their achievements in sports, politics and the arts. Some people are even celebrated for their lack of achievement — famous for being famous, as the saying goes. I won’t name names, but you know what I mean. Celebrities are everyone — in the news, [...]
November 1, 2008 – 1:25 pm
Suddenly it seems like everybody’s trying to sell me wine. I wonder what’s going on?
Drinking and Flying?
It hit me earlier this week when I received an email from Alaska Airlines inviting me to earn frequently flier miles by buying wine. Here’s the offer
You could stand in front of a wall of confusing wine labels and [...]
October 11, 2008 – 12:49 pm
“We are all socialists now.” That’s what my wife Sue said yesterday as we drove back from the airport listening to radio reports about the U.S. plan to stabilize American bank capital by making direct government investments in financial firms. Yes, I thought, like Sweden (and its solution to an earlier banking crisis). Then I [...]
October 4, 2008 – 7:57 am
Some people think that wine is recession proof. They’re wrong.
Demand and Supply
The still evolving economic crisis is already having serious impacts on the wine industry. Although some segments of the industry are gaining as a result of the collapsing credit markets and contracting real economy, there are a lot of losers, too. Herewith a brief [...]
September 30, 2008 – 10:27 am
First Sideways, then Bridget Jones. Now Bottle Shock. How will the new film about the 1976 Paris tastings affect the wine market?
The Sideways Effect
Sideways (a 2004 film by Alexander Payne) is famous for helping to provoke a global Pinot Noir boom. A soliloquy (see below) on the thoughtful, fragile glories of Pinot spoken by [...]
September 23, 2008 – 6:48 pm
A recent book review and an article in today’s Financial Times provoke a short essay on wine exceptionalism.
Bad Samaratans
Choice magazine, a publication of the Americal Library Association, recently asked me to review a book called Bad Samaratans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang of the University of [...]
September 7, 2008 – 10:20 am
The Principal-Agent Problem
You might think that the job of wine critic would be heavenly - traveling the world, tasting wines and talking and writing about them. What could be better? But there are downsides and trade-offs to the job. One is that your credibility depends upon objectivity - if your ratings are thought to [...]
Mike Veseth