Wine Trends

I've been wanting to cover this topic for a while. It seems like every time I turn around the last couple of months, there are more changes going on in the wine industry. Here I have compiled a few items that go under the topic of "Wine Trends".

US Supreme Court allows direct shipping for out-of-state wineries.
This is great news...and should help the wine industry overall. Now you can order directly from your favorite winery and have it delivered to your door. It doesn't matter that the winery is in California and you are in New York. This will help the small "niche" wineries stay alive & grow, as well. I guess it helps all of these "Wine of the Month Clubs" as well!

Screw Caps are going to take over the market. Goodbye corks!
Okay, first of all I never knew that cork comes from special trees, and that it is quite a process to create a cork. And there is somehow a stigma attached to screw cap wine...do most of you think of Boone's Strawberry Hill? (On a personal side note, a friend called me up in college and said "I found the coolest thing, it's called Boone's, and you get a whole bottle for $1.50, and it doesn't even taste like alcohol!")

Anyway! They have just completed a 5 year study of Screw vs. Cork and found that the screw cap actually allowed the wine to age more evenly. It's time to stop associating these caps to cheap wine...many wineries are bottling even their reserves with this cap. There is still some debate, however, in how the screw capped wines will age over many, many years. Another article on the topic tells us that 95% of wines purchased are consumed within 8 hours...so apparently this aging topic will not be an issue for the "common" wine drinkers.

High Alcohol Wine
This trend is apparently being demanded by the consumers. This higher alcohol wine is created by leaving the grapes on the vine longer, so that they are "ultra-ripe", which in turn causes them to lose some of their water content. Basically what I understand from the article on the topic is that the smaller vineyards that are doing this are therefore not receiving as much product from the grapes, costs go up, and it's making it really difficult for them to make a profit.

Largest winemaker aims to pick off No. 2
Just some wine industry news that the #1 Winemaker is trying to buy #2.


I guess that's it for Wine Trends! We can't forget the recent film "Sideways" which I understand has really created a lot of demand on the wineries in the region that was visited in the movie.

Technorati tags: Wine, Corks