Barges, musical, Thanksgiving, storefront - tasting sized pours
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Tesco Merlot, at seven knots
The British supermarket is transporting some wine via barge in canals to reduce emissions. This comes after the retailer started importing wine from Australia in bulk tanks thus “saving 15,840kg of imported glass” per container. Here, here! Did Tesco just became the odds-on favorite for the Dr. Vino green wine retailer of the year? Maybe. Depends how much air conditioning is on ye olde Tescoe barge. [Guardian]
Sideways, the musical?
Wine has conquered the silver screen with Sideways and two forthcoming wine movies. Now our favorite beverage turns its sights on Broadway (well, off-off Broadway). Michael Green, Gourmet wine contributor, is the force behind the interactive production that encourages the audience to “see, swirl, smell, sip, and savor WINE LOVERS — a romance in six glasses.” On their web site, Green says that it’s a send-up of the “theatricality” of wine education–wait, he doesn’t mean my forthcoming class, does he? Limited run, Dec 1-3, 8-10.
Glug, glug: Thanksgiving edition
You know what you poured at Thanksgiving. But what about everybody else? Dr. Debs linked to Cellartracker, a wine cellar management tool, sorted by open date. In my tryptophan haze, I found it a fascinating snapshot of almost 10,000 wines poured. The top six producers were American. [cellartracker]
E-tailer goes bricks and mortar
While most wine retailers struggle to work out selling wine over the internet, Wine.com opens it’s first “bricks and mortar” location, a 2,000 sq ft store, in Berkeley. [PRnewswire]
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On November 26th, 2007 at 9:37 pm ,Anthony Nicalo wrote:
Tesco’s green efforts deserve applause. I do fear that such applause has a tendency to reinforce consolidation and corporate dominance in the wine trade. It seems that huge economies of scale are required to move wine in a greener fashion. I don’t mean to sound like J. Nossiter, but wine is pretty hard to move in “bulk” unless it is also manufactured in the same style.
On November 27th, 2007 at 12:19 pm ,Jacob wrote:
An argument can be made (and is) that a bottling plant in the UK will run off a not-so-green coal-generated electricity source, whereas New Zealand, for instance, is more likely to use a renewable resource to provide the same service… thus rendering the ‘food-mile’ argument more complicated.
As for the barges, it’s just a shame Tesco will go through all that trouble, but won’t put better tasting wines in the bottles.
On November 27th, 2007 at 4:49 pm ,Dr. Vino wrote:
Anthony -
In my research on the carbon footprint of wine, I found that local wines and low-quality (high-quantity) wines often had the lowest level of CO2 emissions. Depending on where you are, the local may not cause a problem. But the other…
Props to you for the J. Nossiter reference!
Jacob -
Yes about the energy. But still the mass of the glass is more significant. Ditto quality comment from above.