Wine.com’s dirty tricks, quality of wine blogging on the rise - tasting sized pours
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Playing dirty
Wine.com, a retailer with big ambitions (but a rocky past) and a largely meh selection of wines, rats on 29 online retailers who illegally sent wine to Washington state. How do they know? Because they were the ones who ordered the wine from those 29 stores! Scandale! For a fascinating thread check out Vinography where the CEO of wine.com appears in the comments along with several anonymous retailers in a clash of the business models. Booooo wine.com!! I am pushing my Cramer-style boooo button! [Vinography]
Mo’ moxie
Winemonger, an internet-only retailer specializing in the wines of Austria, has the chutzpa to offer a mixed case of their “best” wines with a 15% discount as a result of wine.com’s actions — and they have pledged 10% of the proceeds to the Specialty Wine Retailers’ Association, an organization that probably counts many of the 29 “busted” retailers among their members. Enter discount code: ISUCK at checkout. [winemonger]
Mo’ money
Tom Wark, who writes a fiery blog and is the head of the SWRA, has calculated that wine and spirits wholesalers contributed a staggering $50 million to political election campaigns from 2000 - 2006. Yikes! If that’s what they spend on lobbying, just think what the profits are! For a backgrounder on the politics of wine shipping, check out this story from the LA Times. [Fermentation]
Mo’ betta blogs
Wine & Spirits magazine doesn’t put much of their content online, alas. But two of their senior editors have now started blogs. Peter Liem, who lives in and loves Champagne, has started his “Besotted Ramblings and Other Drivel.” Wolfgang Weber, Italian critic, has started “Spume.” Check them out!
Ceci n’est pas une pub
A French court has ruled that newspaper articles that review wine must carry the same health warnings that apply to advertisements to alcohol advertisements. But don’t consume journalism (and blogs) in moderation! [Decanter]
More carbon footprints
Science magazine of the AAAS has a piece entitled “The Wine Divide” in the January 11 issue about the carbon footprint research I did with Pablo Paster. Welcome Science readers! Consider subscribing to the site feed or the monthly email updates. And congratulations to Pablo! As of next week, he will be analyzing the carbon footprint of everything in a new weekly column for Salon.com.
Related: “Developing: the next shipping battle”
Image 1 from winemonger.com
One of the "seven best wine blogs." 
One of the three best wine blogs
On January 11th, 2008 at 6:30 pm ,swirlingnotions wrote:
That French ruling sounds so very American. What’s happening over there?!
On January 12th, 2008 at 3:51 pm ,jfoobar wrote:
Thanks for the links to Peter and Wolfgang’s blogs. Good stuff and I hope they both stay with it.
On January 16th, 2008 at 4:30 pm ,I *Heart* New York « spume wrote:
[...] my friend and colleague, Peter Liem and I both had our blogs mentioned on Tyler Coleman’s Dr. Vino the other day. Thanks, Tyler! For those of you with an interest in learning more about the world we [...]