Quotulatiousness

September 19, 2013

The LCBO’s new “Ontario Boutique” outlets – doing a Wal-Mart to Ontario wineries

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

In the latest Ontario Wine Review, Michael Pinkus talks about the opening of three new “Ontario Boutique” LCBO stores. These stores are the LCBO’s response to rising demand for quality Ontario wines … opening stores to directly compete with the wineries.

Well it happened; the LCBO opened their Ontario Boutiques to great fanfare on September 12, in three cities: Niagara Falls, St. Catharines and Windsor … three places that have wineries nearby. Three places where the local populace could hop in their cars and within 15 minutes be at any of a dozen wineries in the area. The way we should all view this is the LCBO utilized the Wal-Mart approach to competition: get in there and fight it out with already established businesses. According to reports, they are beautiful, well-stocked and something to see. Now, I’m not questioning whether or not the LCBO was going to do a nice job on these in-store boutiques, heck they have the money to sink into them (yours and mine), I question their location and I question why the Wal-Mart tactics?

[…]

Someone who did get it (Bob) emailed me directly, putting it very succinctly: “The Wine Council’s information shows that the majority of VQA wines are still sold at the wineries. I asked one of their staff why they were putting a new VQA [boutique] in the Glendale store in St. Catharines rather than Toronto, and was told that it was because they sold more VQA wine in that store than any other in their system. Obviously, they are intent on trying to steal as much business away from the local wineries as possible, and therefore to deny the wineries (for the most part Canadian small businesses) as much profit as possible.”

While another reader, Gaye, admitted she has finally seen the light: “I always took your rants re: the LC mildly, as I like being able to shop in the “biggest” importer of wines in the world (sic). But I love Ontario wines, and living in Toronto always bemoan the difficulty of going to Niagara wineries and driving back … for obvious reasons. So I thought these boutiques were inevitable and of course would be in the place most Ontario wine was drunk, Toronto. As your excellent wife said, “a no-brainer”. This is incredible, opening in Niagara Falls? As if our wine was just something to be sold to tourists. Now I’m totally on side.”

September 5, 2013

LCBO to offer expanded Ontario wine displays starting next week

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Sounds like a reasonable thing, doesn’t it? The LCBO is the primary distribution channel for all Ontario wine, so making the best of the province’s wines more accessible is a good thing, yes? Well, sorta, as Michael Pinkus explains:

The LCBO must think we’re all stupid … that or they are run by a bunch of nincompoops – or maybe it’s a combination of both. On September 12, 2013 the Ontario wineries are finally going to see the fruits of their labours sold in special, larger and more prominent sections in some LCBO locations. Now if you were running the LCBO (more apropos to say: if you ran the circus), but if you ran the LCBO and you had some extra money kicking around and deemed it time to (finally) help Ontario wineries, show pride in the wines this province makes, and get the word out that Ontario is making world class wines, where would you put those new locations?

I asked my wife, an American, who can’t seem to grasp the concept of the LCBO, that very same question: “if you were opening up new sections within existing LCBO stores to promote Ontario wines where would you put them?” Her answer was immediately, “Toronto, it’s a no-brainer,” she said, “why where are they putting them?”

London, Ottawa, Kingston and Kitchener also all come to mind as potential locations for these new “boutiques” before the three locations the LCBO has chosen: Niagara Falls, St. Catharines and, you guessed it, Windsor; if they added Belleville to the mix they’d really hit the quad-fecta – but I shouldn’t give them any ideas – who knows, maybe that’s already in the works.

Why these locations matter is because they are smack dab in the heart of wine county; where wine already exists. There the locals have access to drive to their favourite wineries to buy their wine. As we all should know by now the LCBO can’t have you shopping at the competition, can they? Not when their unwritten mandate is to rule the province with an iron fist where booze is concerned … big sister Wynne doesn’t want to take her eye off the bottle, not for a second. Why you might ask would the LCBO put their stores in these locations? Think about it this way: when Wal-Mart comes to town where do they park their stores? Right next to the Canadian Tires and the Zellers locations (or as close as possible anyway) – they want to take on the competition directly. The LCBO is placing these new expanded Ontario sections in St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Windsor – I trust you see the similarity.

August 20, 2013

QotD: Queen Victoria’s Tipple

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

1/2 tumbler red wine
Scotch

I have it on the authority of Colm Brogan that the Great Queen was “violently opposed to teetotalism, consenting to have one cleric promoted to a deanery only if he promised to stop advocating the pernicious heresy,” and that the above was her dinner-table drink, “a concoction that startled Gladstone” — as I can well believe.

The original recipe calls for claret, but anything better than the merely tolerable will be wasted. The quantity of Scotch is up to you, but I recommend stopping a good deal short of the top of the tumbler. Worth trying once.

Scholars will visualize, pouring in the whisky, the hand of John Brown, the Queen’s Highland servant, confidant and possibly more besides; and I for one, if I listen carefully can hear him muttering, “Och, Your Majesty, dinna mak’ yoursel’ unweel wi’ a’ yon parleyvoo moothwash — ha’e a wee dram o’ guid malt forbye.” Or words to that effect.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

July 26, 2013

BC Premier highlights antiquated inter-provincial trade rules with wine

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

The rules governing inter-provincial trade in wine date back to the Prohibition era. BC’s Christy Clark would like to see the rules brought into this century:

British Columbia Premier Christy Clark brought a case of her province’s wine to the heart of Ontario’s vine land.

Clark presented the vintages to her dozen provincial and territorial colleagues in a bid to lower trade barriers.

Even though Ottawa eased interprovincial rules surrounding wine last year, it is still illegal for Ontarians to buy wine in bulk directly from B.C. vineyards.

To get around that, Clark’s six-person entourage brought two bottles apiece to have a full case for the premiers at their annual Council of the Federation gathering.

I linked to an item on this issue by Michael Pinkus earlier this year.

June 30, 2013

“It’s very difficult to regulate greed”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, China, Law, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

Icewine is what originally put Canadian wine on the international map. Icewine is an expensive thing to produce, and therefore has drawn a lot of cheaters into the market:

Canada is tightening the rules for producing its popular icewine, a sweet dessert wine that is only made in cold climates, to crack down on fraudsters who sell mislabeled bottles that don’t make the grade.

In regulations published this week, the Canadian government said any bottle labeled and sold as icewine must be made only from grapes that have frozen on the vine.

[. . .]

Because the frozen grapes only yield a tiny amounts of sweet liquid, the dessert wine has a high cost and a high price. Grapes are left on the vine until the temperature falls to -8C (18F) over a prolonged period, and usually harvested overnight.

“It’s liquid gold,” said Paszkowski.

In China, where icewine has become hugely popular, a thriving counterfeit industry is flooding the market with wines that don’t live up to the label, he said.

“It’s very difficult to regulate greed,” said Paszkowski. “We’ve identified counterfeit icewines even in five-star restaurants and hotels.”

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

June 23, 2013

Wine tasting scores are bullshit

Filed under: Business, Media, Science, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:49

In the Guardian, David Derbyshire takes the modern “science” of wine tasting to the woodshed:

… drawing on his background in statistics, Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.

Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual “flight” of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson’s findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine.

“The results are disturbing,” says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. “Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year.

“Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win.”

These judges are not amateurs either. They read like a who’s who of the American wine industry from winemakers, sommeliers, critics and buyers to wine consultants and academics. In Hodgson’s tests, judges rated wines on a scale running from 50 to 100. In practice, most wines scored in the 70s, 80s and low 90s.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge’s scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

Today’s headline is a slightly stronger version of one I ran in May: Is wine tasting bullshit? with this rather amusing caption:

A real wine review

Although that “real” wine “review” illustrates the verbal bullshit side of wine reviewing, the statistical analysis in Robert Hodgson’s tests rather undermines the claims to any kind of actual analysis in most or all wine reviewing.

I’ve said for years that for most people there is a range of wine prices that will satisfy their tastes without emptying their wallets — in Ontario, the range for most people seems to be in the $14-$40 price spectrum. Pay less than that, and you risk buying wine that really isn’t very good (although there are some underpriced gems even there), and pay over $40 and you’re just paying extra for the “prestige” and most of us wouldn’t really be able to detect any flavour differences.

It’s interesting to see what kind of immediate environmental changes seem to be able to directly influence the scores given by reviewers:

More evidence that wine-tasting is influenced by context was provided by a 2008 study from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The team found that different music could boost tasters’ wine scores by 60%. Researchers discovered that a blast of Jimi Hendrix enhanced cabernet sauvignon while Kylie Minogue went well with chardonnay.

June 19, 2013

Examining Vermouth’s claim to being the “oldest wine in the world”

Filed under: Greece, Health, History, Italy, Middle East, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:13

History Today linked to an article in their archives from 1975 from Pamela Vandyke Price discussing the ancient provenance of Vermouth:

When the great vermouth establishments refer to their product as ‘the oldest form of wine in the world’, they are not exaggerating. If we could travel in time, we might find many of the wines praised in antiquity to be harsh, sour and coarse to our palates, but the ‘aromatized wine’ that we know as vermouth would then have existed and, even if we drank it for medicinal or preventive reasons rather than for enjoyment, we could recognise it and relate it to the vermouths of today.

Vermouth can be, and often is, made wherever wine is made. The ancient Egyptians used both wine and beer, plus juniper, frankincense, celery, lotus leaves and honey, in the treatment of certain ailments; and it is by a method of infusion, maceration, distillation, or two or all three of these processes that, essentially, vermouth is made today. In Book IV of the Odyssey, Helen throws a drug given to her by an Egyptian lady into the bowl in which the wine is to be mixed and diluted before dinner; this ‘had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories’ — an efficacious aperitif, assuring good digestion. At the end of the third millennium B.C. what is perhaps the first written doctor’s prescription is recorded in cuneiform script on a tablet from the Sumerian city of Nippur — a physician notes that certain powders should be infused with a type of wine.

[. . .]

Other families in the drink business were quick to see the possibilities for vermouth, setting up in Turin, Marseilles and Sete (again in proximity to mountain herbs and a quantity of wine), and in Chambray. Many of them are still family concerns, even though they are great empires of the drink business. Martini & Rossi, who were founded about 1840, replaced a much older concern making vermouths and liqueurs at Pessione, near Turin (the head of that firm was the grandfather of Giovanni Angelli, founder of Fiat); the superb museum now established alongside the Pessione installations is a necessary detour for anyone interested in the history of wine from the earliest times.

The Cinzano family began in the drink business in the sixteenth century, and in 1757 the brothers Carlo Stefano and Giovanni Giacomo were invested as Master Distillers in Turin; today their business is gigantic, including, among other things, the Florio concern at Marsala, (itself including the former cantinas of Ingham and Woodhouse). Louis Noilly, in business at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Lyons, set up in the vermouth trade with his son-in-law, Claudius Prat and they enjoyed so much success that by 1843 they moved their headquarters to Marseilles. Madame Josephine Prat, who ran the business after the deaths of the two founders, was succeeded by her two children; and her granddaughter, Vicomtesse Vigier, who entered the firm before 1939, directed it until 1970 when she died, over a hundred years old.

It seems a little odd that, with so many modifications of wine-making and changes in the tastes of drinkers, aromatized wine should still be in demand. But, in fact, it is increasingly so. Whenever people order a straight vermouth they are ordering the oldest wine in the world.

June 17, 2013

Top this – wine corks meet screw-tops

Filed under: Business, Europe, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:14

BBC News looks at the latest attempt to blend the tradition of the wine bottle’s cork closure with the convenience of the twist-off screw top:

Helix wine bottle closure

The unveiling this week of a new style of cork raises the question of why the traditional kind continues to dominate much of the wine world.

The Helix is opened with just a twist of the hand. No corkscrew is necessary as the top of the bottle has a thread inside.

The glass bottle and cork combination for wine is thought to have started in the 17th Century. But newer materials exist today that some argue are better suited for sealing a bottle than cork.

Screw caps and plastic corks have been embraced by producers fed up with wine becoming “corked” — the unpleasant musty taste, likened to wet dog, which is caused by tainted cork.

Influential US wine critic Robert Parker reckons that during the mid 1990s 7-10% of the wine he tasted was corked. In 2004 he predicted that by 2015 screw caps would dominate the wine industry.

The screw cap — generic name “Stelvin” after its biggest brand — advanced spectacularly in “New World” wine nations. By 2011, 90% of New Zealand wine was sealed this way.

But in Europe and the US the cork remains king.

It’s a little puzzling to some. Wine has become democratic and modern. There are prices and drinking styles to suit everyone. So why hasn’t the closure method evolved?

Portugal, where most of the world’s corks are harvested, has fought back against the chemical compound trichloroanisole (TCA), one of the most common causes of tainted corks.

But the screw cap not only avoids the problem of tainted cork, it forms a tighter seal. Most critics say that this guarantees a better flavour for all but the more expensive wines (which may age better with more oxygen).

“We prefer seals that ensure the wine is not going to be faulty,” says Ewan Murray, spokesman for the Wine Society. “Wines that are ready to drink young are always going to be fresher under a screw cap.”

June 13, 2013

Hugh Johnson forced to downsize his wine cellar

Filed under: Books, Britain, Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:36

As the Guardian noted last month, Hugh Johnson is the best-selling wine author in the world, but even he has to cope with time and space restrictions:

Monday’s sale at Sworder’s auctioneers of over £100,000 worth of wines, gathered over a career in which Johnson has overseen a revolution in British attitudes to wine, includes rare vintages dating back to 1830, a £2,000 1945 Chateau Latour made in the balmy summer after VE Day and his own desert island bottle, a single 1971 German riesling for £6,000.

The 74-year-old is trying to be philosophical about letting it all go as he moves with his wife Judy from a house with a five-room cellar to one with a coal hole to be closer to children and grandchildren.

“Everyone with a big cellar realises in the end they don’t have enough friends to drink it all with,” he says. “To start with I felt it was a catastrophe but in the end I felt: ‘Just take it.'”

Some of the bottles are thick with dust and their capsules chipped. Perished labels reveal dates that scroll back through time: 2006, 1996, 1945, 1830. There’s even an amphora dredged from the Mediterranean dated AD100. For many in the wine world the sale marks the end of an era that began in the 1960s when wine was the preserve of the elite and Britons drank on average just a third of a glass a week. Between then and now, Johnson’s annual pocket wine guide, featuring hundred of bite-sized verdicts, has sold 12m copies, his World Atlas of Wine, first published in 1971, has sold close to 4m and wine consumption in the UK has increased twelvefold.

[. . .]

Sitting among his bottles for one last time he reflects on how the wine world has changed. In 2006 he spoke out against rising alcohol levels reaching 15%, which he described as thick “steroid-driven muscle” and “boring”. It was part of a long-running battle with his US rival, the critic Robert Parker, whose highly influential scores out of 100 based in part on his love of powerful, fruit-driven wines, reshaped the wine market. Now with more lower alcohol wines on the shelves, Johnson feels the fight is swinging his way.

H/T to Michael Pinkus for the link.

May 10, 2013

Is wine tasting bullshit?

Filed under: Business, Media, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:41

There are lots of bullshit artists in the wine trade … and a lot of what is written about wine is definitely bullshit:

A real wine review

The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses. This begs an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or is it complete and utter bullshit?

There are no two ways about it: the bullshit is strong with wine. Wine tasting. Wine rating. Wine reviews. Wine descriptions. They’re all related. And they’re all egregious offenders, from a bullshit standpoint.

[. . .]

In 1996, research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology concluded that wine experts cannot reliably identify more than three or four of a wine’s flavor components. Most wine critics routinely report tasting six or more. The wine review excerpted in the top image for this post, for example (which is a real review, by the way – somebody actually wrote those words about a bottle of wine, in earnest) lists the following components in the wine’s “principle flavor” profile: “red roses, lavender, geranium, dried hibiscus flowers, cranberry raisins, currant jelly, mango with skins [Ed. note: jesus wine-swilling christ – mango with skins?], red plums, cobbler, cinnamon, star anise, blackberry bramble, whole black peppercorn,” and more than a dozen other flavors that I refuse to continue listing lest my head implode.

Fun fact: MIT behavioral economist Coco Krume recently conducted a meta-analysis of the classifiers used in wine reviews, and found that reviewers tend to use “cheap” and “expensive” words differently. Cheap descriptors are used much more frequently, expensive ones more sparingly. Krume even demonstrated that it’s possible to guess the price range of a wine based on the words used in its review.

Even with all the evidence that the wine world is replete with marketing bullshit, there’s still great wine experiences to have, and you don’t need to wear an ascot and fake a snobby accent to enjoy it. As I wrote last year:

There are good wines and bad wines. There are good wines and better wines. But my experience has always been that there’s a point of diminishing returns beyond which you’re paying more money for no appreciable improvement in the quality of the wine. In other words, beyond that point, you’re paying for the prestige of the label or the mystique of the brand not for anything intrinsic to the liquid in the glass. [. . .] If you’re buying wine to have with a nice dinner, find your point of diminishing returns and don’t go beyond it: you’ll save yourself a lot of money over time and still enjoy your wine. If, on the other hand, you’re buying wine specifically to impress then go as expensive as you like.

May 8, 2013

Repost: Wine without whining

Filed under: Humour, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Originally posted 27 September, 2007:

Scraped off the bottom of rec.humor.funny, from August, 1996, and attributed to “PiALaModem@aol.com”:

The Down And Dirty on The Fruit of the Vine

I’m going to do you a big favor. I’m going to free you from feelings of inadequacy that have been haunting you since sometime in your teens. I’m going to fill you in on the greatest scam ever perpetrated upon the consuming public. I’m going to tell you what I know about wine.

The bottom line is that wine tastes awful. It’s just grape juice gone south (forgive me, dixiewhistlers). All the millions of poor slobs dutifully disguising the revolted pucker behind looks of thoughtful analysis, parroting gibberish of which they’ve no idea of the meaning, studying for hours so as not to be humiliated by menial restaurant employees once again, have fallen for a complex and insidious canard (see COLD DUCK). An “acquired taste” they call it. Well, you could acquire a taste for Ivory soap.

Herewith is a glossary of selected wine terms and what they really mean:

APPELLATION CONTROLEE: French for “Trust me”

AROMA: A bad smell that comes from the grapes; See BOUQUET

BEAUJOLAIS NOUVEAU: Wine so awful that it isn’t worth aging.

BOUQUET: A bad smell that’s added during processing; See NOSE

BRUT: Describes a wine that sneaks up on you and stabs you in the back. Or a wine dealer. From the Latin, “Et tu, Brute”

CHATEAUNEUF DU PAPE: The pope’s new house was paid for by swindling buyers into paying the price for this wine.

DRY: Hurts your throat while swallowing.

FRUITY: Tastes like children’s cough medicine. See ROBUST

NOBLE ROT: What well-born wine snobs talk.

NOSE: The total effect of AROMA and BOUQUET; something you wish you could hold while drinking.

ROBUST: Tastes like cough medicine. See FRUITY

ROSE: Many people mistakenly pronounce this to rhyme with Jose. A term for a pinkish wine, named for what an early commentator said his gorge did when he tasted it.

VARIETAL: Having the worst qualities of a single type of grape, rather than a mixture of sins.

VINTAGE: How many years we’ve been trying to get rid of this rotgut.

March 28, 2013

Challenging Prohibition-era federal laws

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Michael Pinkus updates us on a hopeful sign that we may soon see the end of one of Canada’s surviving Prohibition-era laws:

Almost two years ago I published in these very pages an interview I did with Ian Blue, a lawyer who had turned his focus to liquor laws, constitutional issues and even more importantly, the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act (IILA). Now, many think the law was struck down but in fact there was just an amendment made to the federal law that now allows you to carry a certain amount of booze for personal use across provincial borders without fear of being charged by your provincial liquor board. So why am I bringing up this “ancient history” — well it seems the constitutional challenge that Ian was hoping for has finally got a name and a voice in the form of Vin de Garde wine club, and the challenge is going forward — before you blindly blow this off as another soon-to-be failed attempt to challenge the power and might of the LCBO I suggest we revisit the interview, the article and the issues that surround it; there seems to be more relevance here than ever before. This is going to get very interesting.

    Have you ever been out to British Columbia and brought back a couple of bottles of wine? Better yet, have you ever driven across the border to Quebec and brought back a case of beer? If you have done either of these things then you my friend are a felon, capital F-E-L-O-N. That’s all according to the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act (IILA) of 1928, which is still on the books and very much in use by our liquor board (the LCBO). What it boils down to is, you can travel to Cuba and bring back 2 bottles of rum, go stateside and return with two bottles of wine, go to Mexico and carry back 4 cervesas; but you can’t cross Canadian provincial borders carrying any booze back with you. So, who’s ready to turn themselves in?

    Not so fast says lawyer Ian Blue, who has been looking into the matter for us. Ian is an energy lawyer who found himself in a conversation with fellow lawyer, Arnold Schwisberg, about the IILA and like an ear-worm (a song that won’t leave your head) Ian couldn’t stop thinking about the absurdity of the Act. “The constitutional issues around inter-provincial and international sales of energy have equipped me admirably to look at the IILA … it stuck with me until I wrote my paper on the subject ‘On the Rocks’.” Ian subsequently wrote a second article on the same topic (On the Rocks; The Gold Seal Case: A Surprising Second Look); both appear in Advocate Quarterly.

    [. . .]

    “Liquor boards would continue to exist, their power would just be diminished,” but they would definitely put up a fight, “You’re fighting entrenched interests, so if you’re diminishing their power they’re going to fight to try and keep it.”

    How big a fight? “I would be fighting 10 sets of lawyers one each from every attorney general’s department; probably 10 sets of lawyers from the provincial liquor commission; and probably lawyers from the police associations,” estimates Ian, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “What [a win] would mean is that if I wanted to have a private liquor store I could set one up and I could buy directly from the wineries in Niagara or British Columbia or foreign countries. Nova Scotia restaurants could order wines from Ontario. It would just loosen up the system. [It] doesn’t mean licentiousness; the province could still legislate standards for people who work in liquor stores, store hours, security, all safe drinking training, all that stuff; it’s just that you would not need to have liquor and wine sold through publicly funded liquor stores; being sold to you by unionized staff on defined benefit pension plans.”

    But what about those who claim a loss of provincial revenue as their argument for keeping the liquor boards as is? According to winelaw.ca, “The Provincial Governments make their money regardless of whether the sale is made in a government store or a private store. In fact, the revenue that government makes from liquor on a per capita basis for 2007/2008 was as follows: $192 for BC [a mix of private and government stores], $190 for Alberta [all private stores], and $139 for Ontario.”

February 14, 2013

The LCBO crowds out another private business

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

In the latest Ontario Wine Review, Michael Pinkus writes an obituary for Wine Access magazine and hurls “J’accuse!” at the Ontario government’s liquor monopoly for the murder:

Now there are some of you out there who will be asking how can the Ontario Liquor Monopoly put an Alberta-based magazine out of business — well it’s actually quite simple, if you’re willing to connect the dots: if you only have a certain amount of advertising dollars to spend in Canada how much are you going to allocate to the largest population in the country (Ontario); even more to the point, how much do you put into the Liquor Board willing to buy more product if you’ll spend more of your ad budget with them versus a magazine that might (or might not) increase your sales.

I have long advocated for the LCBO to cease publication of this magazine. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beauty of a publication — my wife fawns over the pictures every issue — but it’s a publication that competes against private enterprise, and the LCBO is after all an extension of the government — so what I, and many others have said is unfortunately true: the government in essence, taking thousands of dollars out of the hands of the companies that pay taxes, their own populace, and competing against them. Sure I hear many of you saying “finally my tax dollars hard at work”: but ask yourself this question: how would you like the government competing against your business?

People don’t see the problem with Food & Drink magazine because they aren’t in the publishing business and are not affected by its publication, but consider these numbers: in the Holiday 2011 issue of said magazine, an almost Sears catalogue sized edition, there were 308 pages total, 140 of those were advertising (not including product placement and promotions within editorial / advertorial which is no doubt paid for as well — and don’t forget the 6 hefty inserts included inside the plastic wrapper) … that’s money that was not spent with privately run magazines that could have, and most likely, would have. Here are some more numbers to boggle the mind. According to the Luxury Media Sales website a full page in F&D magazine is $20,588 (2012 rate) — that’s a lot of money the government of Ontario is taking from their tax paying private enterprise magazines (in a democratic, free market system — who would believe the government is competing against their own populace). Think about that kind of money funneling out of your business sector, your chosen profession or what you do for a living (it’s close to 3 million dollars – 140 x $20,588) … do you think you’d be making the kind of money you are now? Would you welcome that kind of competition? And before you crassly answer “sure, the government can’t do anything right” also put in the fact that they’re the biggest game in town and control what you sell. The nightmare scenario is the closing of your business due to unfair competition and lack of revenue (but it’s the government, so what can you do) — in the publishing game you just shuttered a magazine because of lack of revenue and unfair competition. If you’re RedPoint Media you close down Wine Access magazine.

So, in Clue fashion, who killed Wine Access? It was Colonel LCBO, in the wine cellar, with the government monopoly privilege.

February 8, 2013

Telegraph runs “Shock, horror!” story about UK government’s wine budget

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

I’m a minarchist: I’m in favour of much smaller, less intrusive government. Even saying that, I can’t find it in my heart to get upset about this “shocking” revelation:

Ministers fail to balance books at £3million wine cellar
Ministers and guests have got through 5,000 bottles of alcohol worth more than £55,000 in the last year, report into the Government’s wine cellar has revealed.

[. . .]

The latest annual report into the Government’s wine cellar has revealed that ministers, officials and their guests got through nearly 5,000 bottles of alcohol worth more than £55,000 in the last year.

In total, the cellar holds 38,000 bottles costing £857,000 when bought, but are now valued on the open market at £2,953,000.

Some of the taxpayer-funded bottles are sold in shops for more than £1,000 each.

Guests at Government events drank 23 bottles of the 1982 Chateau Margaux Bordeaux, which sells for up to £1,100 a bottle.

Five thousand bottles? That’s all? David Cameron’s cabinet consists of 22 senior ministers. I assume there are junior ministers or parliamentary assistants for most of those ministers, so let’s call it 50 men and women who are entertaining on government business and would be drawing from the official wine cellar. Even if each of them only entertains one other person at each event, that’s roughly two bottles of wine per minister per week.

The Queen drinks more than that by herself!

And the eye-popping number of £857,000? That works out to less than £23 per bottle. And we’re told that some of the bottles could sell on the open market for £1,100 a bottle. But based on the figures, there can’t be very many of those ultra-expensive bottles, can there?

I fail to see a scandal here…

February 2, 2013

Hidden under Britain’s defence HQ: Henry VIII’s wine cellar

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Military, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:44

It’s not open to the general public — and given what’s built on top of it, that’s probably no surprise:

Like the Pentagon, its better-known counterpart in the United States, Britain’s Ministry of Defence building is a fairly mundane, if gigantic, office block camouflaging a much more exciting subterranean realm of secret tunnels, bunkers, and — at least in the MoD’s case — a perfectly preserved Tudor wine cellar.

IMAGE: Henry VIII’s wine cellar, photograph by Nicola Twilley. The cellar is apparently occasionally used to host Ministry of Defence dinners and receptions, but is otherwise off-limits to the public other than by special request.

IMAGE: Henry VIII’s wine cellar, photograph by Nicola Twilley. The cellar is apparently occasionally used to host Ministry of Defence dinners and receptions, but is otherwise off-limits to the public other than by special request.

This stone-ribbed, brick-vaulted undercroft was built in the early 1500s by Cardinal Wolsey, as part of a suite of lavish improvements to York Place, the Westminster residence of the archbishops of York since the thirteenth century. The additions, which also included a gallery, presence chamber, and armoury, were intended to make York Place into a palace splendid enough to host the King. They succeeded well beyond Wolsey’s intentions: when Wolsey fell from favour, due to his inability to secure the papal annulment Henry VIII needed in order to marry Anne Boleyn, the King decided to move in.

[. . .]

York Place became the Palace of Whitehall, the principal residence of the English monarchy in London for nearly two hundred years, and Wolsey’s expansive cellar (he apparently received the first delivery of Champagne ever exported to England) became King Henry VIII’s Wine Cellar, the name by which it is still known today.

In Tudor times, the wine was stored in barrels, which presented a certain problem for service: “The barrels are historical reconstructions to represent how wine was stored in Tudor times. Henry VIII’s court consumed something like 300 barrels of wine each year, mostly exported from France and delivered to the palace by river. Interestingly, the wine was drunk very young by today’s standards — an August harvest might be on the table by November — and it was carefully blended with water, honey, and spices to mask its increasing sourness, as half-drunk casks allowed air into contact with the wine, which gradually oxidised into vinegar.”

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