by Laura Ness - HerVineNessJanuary 16, 2012
Wine Sales Continue to Make Registers Go KaCHING!
You probably knew this already, but wine sales were definitely up this holiday season. People are in a merrier mood than they’ve been in a while, even if they’re not celebrating the prolonged California drought. So far, the only thing dry about this year is the weather.
What’s the fastest growing variety in recent sales trends? Online sales site, wine.com, reports that sales of cabernet were up 58% in 2011 over 2010. That’s winemaker Jeffrey Patterson crafting some dynamite House Family Winery cab, above. It’s bold, muscular, satisfying stuff, with all the cigar-laden, tanned saddle leather cabness that makes it the King.
Holding the number two sales position, at least on this site, is no longer chardonnay, but pinot noir. That’s quite an interesting trend. Good news for merlot makers, too: sales were up by 43%: maybe an early indicator that the merlot-bashing phase has passed? That Burrell School “Honor Roll” merlot is as bodacious as a Right Bank Pomerol beauty, at half the price, jam-packed with wild cherry and mocha goodness.
The wine.com site reports sales of tempranillo and sangiovese on the upswing, and in the white category, chenin blanc, muscat, torrontes and gruner [...]
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by Laura Ness - HerVineNessJanuary 15, 2012
In early December, as the sun sank low in the sky, dropping daytime temps quickly from 60 something to barely 50, I took a rather exciting drive through the broccoli fields of Gonzales to the fall-colored hills of the Santa Lucia Highlands, with Mark Pisoni: farmer, father, son, grandson and winegrower. He is first and foremost a farmer, and his love of the land, this fruitful, beautiful land, is evident in everything he says and does. Oh, he does love wine, but one gets the impression that he would choose a jar of his wife’s apple butter over a bottle of chardonnay if that were the last choice to be made.
Mark lives in a beautiful old farmhouse with a root cellar filled with wine – dust-covered, musty-looking old bottles, quietly resting on even more dust-covered shelves, surrounded by empty bottles that read like a who was and really still is who of the great Burgundy houses: Echezaux, Le Tache, Gevery-Chambertin, and modern legends like Kosta-Browne, Roar, Testarossa, Lucia…oh, yeah, and Pisoni.
Cases of liquid gold resting beneath the growing roots of broccoli and lettuce, and the pitter patter of children’s feet as they scamper across the same oak floor that Mark [...]
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