October 22nd - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

 

The Good

There was a pleathora of great stuff this week, as always. One of the highlights of the week in my oppinion was the announcement of a new online wine sale opportunity brought to us by the geniuses at VinTank. The program is called Deals From the Vines, and is modeled somewhat after the flash sale sites, such as CinderellaWine and the like. I will have a full post coming up on this new effort next week, but I want to call attention to a great post detailing the new program by Beau Carufel on his Beau's Barrel Room blog. You can also read about the details of the program on Paul Mabray's blog.

The Bad

The one and only Melanie Ofenloch posted the results of a recent tasting of wines from India. Unfortunately, this was not a very possitive experience for her. Has anyone else had any experience with Indian wines? For now, I'm putting this into The Bad, but I would love to one day offset this by posting a great experience that someone had with Indian wine.

The Ugly

The Ugly for this week is the back and forth fight that has been brewing (sorry for the pun) over the Washington initiatives to privatize liquor sales in the state. I had written earlier this week about the situation, as have many other fine bloggers. One post that I would really like to point out is found on the Wine Economist blog. To the surprise of nobody who follows alcohol consumer policy, the beer, wine, and liquor lobby has come out in full force to oppose these measures, which always gets ugly.

Cheers!

Comments

[Benito]

Funny you mention this, because I e-mailed Melanie about my experience with Indian wines. The Chenin Blanc from Sula is pretty decent. Not perfect, but far from bad. However, I bought it and tried it along with two of the worst wines I've ever consumed, one from Belarus and the other from Romania. The writeup:

http://wine-by-benito.blogspot.com/2008/05/and-other-delights.html

[Beau Carufel]

Thanks for the shoutout bro :-) I'm glad you liked my post!

[Melanie]

Appreciate the shout out -- I hope that others can prove me wrong. I loved my travel to India and the people and food were top-notch. I'd like to see the wine be the same.

[Joe]

I've heard that Chinese wine sucks because there's no culture of quality control there (a nice side-effect of government control)...

...sorry for the political aside. It won't happen again.

I wonder if India is making wine on a volume scale, or striving for quality. With the climates, altitudes, and weather afforded to the country by the Himalayas, I'd have to think there are some good spots for growing grapes.

[Vinotology]

I'm sure the wines in India are like wines from most places. There are some good ones and some bad ones. I would still be curious to try some. It's always fun to try wines from a region that you are not familiar with.

[Vinotology]

Interesting questions Joe. It would be interesting to know more information about the way that these wines are being produced. I might have to do a little research and see what I can find out.