vintuba.com

Switzerland is not generally known abroad for its wines. Several factors contribute to that: the climate is much different from that of sun-drenched California, production is expensive due to the cost of real-estate and labor costs are well above the EU, and especially South America. In a world accustomed to increasingly powerful wines at competitive prices, Swiss wines will have a difficult time against wines from Argentina, Australia and Chile, for example…. Read more

I just returned from a weekend of spirits tasting. As the Old World Old Guy, I was shocked by the prevailing attitudes I found my fellow tasters had, including the lecturer at our event, to lesser-known spirits. Everyone knows it is fashionable to like Cognac. Aficionados go for Armagnac and their dried fruit flavors. Fewer are enthusiastic about Brandy de Jerez. Surprising, to me at least, is the level of enthusiasm for the best-selling “clean spirits,” e.g. vodka. Its singular distinguishing mark is this: the less you can identify the base material, the better it seems to be.

There are those who subscribe to truth-in-origin, and others who dismiss this notion as silliness. You could count the French, however you feel about them, most Europeans, the Slow Food Movement and perhaps Alice Waters among the former. The latter are of the flat-earth persuasion: the Mondovino coterie, the varietally obsessed wine lovers who discount the origins of wine and those who uphold McDonald’s uniformity of quality as something to attain as a goal.

At present each closure occupies only a certain market segment: natural cork the premium and super-premium, technical cork the sector just below, synthetics the lower-priced sectors. The only closures making progress across various segments are screw cap and Vino-Lok.