Good Grape Wine Company

February 6 2008

Wine Errata, Miscellaneous, Pomace and Lees

I wrote a post recently on Cost Plus World Market, a consumers Shangri-la for low cost brands that usually deliver at price point.  If you are not that wine savvy, but enjoy a wine tipple (which is most of the wine consuming country) than Cost Plus is your place.

Thanks to a pointer from my friend Renee at the Indianapolis foodie blog, Feed Me/Drink Me, she notes that this site is indicating that customers of Cost Plus World Market are in for more wine fun. 

Cost Plus, long a Bay Area leader in specialty food and drink retailing, kind of lost its way as it moved into housewares and furniture and it looks like the housing slump that is hitting the country is likewise hitting their business as folks shop for furnishings at discount retailers.

According to the site, the housing sector woes may be our gain:

Look for specialty foods, beverages, wines and craft beers to play a major—if not the major—role as the retailer attempts to steer a new path in the retail marketplace. Its origins are in these categories, and despite the fact that overall sales have come largely from an expanded mix of furniture, housewares and the like over the last three or four decades, food and drink have always remained the top categories on a store-sales basis.

We see a “back to its specialty foods and drinks origins” move being key for Cost-Plus as a way to rapidly increase sales and profits in light of its declining furniture and related goods sales, especially in the current economic climate where the housing market looks to not be improving for some time.

As far as I am concerned, Cost Plus World Market can bring in every high value, under $20 wine in the universe and I would be a happy guy.  Bring it on and as stockbrokers like to note—there is an opportunity in every downturn, maybe this is wine consumers opportunity.

Now, it would chagrin me to say that a wine that you would not see in Cost Plus World Market would be a Michigan wine.  It turns out that local Cost Plus stores do carry a regional selection of wines and a steady diet of good news from the Michigan wine industry is challenging the notion that Michigan wines do not travel out of the Midwest.

Aside from the L. Mawby bubbly that I saw featured in a San Francisco restaurant, consider also this recent story from The Detroit News that indicates Chateau Grand Traverse is selling its Riesling at Ralph’s supermarkets in the LA area.  Coupled with the fact that a California winemaker is going to label Michigan Riesling under his California label, Jana, and you might have some salad days for Michigan wine coming up. 

Oh, and, the 2007 harvest is supposed to be one of the best on record …  As the columnist for The Detroit News sums up,

Surely, if the New York wine industry is the “California” of the East in quality, quantity and organization, then Michigan is the “Oregon.”

I am sure the folks in Michigan could live with being the equivalent of “Oregon” this side of the Mississippi.  Check out Michigan wines if you get a chance; armchair travel to Michigan via the wines from the state is a pretty good trip, I promise.

Speaking of armchair travel, it is a concept everybody understands, but if you are like me you also armchair read around other areas aside from travel.  It dawned on me that I must have a sub-conscious “head-to-the-woods” streak in me because I unpacked a bunch of books and they included not only “Country wisdom and Know-how,” but also “Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live it.”

The “Self-sufficient” book, in particular, is a pretty incredible bedside reader.  If you long for simple days and want to know how to tie a knot, sharpen a scythe, make bricks and even make some country wine, then this is the book for you.  It is a lot of fun and easy to read with beautiful illustrations that are typical of DK books.

I am only a generation removed from the farm and my Mom recently sent a couple of country wine recipes she undoubtedly got from my grandfather.  Her rhubarb wine recipe is similar to the one in the book.  For fun, it is listed below:

Rhubarb Wine

Cover rhubarb with water. Add juice.  Add yeast.  Let stand in jar 2 weeks then bottle.

And, to wrap up and bring it back to viniferous wine proper, I do have to point out that that both of the de facto standard wine industry magazines, Wines and Vines and Wine Business Monthly, in the last two months, had excellent cover to cover coverage of an alarming issue facing the wine industry:  we’re getting lapped in wine-related research.  We are not doing enough to keep pace.  Most industry invests in research at pace that is equal to sustainable innovation and sales.  So, what is the next thing I read about wine research?  Lenn from Lenndevours, very innocently, noted in a post found here that the winemaker from Fox Run is heading to Serbia on a USDA research grant to, “conduct an assessment of the wine industry there.”

No offense intended to anybody, but hopefully that sort of money is re-allocated in the future to focusing on the U.S.  I think there are some folks in not only California, but also Virginia, Michigan, Missouri, and elsewhere that could do some real good with some research monies.

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