Shutting down The Spill (my second publishing project, which curated the best consumer wine content daily) doesn’t even come close to cracking the top ten most disappointing things in my professional life. However, it does crack my top ten most interesting learning experiences in my career.

For those of you who are unaware, I’ve always admired the work of Wine Industry Insight, Wine Business Daily News, and Wine Industry Advisor’s Afternoon Brief. These three daily email newsletters track the most important wine trade news of the day. They serve as the vascular system of the wine industry, keeping the information we all need flowing.

But despite there being FAR more consumer-based wine content published daily than trade-related, there had never been a similar daily newsletter capturing the best of that consumer wine content. That was The Spill. I began publishing it precisely a year ago to the day. Today, I shut it down.

For those wondering, The Spill is suspended because the effort it would take me to acquire the number of subscribers (subscriptions were free) to make it a viable advertising product for advertisers and the publisher (me) is more than I have to give.

The time to curate The Spill on a daily basis was not the issue. Technology was such that determining from the hundreds of new pieces of content published daily which would make it into The Spill and actually building the newsletter was manageable. However, building the subscriber number up to what they needed to be would take more time than I had to give.

ANYONE INTERESTED IN PURCHASING THE SPILL AND GIVING IT A GO OR SIMPLY TAKING OWNERSHIP OF THE INTELLECTUAL ASSETS IS WELCOME TO REACH OUT TO ME. I’M HAPPY TO CHAT.

But in the wake of putting The Spill to bed, I thought I’d share some of the things I learned from intensely imbibing wine content for a full year. I think it is safe to say that no one in the past year has so thoroughly examined consumer-aimed wine content as I have. Add to this that I have been closely watching the wine media for three decades in my work as a wine publicist and media relations consultant. And finally, I have been able to see precisely what kind of content people appear to be interested in based on knowing which links in The Spill they have most and least frequently clicked over the past 12 months. So what have I learned?

The Product Determines the Content
The vast majority (95%) of wine-related content is based on the fundamental thing that wine is: An ancient alcoholic beverage produced from different varieties of grapes grown in a relatively small latitudinal band where certain small geographic regions produce higher quality raw materials that can be crafted into wine based on the direction and efforts of individuals. Winemaking everywhere is both a craft and an industry. This basic description of wine is not only accurate, but also the basis of articles that describe and interpret the people, places, and products that surround wine. Whether the content is about what to drink, why to drink it, who made the drink, the details of where the drink was made, how the drink was made, or how to visit the places it was made, the content is almost always derived from what wine is.

Thoughtful Content is Rare
What is extraordinarily rare in wine content is an exploration of what wine means. When these kinds of thoughtful articles are attempted, they are almost always mediocre. However, they are occasionally very good. But even when they are very good, they are not well read by consumers. If you think this is odd, consider that 90 of all the wine produced and purchased for consumption is very inexpensive and very average.

Six Words Placed In Headlines Are the Key to Attracting Readers
Biggest, First Ever, Best, and their opposites in headlines attract the most attention. Without exception, articles with superlatives in the headline draw the most interest from readers. Whether having to do with size or quality, or timeliness, superlatives grab potential media consumers and lead them down paths both silly and substantial. The quality of the content, the reputation of the publisher, and the time of publication have nothing to do with the appetite that draws consumers in most easily. It has to do with the use of a superlative.

Substack Has Captured the Most Interesting New Wine Content
Substack is the source of the most interesting wine content being published today. Like blogs before, Substack is a publishing platform that provides writers and content creators with an uncomplicated and inexpensive route to market. What’s different about Substack is that it made monetization of the content easily accomplished, something the blogging platforms did not. Over the past year, there has been an explosion in the number of wine-related Substacks, many authored by really great wine minds, including many not considered traditional media. One of the most important things I did in publishing The Spill was keeping up with the rise of new wine newsletters published on Substack. Ironically, I used a competing platform, Beehiiv, to publish The Spill.

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Legacy Wine Publications Are The Best At Spotting and Commissioning Great Wine Content
For those who want to diss the legacy wine publications, you don’t know what you are talking about and should shut right up. The Wine Spectator, the Wine Enthusiast, Food & Wine Magazine, The World of Fine Wine, and Decanter all continue to deliver the most entertaining and most in-depth wine content available. They do this by hiring and keeping great editors who know wine and wine people and the wine industry and paying the best writers who tend to know the same. Barely a day went by that an article from a legacy wine publication did not find its way to the featured place in The Spill.

AI Could Curate Daily Wine News, Just Not as Well As I Can
It is entirely possible to train an AI to seek out newly published wine content. It is possible to train an AI to do this and to place the results in a database that ranks the content by quality or length or subject matter or creator or some other criteria. All this would take some work, but I think it could be done and probably done even easier six months from now. However, what AI cannot do is curate this content on a daily basis with the same discerning eye that I bring to it, nor with the same judgment of what is important, nor with the editorial determination of which content vehicle deserves elevation. The key words in all that are “discernment” and “judgment”.

Too Much Trade-Directed Content
The primary reason an otherwise really well-done piece of content was excluded from The Spill was due to it being trade-focused. That is to say, the content assumed a level and quality of interest in wine that is most often reserved to those concerned with the business side of wine. You would be surprised how common these kinds of articles are. Moreover, many content creators and writers who think they are creating and writing for consumers and enthusiasts are actually producing something that is best suited for a trade-level acquaintance with the information presented. My own judgment is that content produced for consumers and enthusiasts that creeps up toward being something of interest to the trade but falls slightly short is the sweet spot for really useful consumer wine content.

There Is Always A Hierarchy of Talent, and It’s Usually Obvious
It should be clear to anyone who follows the wine media even moderately closely that where publications, editors and writers are concerned, there is an easily recognized hierarchy of talent. I’ve followed it for quite some time. However, after bathing in this niche for a year, what is equally clear is that the space between the top publications and writers and the next rung is fairly wide.

It was suggested by a number of subscribers that I turn The Spill into a paid subscriber publication rather than simply suspend publication. I appreciate that. Moreover, priced correctly, I think a paid daily, curated newsletter filled with links to the top wine content would attract more paying subscribers than Fermentation. And maybe that will happen. For now, however, it’s best to just shut it down and take some time to think it over.

If you are a subscriber to The Spill, thank you. I hope it was of use.

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My son Henry, who recently turned 12, ran into the house and presented himself in front of me as I sat in a chair downstairs working. The smile on his face was one of those genuine kid-smiles that can’t be faked. He proudly announced that “a girl hit on me” when he was at the Urban Air Trampoline Park his grandfather had just taken him to.

I’m not entirely sure if the proud smile on his face had more to do with actually being hit on by a girl for the first time or because he got to stand in front of his dad and announce he’d been hit on. The two things are very different. The first is an excitement that comes from being the center of attention. The second is the excitement of being able to show your father that you are growing up.

To Henry’s father, this felt like an important moment in his boy’s life; something to take note of and that he would catalog in his memory and refer back to throughout his life. I was genuinely happy for him and a little bemused. But what really interested me was the 11-year-old girl who walked up to my son, declared she liked him, and said she’d like his number (he doesn’t have a number).

My own experience tells me that this little girl possessed a tremendous amount of courage. And this is where my mind turned toward the wine industry—as it inevitably does when seemingly disconnected information passes through my mind.

The wine industry needs to muster the level of courage exhibited by this 11-year-old girl who walked up to a boy she did not know and declared herself interested.

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I monitor scientific research concerning alcohol. I do this because I’m curious. I also monitor this kind of research because in my role as the executive director of the National Association of Wine Retailers, I have been tasked with staying alert to the changes and the evolution in the narrative concerning alcohol and health.

Sometimes I come across significant findings that I know will be covered in mainstream media once they filter down from research journals to science journals and finally to popular media. For example, this story noted that wine drinkers were the only alcohol consumers who experienced significantly reduced risk of cardiovascular disease as well as all-cause mortality when their alcohol of choice was consumed moderately. There was no doubt this study’s findings would eventually make it to the mainstream media.

Sometimes I come across research that is absolutely hilarious, but which I’m absolutely sure will also find its way to the popular press once the medical literature gets done with it. I came across such research today.

Here’s the headline from the actual research journal (Nature Neuroscience) this new study appeared in:

Social isolation recruits amygdala–medial prefrontal cortex projections to escalate alcohol drinking in male mice

It’s as though these journals publish research below headlines that are written with the intent to prompt us to just move along. Here’s the headline about the same study as it appears in a medical publication at Northwestern University that is meant for wider readership:

Loneliness Rewires the Brain to Drive Alcohol Consumption, Mouse Study Finds

The findings from this study have not quite made it into the mainstream press. But they will. I give it 3 to 7 days before the New York Post or The Daily Mirror publishes a story under the headline: “Men Descend Into Alcoholism When Lonely, Study Shows”.

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There’s nothing else like a sure thing; that feeling where you know for a fact that something will come to pass before it happens. However, a “sure thing” isn’t always a good thing.

Take, for example, regulating the sale and distribution of hemp-derived beverages using the three-tier system. It is a sure thing that producers and retailers of these beverages will regret agreeing to be regulated under this system.

“Hemp-derived beverage products” are exactly what they sound like: THC delivered via liquids. The “three-tier system” is a form of product regulation that puts all power in the hands of middlemen by requiring producers to sell to wholesalers and requiring retailers to buy from wholesalers.

Hemp beverages, which had been produced and sold under something of a loophole in federal law, were set to be prohibited by federal legislation, and there has been a push to pass a bill that would keep these beverages regulated and legal. Well, that bill has been introduced. Reps. Beth Van Duyne, (R-Texas), and Greg Landsman, (D-Ohio) introduced The Beverage Regulatory Parity Act on Aug. 10. Among other things, the bill requires these beverages to be sold and distributed via a three-tier system that has been more or less a staple of the alcoholic beverage industry since 1933.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that alcohol wholesalers and their trade association, The Wine & Spirit Wholesalers of America (WSWA), has been lobbying for exactly this for a very long time.

But the sure thing here is not that WSWA got its way. The sure thing is that the producers and retailers of THC-derived beverages will be both disappointed and screwed by their wholesaler partners who, under this legislation, have been given complete control of distribution and margins within this niche industry.

What can the THC drink producers expect? It’s a sure thing that…

-Small producers will have a very difficult time finding a wholesaler to distribute their product.

-Small and medium-sized producers will see excessive margin extracted from them by wholesalers who have complete control over whether they can bring their products to market

-Small producers who seek the ability to self-distribute their products will be opposed by WSWA and local alcohol wholesalers who will tell legislators that children will die and tax payments will be avoided if producers are allowed to bypass wholesalers and sell directly to retailers.

-The THC Beverage industry will consolidate quickly around a very small number of huge wholesalers and a small number of huge manufacturers.

-Small producers will find their existence will come to depend on selling direct to consumers. Still, when they suggest legislation allowing this, they will be met by a collection of wholesalers, large producers, and retailers who will claim in the media and in one-on-one meetings when “campaign contributions” are delivered to lawmakers that allowing direct-to-consumer sales will lead to catastrophe and should be avoided.

The word “Parity” in the name of this legislation refers to parity with the way alcoholic beverages are regulated and sold. Producers of THC beverages are going to wish the name of the legislation actually carried some meaning. The alcohol beverage industry is moving away from a strict three-tier system as consumers, producers, and retailers attempt to overcome the damage this system and its wholesalers have done to the alcohol beverage industry.

The Sure Thing coming down the line is disappointment. Producers of THC-derived beverages will have a market when this legislation passes. They just won’t be in control of their products or their margins. That control is being given over to the wholesale tier. More than 30 years of experience working in an industry governed by the three-tier system has taught me that wholesalers care nothing for producers. The fewer, the better.

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I have met thousands of people in my life. They range from very casually acquainted to friendly acquaintances to close friends. Most of these people drink wine. Among them, I can count on one hand the number of those people who don’t care about the cost of a wine before they buy it. Nearly every single person I’ve ever known who buys and brings wine home has a limit on what they will spend, even when they are in their most splurgiest mood.

The people who review wines and publish those reviews must understand that 99.999% of people interested enough in wine to read their reviews have an upper limit of what they will spend on wine—even for those wines that most enthrall them for one reason or another.

It is because of this reality that I am constantly flummoxed by wine reviewers who do not include the price of the wine in their published reviews.

I won’t call out these reviewers and wine publishers by name (You know who you are!!). But I will say this: Not attaching a price or price range to a wine review is akin to listing a house for sale without revealing its price: The home becomes a curiosity rather than a possibility.

I’ve tried to figure out for myself why some engage in this practice of publishing reviews without prices. The only possible explanation I’m willing to accept is that the philosophy of the wine reviewer informs them that a wine’s intrinsic quality and character are separate from its value.

This is true…undoubtedly so. Problematically, however, this distinction is relevant to the tiniest slice of wine drinkers; that slice that is so flush with resources that the price of a wine simply does not matter. These folks are unicorns and I can't imagine designing a reviewing style around this group of people when 99.99% of those interested enough in wine to read a review of a wine have hard ceilings on how much they will pay for any wine.

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Could anything be more tiresome than the whiplash caused by competing academic studies purporting to document and describe the benefits and risks of drinking wine in moderation?

For upwards of four decades now, we all have watched study after study proclaim the great benefits and great harms of a simple glass of wine with dinner. Those of us who indulge on a nightly basis will preserve our heart’s health, yet die from cancer—both delivered on the back of a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.

It’s wearisome.

The most recent volley comes from the American College of Cardiology. In March, in advance of their annual convention, they promoted a study that was to be presented to the gathering scientists and researchers in April.

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This article is about sex…and the human condition…and 1984….and alcohol. It delivers bad news…and a little bit of good news.

In 1979, on February 20, I had an appointment with the Department of Motor Vehicles to take my driving test that would earn me a license to drive. I remember it was that day because it couldn’t be any other day since that was the precise date I turned the age of legal driving in California: 16. Why would I wait one day longer? With that license, freedom and opportunity were mine!

I was no different than my other friends, none of whom waited more than a week beyond their 16th birthday to obtain their California driver’s license. The things we could do with that document included taking ourselves to parties or cruising the boulevard in Petaluma, California and ogling the girls while peering at our competitors to see if their cars looked cooler than ours (it almost always did). We could finally drive ourselves to the movies, to each other’s homes, to the mall, and, eventually, to bars. That license provided me, my friends, and nearly every other teenager access to a new era in our lives: The Era of Socialization.

We didn’t call it that. We just called it freedom. But it was both.

Having the freedom to meet other people (and especially the opposite sex) outside the confines of school was liberating. It opened up all sorts of possibilities, from new friends, to sex, to testing our mettle against others. Access to the car meant our options opened drastically. Nothing less than a rite of passage; a nod toward adulthood and responsibility…and freedom.

It certainly made illegal drinking easier, and that couldn’t come at a better time since alcohol came in handy when we more frequently found ourselves in the company of others (well, girls, really), in unfamiliar places. And it worked. The alcohol lubricated social interactions as well as provided the excuses we’d all need at one point or another. There were moments when we overused the stuff. But for the most part, the beer, Seven-Sevens, and wine coolers did the trick of lessening our inhibitions, loosening our tongues, and deepening our well of courage.

But after a couple of years of gaining and using that freedom, we were still blocked from what then seemed to be the real den of adulthood: The Bar.

By the time I turned 18, the joke of being able to vote, drive, be considered an adult under the law, and be able to join the military, but not be able to legally drink or enter a bar, began to weigh on us. The bar was where the adults gathered. Also, hiding our drinking, while we became better at it, was getting old too. So, it was about this time when my friends and I began the process of procuring fake IDs.

This was a pretty easy thing to do. You either knew a guy or knew a guy who knew a guy. In any case, as soon as we had access to the guy, we forked over the $25 bucks or so and hoped for the best—which wasn’t always that good. But we knew the older and wiser women were in those bars and we were going to get in there too—crappy fake ID or not.

By the time I turned 21 in 1984, I’d figured out bars. I figured out the protocols for ordering, tipping, and tabs. I learned how to spot the crazy people. I learned how and why to befriend the bartender. But more importantly, I learned how to interact and spend time with people I did not know and to enjoy it. The lessons didn’t come easy, but you had to learn them. You had to learn them because in 1984, if you wanted to socialize, meet people, learn about life, entertain yourself or just participate in humanity, you pretty much had to come face to face with humans, and preferably, outside the context of work. And that usually meant places where alcohol was served.

And here is a fact that pretty much everyone learned at a very young age: A little alcohol diminished the fear, the self-doubt, and the shyness, while at the same time puffing up one’s courage to engage. This is the role alcohol played over the centuries in aiding social interaction and social cohesion, and its importance can’t be underestimated. And if you want to suggest that this phenomenon led to some people indulging too much, forming dependency, and harming their lives, I’ll agree it happened and it’s a problem for many. But I’ll also tell you that the positive role played by responsible, alcohol driven lubrication outweighs the harm…by a wide margin.

This is the chart that explains both why my coming of age and socialization experience described above is long gone and the primary reason for the decline in alcohol sales over the past two decades.

You see those blue bars? They represent the group of people who would have been considered suspect when I was in my teens and early 20s. Today, the Blue Bar group sets the standard for what is socially acceptable; for what is the norm.

The crisis of social isolation depicted in the above graph is the primary cause of the decline in alcohol sales. And without delving too deeply into what caused this crisis (Cough: cell phones, Cough: Social Media), it is the primary reason why sales of wine will never return to their 2010s-era peaks. It is the result of one of the most fundamental changes to society in centuries: the atomization of society and culture.

The fact is, as people of all ages (but particularly young people) forgo in-person socializing and choose isolating screen-based interactions and mistake social media friendships for personal relationships, alcohol loses its primary utility. Alcohol has always had the social role of both easing and smoothing interpersonal interactions. It has helped overcome the awkwardness of young love, supported procreation, made the annoying among us palatable, and helped us laugh with others when we might otherwise not. Moderate inebriation has helped build trust among people and between persons. Moderate inebriation has been so fundamentally connected to the smooth working of the human condition (which is a social condition) that alcohols of various sorts have been important cultural touchstones for people across the globe for millennia.

When coming of age, adulthood, and even middle and old age are marked far less by personal interactions, carnal exploration, and acceptance by the crowd, we simply don’t need alcohol to lubricate the natural friction. When we choose, instead, to embrace a more isolated digital life, alcohol and inebriation are less useful. So, drink less. We buy less.

It doesn’t matter if you slice it by sex, race, age, income or education. Everyone is spending less time navigating face-to-face interactions.

Read these graphs carefully. They all, individually and together, explain why wine and alcohol sales have been in decline and will likely continue to decline. Now, add to this a robust effort to categorize wine as a poison, a difficult economy defined by inflation and the uncertainty of AI, the documented suppression of an appetite for alcohol created by the use of GPL-1 drugs, and the easy access to cannabis.

In fact, the same social and cultural change that killed the mall, the church, the libraries, the strip malls, Christmas shopping, dining out, movie going, dating, and backseat sex is what finally pressured alcohol into a years-long and still ongoing decline in sales.

The goal here is not to be Debbie Downer. Rather, the goal is to be specific about the conditions that are leading to a substantially smaller wine marketplace. And one thing is absolutely true: the problem is not about talking about wine differently. It’s not that the vocabulary surrounding wine isn’t inclusive or doesn’t speak to younger people. It’s not that wine needs to be simpler. It’s not that people are confused or intimidated by wine. It’s the crisis of isolation that has built over the past two decades and has blanketed the whole of society, leading to fewer occasions and reasons to drink; fewer reasons to get a buzz.

Now, here’s the good news for those who sell and make wine. We know precisely what makes wine desirable. We know precisely what sets it apart from beer or spirits or Buzz Balls. We have a brilliant and robust vocabulary for communicating the complexity of wine and the places and ways it is grown and made. We know that once on the property or inside the well-appointed wine shop, people respond to the diversity of wine just fine when a practiced guide offers to pull back the curtain.

We don’t need to reinvent anything.

While the consumption of alcohol has not and will not go away, the number of occasions that people want to use it has declined considerably. A healthy economy can increase sales and consumption. The right kind of cultural moment/icon/shift can positively impact sales of wine or alcohol in general. But I can’t imagine the digital atomization of society and culture being reversed and, with that reversal, an increase in person-to-person interactions and the increase in alcohol consumption necessary to support it.

What is the wine industry and the individuals and groups within it to do? This is the easy part. Even as some vineyards, wineries, restaurants, wholesalers and merchants fail and disappear, you simply keep on serving the people and the market. You make the case for needed reform. You communicate the diversity of wine. You invest in new tools and technology. You put hospitality first. You point your efforts at the places where people still gather.

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For years I wondered why there was no daily email that curated the best, new consumer wine content on the web. So I built it. It’s free. It’s daily. It’s human-curated. I call it The Spill. I hope you’ll consider subscribing.

It’s very difficult to turn a stampeding herd of cattle. I know this from personal experience: Westerns. I’ve noticed it’s always tough for the prickly, sun-worn Western veteran to turn a rushing herd of cattle. And you can’t just get Kevin Costner or Sam Elliot to stand in front of the herd and expect it to stop or turn. You have to coax it into turning by forcing the leader to turn. Anyone who has watched Yellowstone knows this.

Folks in the wine business know this well.

Those who both make and sell wine know what it means to see a herd turn. Over the past decade, a somewhat sizable herd of people has been turned away from accepting moderate drinking toward a neurotic fear of alcohol consumption. That fear has been coaxed into existence by economic uncertainty, a collection of activist health officials selling an unsupported tale of catastrophe at the bottom of a wine glass, and the support of a media establishment that correctly assessed that carrying the water on extremist alcohol claims sells more views and clicks.

At the risk of torturing my metaphor (something I’m most assuredly about to do), it is being recognized within the wine industry and the alcohol industry as a whole that it needs to unleash its cowboys and cowgirls in pursuit of turning back the stampeding cattle in the direction of moderate consumption and (sorry) greener pastures. I’ll get to that, but first I want to take note of what appears to be the beginning of the always-inevitable pushback against narrative.

We are beginning to see the media contemplate the meaning of the extremist, “no safe level” messaging that has come to dominate public policy and reporting on alcohol and alcohol consumption. Read the following and you’ll see what I mean:

Why The World Still Can’t Agree On Alcohol—Time Magazine

What Else Do We Lose When People Give Up Booze—New York Times

The Social Cost of Sobriety—Axios

Is One Drink a Day Really Bad For You—F. Perry Wilson

None of these articles are full-throated challenges to the “no safe leve” messaging. Rather, they either contemplate the social meaning of drinking less or they suggest perhaps a bit of nuance is missing from the You-Are-Going-To-Die-If-You-Sip-That-Chardonnay school of public health messaging.

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No one knows for sure which direction the American wine market will move in the coming few years. They may tell you they know or that they are seeing indications of this or that trajectory, but the fact is they do not know.
However, we can observe objective data.

This graph depicts per-resident wine consumption in gallons from 1960 to the present based on data provided by the California Wine Institute.

What I see is that the current downturn in consumption is only the second such sustained downturn in more than 60 years. I also know that despite it not showing up yet in Wine Institute data, 2026 also saw a decrease in per capita wine consumption. Finally, all indications suggest that per capita wine consumption will continue to decline in 2026.

Perhaps it’s an academic question, but it’s worth asking if the current decline in wine consumption, now in its 5th straight year according to this data, will outlast the consumption decline that lasted from 1986 to 1992—a seven-year stretch? Or better yet, maybe we should ask if we have already exceeded that earlier decline.

If you look at this chart, you see a decline in consumption in 2019. Per-resident consumption moves from 3 gallons in 2018 to 2.94 in 2019. Then, the pandemic hits with its stay-at-home dynamic and money printed and sent out to households and the accompanying spike in alcohol sales and consumption. This spike lasts for two years, 2020 and 2021, and per-resident consumption jumps to 3.16 gallons per person. Then, in 2022, consumption starts to drop.

It’s reasonable to assume that the structural decline in U.S. per-resident wine consumption began in 2019 and the pandemic drinking was simply an interruptive blip that masked the structural decline that became evident to everyone by 2023. If that is, in fact, the case, then we are currently in the 8th year of a structural decline in wine consumption in the United States—a longer stretch than the late '80s/early '90s decline.

At this point, it might be worth asking if there are enough similarities between the conditions that led to the decline from 40 years ago and today’s decline in consumption.

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Are you now or have you ever been a whale? Someone wants to know.

I’ve never been a whale. Yes, I’ll admit to being a fellow traveller of the whales. I’ve swum in the same pools where the whales frolic, and I’ve even led some whales to feeding grounds. But if the truth be told, I’ve always been much more of a cod or even a bottom-feeder.

Adrienne Smith has no interest in me or my feeding habits, but she is very keen to understand the motivations, habits and thoughts of those folks I and some others in the industry fondly call “the whales”: the people—largely older men—who routinely spend $100 or more (often much more) on bottles of Napa Valley wines and build a collection of 1,000 bottles or more.

A managing partner of Parallel, a small Napa Valley winery, Smith was inspired by the research behind The Seven Faces of Philanthropy, which identified seven distinct donor profiles and transformed how nonprofits understood and communicated with their most valuable supporters.

So, she embarked on the Napa Valley Wine Study. It’s remarkably simple. Smith would find 250 whales who buy Napa Valley wines, interview them extensively, and create a report or book that details what motivates and moves them. What causes them to join (or leave) wine clubs, what instance, moment, or revelation first brought them into the whale pod, and much more. Her goal is to interview 250 whales. She currently has 85 under her belt and she is looking for more.

Before we go any further, I want to lay out a little more substantively what I think of as a “whale”. I want to disclose my assumptions. My experience and my prejudices have led me to assume that the Napa Valley species of whales were 1) wealthy, 2) hoarders of wine, 3) closely acquainted with and driven, in part, by the opinions of top critics, and 4) very committed to drinking wine regularly. Additionally, my encounters with Napa Valley whales have been almost entirely positive, primarily due to the fact that as a pod, these folks tend to be remarkably generous and encouraging.

However, Smith’s findings are dismantling some of my views of those who routinely spend $100 or more on Napa Valley wines. I asked her what findings have most surprised her as she moves into her 85th Interview.

“Income barely predicts anything….The expertise is real but the credentials are optional: two of every three buyers have no formal wine education at all….I ask every participant about critic scores, and only five of 84 buy on them. The industry still runs on the number; its best customers largely stopped waiting for it.”

Let this be a lesson to us all. Proximity to or travelling alongside a defined group of folks who are different from you is as likely to result in false assumptions as it is to unveil insight.

One of the features of the whale—one that has been, from time to time, observed as a symptom of larger societal structures—is that the vast majority of whales are men. I asked Smith what her study has found on this score and what she makes of this gender breakdown. So far, 15% of her whales have been women and

“the psychologies [of whales] are not gendered. The women in the study distribute across the same six buyer psychologies as the men — same doors in, same loyalty logic, same exit triggers. Nothing yet suggests a distinctly female buying psychology, though thirteen is a small base and I'd like it larger before saying anything stronger.”

My own experience tells me that when Smith has finally undertaken the 250 interviews she is seeking, the women whales will number somewhere between 15% and 20%. While Smith correctly chooses not to draw any conclusions about the maleness or femaleness of buying expensive Napa Valley wines, she is willing to speculate.

Within a couple or marriage, it tends to be the man’s name that goes on the wine club application, the mailing list or the auction paddle, despite the woman being equally involved in the selection of what is purchased, Smith speculates. On the other hand, Smith notes that many of those interviewed are in their sixties and entered the whaling game at a time when the arena was “male-coded”—meaning much of the social infrastructure of high-end collecting of Napa wines revolved around and layered upon male spaces such as the golf course, business dinners, etc.

I buy the former, but think the latter explanation doesn’t capture the male trait of using things like a collection of high-end wines much like a male peacock uses their colorful train of feathers or uses a collection of high-end watches to display status. Additionally, despite the demise of the traditional “men’s club”, I believe men still desire access to a masculine setting or group and the wine-collecting space seems to be that.

But what interests me most about the cohort that Smith is studying is the initial motivation. What turned a wine-curious person into a collector? What was the catalyst? According to Smith, it tends not to be a gradual process but rather a moment of revelation:

“When buyers tell me the story of the bottle that converted them, the bottle is never alone. Three things converge: a wine good enough to make the quality gap suddenly audible, a person who gives it meaning — the friend who chose it, the story attached — and a listener at a receptive point in life, whether that's new income, a milestone, or just an occasion with some weight to it. One participant can tell you the exact date and dining room of the bottle that started his collection more than twenty years ago…great bottle, trusted hand, ready listener. Any two without the third produces a nice evening. All three produce a collector.”

If nothing else, Ms. Smith’s interviewees are pretty self-aware. In one of her regular disclosures on social media on her findings, she quotes a whale this way:

“High-end wine is, like, wine for assholes—and I am an asshole that drinks it…stuff that’s expensive for the sake of being expensive.”

It’s hard to know what to make of this kind of disclosure. It’s even more difficult to blanket the sentiment on top of all whales in a rational way. It sounds a lot like a friend of mine who is known for saying, “I don’t date fat women, I’m a fattist. And I’m the worst kind of fattist, I’m a fat fattist”.

In the end, Smith’s goal is to provide those people who sell to and cater to the whales with insights into what their best buyers are looking for. Smith has already disclosed what might end up being the most important finding of her 85 interviews: The connection a whale has to a winery is directly related to an individual. It might be the person who hosted them at the winery or the owner or the winemaker or someone else connected to the winery, but the loyalty a whale has to a particular winery is directly connected to a person. Moreover, if that person leaves the winery, no additional discount or perk is likely to keep the whale in the club. They are likely to move on with their connection.

At 85 interviews, Adrienne Smith is about one-third of the way through her study. She is looking for more subjects who spend $100 or more per bottle on Napa wine. Cellar size is not a criterion — participants range from a few dozen bottles to several thousand. Are you a Whale? Are you willing to speak with Ms. Smith, who is an absolutist on anonymity and discretion? HERE IS WHERE YOU NEED TO GO to join the study. Smith went part-time at Parallel in January to run and focus on the study, which is independent, unpaid, and self-funded.

I would never qualify for this study. In the first place, despite living in Napa and just over the hill in Sonoma for many years, and now in the Willamette Valley among great Pinot Producers, I bought $100 bottles of wine very irregularly in my life. And like the asshole quoted above, I was aware that I could find very satisfying and delicious Napa Valley wines from less than $100 per bottle.

I’ve always been more of a bottom feeder, to be honest. I’m the guy who has a saved search query at WineBid.com that identifies bottles of wine priced $40 or less that have received 92 points or more from a select group of critics. Then again, I’m also the guy who went on a quest to obtain every vintage of Stoney Hill Chardonnay ever produced.

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Also published by Tom Wark…The Spill, a free, daily newsletter that curates the best consumer wine content on the web. Videos, articles, substacks, podcasts…in your email box every morning.

If you write or publish anything and you aren’t using AI to analyze what works, what’s being read, and what’s not being read, you are leaving significant insights on the table.

That said, I’ve been diving into the past 10 months of clicks at The Spill, my other newsletter that curates daily links of top wine content and sends this curated list of links to subscribers who get it for free.

Now, in curating the links to content that I include in The Spill, I do what I can to draw attention to the best writing, the most substantial thinking, the most insightful content I find. I want to both highlight this kind of effort, and I want to expose subscribers to the good stuff.

In looking at what subscribers click on and when they click on it, I’ve come to the conclusion that individual writers and publications can boost readership of this more “challenging” kind of writing by engaging in a bit of mild Bait & Switch. Let me explain.

When I look at which 50 articles were most frequently clicked on over the past 10 months of The Spill, that list is oversupplied with content with headlines that include the following:

-THE BEST….
-THE TOP (NAME A NUMBER)
-…OF THE YEAR
-MUST SEE (EXPERIENCE, TRY, ETC)

Folks are so completely drawn to the idea that they will miss out on something important if they don’t investigate what is “the best” or “the top” or is a “must see”, that they are drawn to headlines that include these terms like bugs to the light. Here’s how publishers and newsletter writers should take advantage of this kind of human nature.

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A sheer cliff with a 1,000-foot drop-off can cause harm from a fall.

A banana peel can also cause harm from a fall.

However, the risk of suffering severe harm from the two is dramatically different. This is the difference between potential harm and potential risk.

I’m wondering if the Director of the Oregon Health Authority got fired because she or her staff didn’t know the difference. Or maybe she got fired because she and her staff do know the difference, yet chose to obfuscate that difference to try to convince Oregonians that there is no difference between a glass of wine with dinner, smoking a pack of cigarettes, and inhaling asbestos.

This is the Instagram post that Rethink the Drink Oregon posted to its feed on June 25th. On June 26th, a coalition of alcohol-related Oregon trade associations sent a letter to the Director of the Oregon Health Authority, Dr. Sejal Hathi, incensed that this Instagram post equated alcohol with smoking and asbestos and failed to note that while all three can cause harm, they don’t all pose nearly the same risk.

On July 2, Director Hathi responded to the letter in perhaps the most obtuse fashion possible:

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Just the other day, I came across a writer whose article was asking, “Are wine reviews biased or objective?” This is a question that dorks and geeks have long pondered, if only to have something to argue and talk about among other wine geeks and dorks. But today especially, this kind of question reveals an important truth.

The presence of bias in wine reviews, wine scoring, and wine content in general is really the only sure sign that human authenticity is at play.

As to the substance of this old question, it has always been my contention that while some form of objective assessment of a wine is possible, objective wine reviews are the last thing anyone needs. However, objective information (“This wine is relatively sweet”) within the context of a subjective review (“…and I really hated this wine”) is really what we ought to be looking for. There, case closed.

But more importantly, today, when Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok can be coaxed into writing reviews of wines and do so in convincing fashion, the safeguard against homogeneity within the genre of wine assessment is real, genuine bias. If you don’t find bias in reviews of wine, you don’t want to keep reading that person’s (?) reviews of wine.

And by the way, you do want the wine content creators among us to review wines, and you DO want to read wine reviews. Unlike others who have argued that reviews of wine (and scores in particular) are of no value, I know they are of value. They are stories. Mini stories for sure, but stories nonetheless. And when done well and not formulaic (that’s not easy), they are both educational and good reading.

But back to bias. You want bias. You need bias. Opinion and bias is the font of all human creativity. We dont read objective educational material for the pleasure of it. And the very best wine content and wine writing might be educational, but when compelling, it’s not the education that makes it so, it’s the bias and the opinion that draws us in and keeps us coming back.

“Boring” isn’t an option today if you are a critic or a plain old writer. Boring has been automated. Boring can be manufactured in bulk today. The educational can be created and disseminated by the least capable AI systems. You want boring? Go to Gemini or ChatGPT and ask them to describe a wine. Ask them to tell you about the history of winemaking in the Duoro or Sonoma Valley. Ask them how red wine is made. Ask them about the history of the glass wine bottle. You’ll get what you need. What you won’t get is opinion, bias or insight.

Im afraid objectivity has been delegated to the artificial models that are improving on a daily basis. Boring, objective and educational has been outsourced to the circuitry. What’s left is bias and opinion.

But the fact is, I’ve always been suspicious of those who demanded objectivity in thier wine reviews and critics. What is it about these people that compels them to demand the impossible from another human being?

So, here’s what I’m looking for from the dedicated wine content creators among us. Lean into opinion! Lift up your bias. Spotlight your subjectivity. Demonstrate your humantiy. Center the thing that separates humans from machines.

Do wine drinkers really want a wine review that informs that “this wine had higher than average tannins. It smells like roses and cherries.” Great! Wonderful. No. What you want is, “This wine blew me away. The obnoxious whiff of putrid cat piss blew off and uncovered a bevy of Australian Fingeer Limes. Get at this. Buy a dozen bottles or be sorry.”

If you bias and opinion creates controversy, then you’ve done your job. No one ever developed a following or delivered real benefits to consumers of wine content by describing the ratio of tannin to acid. We have machines for that kind of objectivity.

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If you are looking for a daily dose of the best wine content on the web, consider subscribing to The Spill. It’s free. It’s daily. It’s curated by me, not AI.

Today on The Spill, one article link received more clicks than any other article highlighted in this curated newsletter this entire year. It was entitled “The Absolute Best Winery in Every U.S. State”. It is indicative of two things. 1) Why wine lovers should support writers at Substack and wine publications, and 2) a confirmation that clickbait headlines and stories rule the day.

Let me first start by saying this story wasn’t just about the best winery in every state. It was about the “ABSOLUTE” best winery in every state. That’s all I’m absolutely going to say about that.

When this story came up on my feed as I was sitting in my garden building The Spill early this morning, it was perfectly obvious that I was looking at a story designed for SEO success. This doesn’t bother me because I don’t care what an article is built for. If it’s interesting, entertaining, fun, or educational, the point of writing it doesn’t really inform whether I’ll include it in The Spill.

However, as I read through it, I had a real suspicion the story was written by AI. The syntax, the consistent quirks of grammar throughout the story, the lack of any first-person perspective, and the repetitive nature of the story all pointed to a large language model AI. Plus, try to imagine writing this story. The time it would take to research wine production and wineries in every state, then make an assessment of which of each state’s wineries is “the best” would take days if not months.

However, it was written by Xenia Turner, a real person living in Vermont.

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Look at the following lists of the top ten catalysts and top 10 impediments to wine success/sales in the United States. They are my lists. But I’d argue they are very good, fairly accurate lists.

TOP 10 IMPEDIMENTS TO WINE SALES
Economy/Inflation
Competition/Alternative choices
Price
Negative Health Claims
Regulatory Friction
Restaurant Markups
Reputation for Complexity/Feeling Intimidated
Inconvenience (Bottle size, tools needed to access the liquid)
Taste
Decline in Fine Dining-66% since 2017

TOP 10 CATALYSTS FOR WINE SALES
Marking an Occasion
The Economy
Wine is the best accompaniment to a fine meal
Taste
The effect of the alcohol (12-15%)
Social Signaling/Gifting
Healthful beverage
Collecting
The Celebrity Draw
Innebriation

There are some important things to point out when looking at these two lists that can guide the wine industry and its participants in any attempt to improve the health of the industry.

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It is, quite frankly, exhausting.

Just when you think the mainstream media has reached the absolute nadir in its pearl-clutching crusade against moderate drinking, they manage to find editorial stairs and descend even lower. On July 2, we were treated to yet another breathless, scolding commentary piece—this time published in the esteemed LA Times—entitled “Alcohol Should Be Stigmatized Like Smoking.”

Written by Dr. Emma Fenske, a physician at Oregon Health & Science University, the piece is a predictable and tedious recitation of the modern neo-prohibitionist playbook. It demands that society rapidly abandon its acceptance of alcohol by using the same tactics of stigmatization tactics that brought the tobacco industry to its knees.

By the way, the author of this anti-alcohol diatribe is the same person who recently wrote to tell us that we need safe fentanyl consumption sites—presumably not next to her home.

Nevertheless, let’s just look at the absurdity of Dr. Fenske’s own words. They are a masterclass in intellectual dishonesty.

THE VIEW FROM THE ADDICTION WARD
Let’s start with her primary credential and the lens through which she views the entire wine, beer, and spirits industry. Early in the piece, she writes:

“As a physician working in addiction medicine, I regularly care for patients whose alcohol use affects nearly every organ system. It is often not until these patients end up admitted to the hospital that they learn the effects of alcohol on various parts of their body besides their liver.”

This is the equivalent of an emergency room doc who exclusively treats catastrophic car wreck victims writing an op-ed demanding we ban automobiles.

Dr. Fenske works in addiction medicine. By definition, she interacts daily with the most tragic, most extreme, and heartbreaking, but minority of alcohol consumers: those suffering from the disease of chemical dependency. No one in the legitimate alcohol trade denies the problems of addiction or the need for robust public health resources to treat it.

But to take the pathology of the severe alcoholic and map it onto the 90-plus percent of the population that consumes alcohol in moderation, safely, and, yes, joyfully is an act of rhetorical malpractice. When your entire worldview is shaped by the tragedy of the most addicted, every glass of Pinot served on a Tuesday night looks like a ticking time bomb. It is a profoundly skewed perspective that has absolutely no business serving as the baseline for national public health policy.

THE GOOD DOCTOR’S “GROUP 1” SHELL GAME
No prohibitionist manifesto is complete without the favorite rhetorical sleight-of-hand of the modern temperance movement, and the Times piece kindly delivers:

“The World Health Organization classifies alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen — the same category as tobacco and asbestos.”

There it is. The great boogeyman. It sounds absolutely terrifying to the layperson (hell, to me too), which is exactly why Dr. Fenske and her cohort use it.

Here is what they conveniently leave out: The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which makes the classification, measures hazard, not risk. They do not measure how likely you are to get cancer from something. They only measure if a substance can cause cancer under certain circumstances and in some amount

Do you know what else is a Group 1 carcinogen right alongside tobacco, asbestos, and your evening glass of Zinfandel? Bacon. Hot dogs. Salted fish. Wood dust. AND THE SUN. Yes, the same folks that named alcohol a Group 1 carcinogen also labeled the sun so.

To say alcohol is in the “same category as tobacco and asbestos” is a deliberate, cynical manipulation of the facts. It is designed to make the reader believe that drinking a glass of wine carries the same lethal risk profile as inhaling the combusted asbestos fibers from a 1950s shipyard. It doesn’t. Not even close. But the anti-alcohol lobby knows that explaining the difference between “hazard identification” and “absolute risk” doesn’t scare politicians into raising taxes let alone launc a program to stigmatize alcohol. So, they trot out the asbestos line and hope nobody looks too closely.

A WAR ON JOY
Perhaps the most revealing part of the entire article is Fenske’s utter disdain for the human and social element of drinking that has sustained the practice for millennia. She notes that federal guidelines recently omitted explicit discussion of alcohol’s links to cancer, and then complains:

“The current administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services characterized alcohol as a ‘social lubricant’ that brings people together, rather than emphasizing its well-established health risks. This may be true physiologically, at least temporarily, but obscures the fact that relying on it as a social lubricant can lead to chemical and psychological dependency. In my view, statements to that effect are shortsighted...”

Heaven forbid a government official acknowledges human nature and the reality of thousands of years of human culture.

Dr. Fense appears to be truly irritated by the concept of a “social lubricant.” To the neo-prohibitionist, the idea that a substance might bring people together, ease the traumas of a long day, foster conversation, and act as the centerpiece of a communal meal is completely irrelevant to her. Instead, the joy of a shared bottle of wine isn’t a cultural good; it is merely a sneaky trap door leading straight to chemical dependency.

This is where her mask slips. This isn’t just about public health; it’s a puritanical war on pleasure. She and her fellow travelers cannot abide the fact that millions of people safely derive joy, relaxation, and cultural connection from a substance they have decided is inherently evil.

THE FALSE TOBACCO PARALLEL
Fenske’s ultimate goal is laid bare in her conclusion. She wants to run the tobacco playbook on the wine industry:

“Looking back at the history of tobacco smoking provides some helpful insights... Together, these efforts transformed smoking from a widely accepted social behavior into one broadly recognized as a major health risk and correspondingly, less socially accepted.”

Here it is. Here is the grift. They want to stigmatize wine exactly like they stigmatized cigarettes. But this ignores the fundamental reason why smoking became a cultural pariah: secondhand smoke.

Smoking wasn’t pushed out of restaurants and airplanes just because it was bad for the smoker. It was stigmatized and banished because the smoker was forcing innocent bystanders to inhale toxic fumes. The stigma was rooted in the violation of other people’s bodily autonomy.

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There is no such thing as secondhand drinking. A couple splitting a bottle of Chardonnay at the table next to you is not passively destroying your liver. (Though, I urge you to google “second hand drinking”. They think it exists)

Yes, drunk driving harms innocent people. But as a society, we already heavily stigmatize and criminalize drunk driving. What Dr. Fenskie is advocating for here is the stigmatization of the product itself and the moderate consumer. They want you to feel the same social shame for buying a bottle of Cabernet at the grocery store that you would feel lighting up a Marlboro Red in a crowded kindergarten (I don’t recommend it) classroom. It is an absurd, unhinged comparison.

WHY THE LA TIMES PEDDLES THIS HYSTERICAL PANIC MONGERING
Which brings me to the ultimate question: Why do major media outlets like the LA Times and the New York Times continue to publish this nonsense?

The answer is simple: Sensationalism sells.

We live in an attention economy that rewards the destruction of the status quo. A headline that reads “A Glass of Wine with Dinner is Fine for the Vast Majority of Healthy Adults” generates zero outrage, zero clicks, and zero shares on social media. (Though we may be getting to the point where such a headline would be considered just transgressive enough to generate clicks) But a headline that screams “Your Wine Habit is Exactly Like Smoking Asbestos” is clickbait gold.

The media ecosystem has realized that “expert” medical opinions advocating for radical, puritanical shifts in social behavior drive massive engagement. They don’t care if the premise is built on the skewed perspective of an addiction ward or the deliberate misrepresentation of WHO classifications. They only care about the clicks.

For the wine, beer, and spirits trade, the publication of this article should be a blaring wake-up call. We are facing a highly organized, ideologically driven movement that has unfettered access to the editorial pages of the nation’s biggest newspapers. If we continue to sit back and quietly hope that commonsense will prevail, we are going to lose.

Now, go smoke your asbestos and have a glass of Chard if you got it.

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In a land of falling skies, the alarmist is king.

“After rigorously analyzing the existing evidence, we strongly believe it’s time to add pancreatic cancer to the list of alcohol-related cancers.”

This is the conclusion that a well-known anti-alcohol alarmist came to in a press release after determining that light to moderate alcohol consumption increased the risk of contracting pancreatic cancer in the following ways:

NON DRINKERS LIFETIME PANCREATIC CANCER RISK:
160 cases of PC for every 10,000 People (1.60% lifetime risk)

1 DRINK PER DAY LIFETIME PANCREATIC CANCER RISK:
165 cases of PC for every 10,000 people (1.65% lifetime risk)

2 DRINKS PER DAY LIFETIME PANCREATIC CANCER RISK
171 cases of PC for every 10,000 people (1.71% lifetime risk)

The increased risk of contracting pancreatic cancer as a result of one or two drinks a day is so small as to be remarkable in itself. And yet, this extraordinarily insignificant connection found between moderate alcohol consumption and pancreatic cancer is not what is highlighted. Rather, the authors of the study argue that pancreatic cancer should be added to a list of alcohol-related cancers.

It is the very definition of “alarmist”.

The fact of the matter is no one, including the media, can trust a single thing that Tim Naimi, one of the authors of this new study, says about what causes cancer, what is significant about moderate alcohol consumption, or what should be done in response to his pursuit of alarming-sounding headlines.

The study in question was released earlier this month and entitled “Alcohol consumption and the risk of pancreatic cancer: A systematic”.

Two of the most notorious anti-alcohol campaigners, Tim Naimi and Tim Stockwell, whose recommendations on what should be government alcohol policy were rejected by both Canada and the United States, were the authors behind this study. Here’s what you need to know about these two anti-alcohol campaigners cum researchers:

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I can count on my two hands the things and people I love more than baseball. This may not seem like the kind of ringing endorsement I mean it to be, but there are several things and people to love in this life. Ranking just outside the top ten, as Baseball does for me. It is, in fact, a rousing endorsement.

But when I think about what Summer means to me, baseball moves up to the first or second set of digits. Baseball is summer. Summer is baseball. Summer has a way of collecting ways of being more than any other season. Certain drinks epitomize summer, too.

The other day, Kathy and I popped open a lovely chilled Orange Wine that exemplified why chilled, pale, refreshing wine makes it to my top ten Summer experiences. We sat in our nook, door open to our lush backyard, enjoying the 85-degree weather, cooling our palate and mind with this 12% alcohol wine, and reveling in the arrival of Summer and each other.

A good rosé has this effect too. As does a chilled white wine that does more to match the season than to impress the palate. Now, some might point to something like lemonade or some other chilled potable as the iconic summer drink, and they might be right. But, if we are being honest, wine wins in part because the effect of that 12% alcohol, combined with an 80-degree dusk, is just about the perfect pairing for mind and palate.

Truth be told, during these three months of Oregon glory we call Summer, I also reach for chilled Pastis and (tell no one, please), Pinot on the rocks. (I once nearly left for dead a winemaker who saw me tragically splash their Pinot over a pile of ice in a wine glass).

I made a list of things without which I would not know how to understand Summer; things that I identify so closely with June-July-August that without them, these months would not make sense to me:

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My son has very little interest in wine. This is good. He’s 12. However, he’s tried the stuff in various forms, including Sauternes, Rieslings, Syrahs and a few others. Still, no interest. But, again, he’s 12.

My own father also had very little interest in wine when he was alive. In fact, as I think back, I don’t recall a single instance of him opening a wine bottle or even drinking wine. His interest in alcohol tended toward bourbon and a good Manhattan. That was provided by my mother, Alverna, who, on occasion, would make a “batch” in a stainless steel vessel that, once filled, probably could provide upward of four or five good, strong Manhattans. They would occasionally finish the batch together, usually on a weekend.

What this means is that had I had any interest in sneaking booze out of the house when I was young—again, if I had any interest in that sort of thing—It would have been Old Crow or Old Grandad, located on the bar directly to the left of his stainless steel mixing cup.

Now, my father-in-law, Hank, worked in marketing and advertising during the “Mad Men” era before becoming a financial advisor. So, in his younger days, it was stronger drink for him. Hank is a Texan, but via Oregon, where he grew up. There, he and his little brother Morrie spend a good deal of time in the basement of their father’s 24-hour grocery in Portland. The grocery served a very diverse neighborhood filled with European Jews, Italians and other immigrants from across the Atlantic. So, it was in that basement that Hank was first introduced to wine through the Chiantis and Bordeaux his father stocked for the neighborhood.

Of course, his daughter, Kathy, spent many years running winery hospitality programs at Failla, Signorello, Terra Valentine, Morlet and other properties in Napa Valley and this resulted in Hank putting together a pretty good stash of pretty good wines. Today, Hank is partial to rich, dry Cabernet and Merlot.

As for me, well, I’ll drink just about any type of wine. I just love the stuff.

I think men are more apt to gravitate toward wine when they attain fatherhood. Fatherhood tends to mature a man. Wine, like it or not, tends to be a drink that invites the more mature among us. It’s a table drink and the table is much more central to a father’s world than the single man. Wine is bottled in sharing form, and fathers tend to have partners with whom sharing in the natural state of being. And of course, wine is a drink that lends itself to longer horizons and fathers too are wont to play the long game.

Wine is also a great gift for Father’s Day. I didn’t get wine this year. My son, Henry, and Kathy presented me with a milkshake maker. They know me well. But did you know there is a relatively well-known concoction that combines chocolate milkshakes and red wine?

4 Scoops Vanilla Ice Cream
1/2 Cup Red Wine
2 Oz Brandy
2 Tbs Chocolate Syrup

• Combine the ice cream, red wine, brandy, and chocolate syrup in a blender.

• Blend on high for 30–45 seconds until thick, creamy, and smooth.

• Pour into a tall glass, top with a generous helping of whipped cream

I will not be making this with my new milkshake machine, my ice cream and my wine.

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The term “Pretext” refers to a “cover story.”

When someone uses a pretext, they put forward an explanation that sounds plausible or acceptable on the surface, but whose true purpose is to disguise their actual intention or the real facts of a situation.

Knowing this, consider the following:

-The state of Ohio allows its own retailers to ship wine directly to Ohio consumers and has no problem with those same retailers shipping wine to consumers in other states.

-The state of Ohio allows any winery located anywhere in the United States to take orders for wine over the Internet and ship that wine directly to Ohio consumers.

-The state of Ohio allows wineries across the country to get a permit to sell and ship wine directly to Ohio retailers, bypassing the wholesale tier entirely.

-The state of Ohio has successfully deterred and prosecuted unlicensed companies from shipping wine to Ohio consumers by using a federal law called the 21st Amendment Enforcement Act

Yet…

THE STATE OF OHIO HAS ASKED THE U.S. SUPREME COURT TO TAKE A RETAILER WINE SHIPPING CASE INVOLVING OHIO’S BAN ON THIS PRACTICE BECAUSE IF IT DOES NOT, SAYS OHIO, THEIR THREE-TIER SYSTEM WILL BE DISMANTLED BY RETAILERS SHIPPING “CHEAP” AND “UNREGULATED” WINE TO OHIO CONSUMERS.

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