Weekly Wine News Around the Web

Burgundian Legend Calls it Quits: Jacques Lardiere has decided to call it quits after making wine for the past 42 years, according to this report in Forbes magazine. Lardiere is ending a lengthy run at Maison Louis Jadot, a Burgundy, France-based operation that grew to offer over 100 different wines per vintage.

BevMo Invades WA: Taking advantage of Washington State’s recent privatization of alcohol sales, liquor store chain BevMo will soon be opening several new stores in the state, according to this report. This trend will be interesting to watch as companies take advantage of the new law to expand. It could make for a highly competitive alcohol sales market.

Short Supply Means Increased Vineyard Sales in CA: In an increasingly scarce market for grapes in Northern California, some have turned to vineyard sales to lock in supply, according to this Santa Rosa Press Democrat report. Grapes supplies for wine are currently tight, as fewer vineyards have been planted in recent years.

Machine vs. Hand: An interesting study done by researchers at Auckland University have found that grapes picked by machine produced higher levels of aromatic characteristics in an award winning Sauvignon Blanc from the Marlborough region than if they were picked by hand, as reported by Yahoo New Zealand Business. It is a standing belief that great wines must be pick by hand, to insure careful handling, in order to produce to high quality product.  Although the study only focused on sauvignon blanc, it showed that high quality can be retained using machines that harvest on a large scale.

Yellow Hops: In other southern hemisphere news, wine making behemoth from Australia, Yellow Tail, has just announced that they are now going to add beer to their production line. The Casella family, the force behind Yellow Tail, one of the world's largest selling wine brands, has built a huge brewery right next to their winery and which will be able to churn out 35K bottles of beer an hour, as reported by Stock and Land. We don't know if Yellow Tail will be Australian for beer, Mate, but based on the size of their initial foray into the beer world, the family hopes to take over about 5% of the country's beer market.