Here’s an interesting twist: a South African winemaker sent 20 cases of its newest wine to loyal customers on consignment, and then asked them to evaluate the wine and pay what they thought it was worth.  The “big reveal” is that the average return price was greater than the price the winemaker would have set without such market knowledge.

• First read  in Springwise

This reminds me of a story I read last year about Karma Kitchen, an Indian restaurant in Berkeley, CA where customers pay what they want.  While trying to remember the name of Karma Kitchen for this post, I found a few other instances of such restaurants in the UK.  This article about the UK restaurants was from 2005, and it would be interesting to know if they are still open.

Edouard Moueix is interviewed about the history of Moueix wines (Petrus, Hosanna, Le Fleur Petrus, Magdelaine, Trotanoy, etc.), his family, critics, and the evolution of wine-making at Grape Radio.  Terrific stuff….

Thankfully someone has already assembled an extraordinary list of wines, martinis, cocktails, and quotes about them from all of the James Bond movies. Thank you Lisa Shea!

http://lisashea.com/hobbies/bond/

Well, not quite, but close.  A company out of the France, Wine Side, is selling ‘taster’ wines in what essentially look like test tubes…just imagine, Petrus-in-a-tube.

http://springwise.com/weekly/2008-04-16.htm#wineside

Paul D, one of our members, sent this article yesterday about how HP and Kodak are getting into the game of preventing (or at least thwarting) counterfeit wines.  Counterfeiting wine (like any other precious product) is a big business – Wine Spectator estimates that 5% of all rare wines sold through secondary markets are counterfeit.  Too bad those wines are directly correlated to the 5% of wines that on average are corked!