Laurent Drouhin from Joseph Drouhin Vineyard in Burgundy will appear at the Bacchus Wine Shop on Tuesday, September 19, 2006. You will have the opportunity to taste 9 selected wines from the Drouhin portfolio (which includes Chablis, Meursault, Puligny Montrachet, Chorey Les Beaune, Chambolle Musigny and Echezeaux).  Any Burgundy fans will appreciate this tasting (and for $15, you can’t beat it). Sign up here. 

The Wall Street Journal has a write-up today of the sweeping changes coming to the wine industry in the US, thanks to deregulation of how wine is sold through wholesalers and the state by state upheaval of archaic inter/intra-state rules prohibiting wine sales. I also learned the Costco is the biggest wine seller in the country.

In the end, these changes mean better wine pricing for us.

Interesting article from the NYTimes yesterday that dissects the ‘market moving’ associated with getting a score above or below the 90pt threshold from wine critics, how the 100 pt system was invented, and its shortcomings.

Today’s WSJ has an important article on the rise of wine counterfeiting (of the likes of Sassacaia, Lafite Rothschild, Penfolds Grange). The sad part may be summed up by the last line in the article:

Claudio Gufoni, a 59-year-old wine enthusiast who lives in Santa Croce sull’Arno, east of Pisa, was the client who was duped into buying more than 100 bottles of the bogus Sassicaia. Although prosecutors confiscated most of his fake bottles as evidence, a few were left behind. Mr. Gufoni says he now serves them to unsuspecting guests: “No one has noticed the difference.“