• Hope down under? All that gloom and doom seems less gloomy and doomy in Australia, thanks to a rapid and significant decline in the Australian dollar. Australian winemakers big and small have been getting hammered for the past couple of years, ever since their dollar was worth as much as the U.S. dollar. Over the last couple of weeks, though, the Aussie dollar has dropped to US$.90 and could get as low as 85 cents – still not the heyday of a decade ago, when it was worth 50 cents, but 15 percent is 15 percent. Why does that matter? Because a cheaper Aussie dollar makes Australian wines cheaper in the U.S.. Hence, they’ll sell more at higher margins.
• No more French wine blogging? A group of experts says one way to cut alcoholism in France is to outlaw wine blogging, a novel approach that assumes wine bloggers actually influence drinking habits. The French are so quaint, aren’t they? This is an amazing proposal, not only because wine is part of the French national identity, but because the French fought a particularly bloody revolution to guarantee liberty, equality and fraternity. Also, though I’m cutting myself in the throat here (pun sort of intended), it’s worth noting that general interest web sites that feature wine probably have more influence than wine blogs. Research for the cheap wine book found that the Wine Spectator’s site gets about one-third fewer visitors a month than TheHairpin, aimed at 20-something women, that does regular posts about wine.
• Best way to preserve open wine? And, in fact, this demonstrates the reach of non-wine blogs. There is a reasonably accurate article and great discussion on Lifehacker, another more or less general interest blog, about a subject wine blogs mostly ignore. Because, as I wrote in a comment to the post, we drink our wine after we open it and there isn’t usually any left over. I wonder how the French would regulate something like this.
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