Napa Cabbage To the Tune of $1.87 Million

Cabernet sauvignons, which accounted for 129 of the 181 lots offered, dominated the Napa Valley Vintners' annual trade-only wine auction that pulled in $1.87 million.

Sixty-seven bidders bought 181 lots of wine, including five-case, 10-case and 20-case lots at the annual event, which raises funds to support the nonprofit group's efforts to promote and protect the Napa Valley, CA, brand. That represented a 10 percent jump in volume over the prior year, and overall nearly 1,200 cases were up for auction.

"This is our annual bake sale where we raise money for our association's programs," John Skupny, owner of St. Helena's Lang & Reed Wine Co. and co-chair of the event, told reporters.

More than 1,000 winemakers, restaurateurs, retailers and wine wholesalers attended the event, held at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone. The top bidder was Gary Fisch, owner of Gary's Wine and Marketplace in New Jersey, who paid $220,500 for 16 lots totaling 115 cases.

Top lots sold included:

• Rombauer Vineyards ($85,000).
• Shafer Vineyards ($75,000).
• Silver Oak Cellars ($39,000).
• Paraduxx ($37,000).
• Beringer Vineyards ($35,000).
• Lewis Cellars ($32,000).

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Ignoring Grapes May Help Aussie Wineries

Australia has been cursed with good grape crops for several years. The bumper crops have resulted in a glut on the market and overproduction of wine, which is depressing prices.

Now, a simple solution may be in the offing: a 7% reduction from the 2005 harvest if enough grapes are left to wither on the vine, according to the Australian Wine and Brandy Corp.

Lawrie Stanford, the corporation's information and analysis manager, told News.com.au, "The expected average yields would be viewed with some relief by many winemakers holding excess wine in stock. This will allow wine reserves to be reduced to more reasonable levels while the good quality grapes from the 2006 harvest will enhance Australia's competitiveness in vital overseas markets."

About 20 per cent of the 2006 harvest had been picked, predominantly white grapes and a small amount of red grapes.

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Chinese Wine Taking Wing

If you're in a major airport looking for an unusual last-second gift, you might think about a bottle of Dragon Seal wine.

Dragon Seal? Not exactly a household wine brand in the U.S., but the made-in-China wine is about to become available for the first time ever in some duty-free airport stores. Camus, the cognac distributor that also is the world's leading operator of tax-free shops, signed a 10-year contract with Dragon Seal to sell its wines in 50 of its duty-free outlets globally within six months.

The French company already has deals with top Chinese liquor companies Moutai, Gu Yue Long Shan and Chunghwa Cognac, a liquor jointly developed by Camus and a leading Chinese cigarette company. These liquors are already on Camus' store shelves. Among other wines, Camus will handle Dragon Seal's signature Osmanthus King wine.

Camus President Cyril Camus has had a long interest in China. His wife, Isabelle, is from China and he is fluent in Chinese. He told the China Daily that he likes Dragon Seal's use of only grapes grown in China.

"The company follows the French concept of one terroir, which is important to guarantee the consistent quality of wine," he said.

Terroir is a certain region belonging to a specific vineyard and sharing the same type of soil, weather conditions and winemaking savoir-faire.

By 2010, Dragon Seal hopes to export 18 per cent of its output annually. Its current foreign customer base now is in France, Germany and Belgium, but it is targeting Britain, Sweden, Denmark and Norway this year.

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Brits Banning Smoking In Pubs, Elsewhere

If you're a smoker headed for England, enjoy lighting up in a pub, restaurant or any other public place for now. That activity will be banned in a year or less.

Parliament has voted, 384 to 184, for a total ban on smoking in indoor public places, something that will end the tradition of the smoky British pub.

Neighbor Ireland instituted the same ban in March 2004. The same will occur in Scotland and Northern Ireland over the next year, and factions in Wales are debating the issue.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's government had supported a partial ban that still would have allowed smoking in private members' clubs and pubs that do not serve food.

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Wine Glut An EU Emergency

Wine may become a worldwide drink of choice just for its improving dollar value.

On top of Australian grape growers announcing a bumper crop that may further depress that nation's wine over-supply, a glut of European wine has caused the European Commission to call an emergency meeting to figure out what to do with the surplus.

The EU says there is a surplus of 4 billion bottles of wine, and it could grow if competition from what it calls "new world wines" continues cutting into European wineries' sales.

According to the London Sunday Telegraph, the 150 representatives at the summit will be asked to present options to avoid the unpopular practice distilling millions of bottles of cheap table wine into industrial alcohol in an effort to reduce supply and boost prices.

Some 3 billion bottles of wine last year were processed into industrial alcohol, but the price remained depressed, officials said.

European taxpayers subsidize the wine industry each year by up to $1.7 billion, the Telegraph said.

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Idaho May Ease Shipping Restrictions

Legislation cleared an Idaho House panel on Tuesday that would allow out-of-state wineries to ship up to 24 cases a year directly to customers in the state for personal consumption as long as the wineries doing the shipping buy a $50 Idaho permit.

If approved, that would make Idaho the latest state to loosen up on direct wine shipping. The proposed process follows guidelines of the Wine Instititute, which represents 800 California wineries. Consumers buying wine under this method would not be allowed to re-sell it. That means restaurants, for example, would not be able to buy wines that way then sell them to customers. Plus, Idaho wine exporters would be subject to other states' laws.

The legislation now has been cleared to undergo full House-floor debate. If it passes, out-of-state wineries would pay Idaho sales and excise taxes on such transactions. That's about $250,000 annually. The state has not been collecting taxes on out-of-state wine sales. There would be no limit on wine bought directly from Idaho vineyards or wine-tasting rooms, and taken home by the purchaser.

And most Idaho wineries are too small to have their bottled beverages shipped through established distributors, Ron Bitner of Bitner Vineyards told the Associated Press.

"Once you get below 5,000 cases a year, it's hard" to get the interest of distributors, said Bitner (seen here with wife Mary), whose 12-acre, 1,000-case winery offers wines made from riesling, cabernet and syrah grapes. "You can't fill the distributor's pipeline. With the economies of scale, we need to be selling retail."

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Maryland Wineries In Big Trouble

Come March 31, Maryland wineries will be prevented from directly selling their wines to retail stores and restaurants.

The impending ban, based on a ruling by the state comptroller's office, would financially threaten most of the state's 22 wineries, which rely on orders from retailers and restaurants and cannot afford to go through a distributor. Seventy percent of Maryland wines are distributed by the wineries to retail stores and restaurants, according to the Maryland Wineries Association.

"It's a death knell for the smallest wineries," said Kevin Atticks, association executive director.

He defines small wineries as those which produce fewer than 40,000 gallons of wine per year, which applies to 18 of the state's wineries.

The comptroller's administrative ruling, according to the Baltimore Business Journal, "is essentially an interpretation of existing Maryland law and not a new law, said Gerald Langbaum, counsel for the comptroller's office and a state assistant attorney general. Though Maryland wineries had been selling directly for years, a new interpretation of the law was required in response to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2005, Langbaum said.

"The ruling declared that states could not favor their own wineries over out-of-state vintners with regards to the distribution of wine. 'No one wants to put anyone out of business,' Langbaum said."

The ruling also was issued in response to a lawsuit filed against the state in 2005. In it, a Pennsylvania winery and a Silver Spring, MD, resident alleged that Maryland's sales laws, which allow in-state wineries to sell directly to retailers and restaurants while preventing out-of-state wineries from doing so, violates the U.S. Constitution.

Maryland wineries can sell to consumers, retailers and restaurants. Out-of-state wineries must go through a distributor.

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Fire Hits Napa's Oakville Winery

An historic wine cellar at the Silver Oaks Cellars' Oakville, CA, winery was destroyed by fire Thursday. Damage to the 7,000-square-foot facility was estimated in the millions of dollars.

Although the main part of the winery sustained only minor smoke and heat damage, the historic part of the structure that had been used to store wine barrels, marketing materials, merchandise and maintenance equipment, was heavily damaged.

"The firefighters did an amazing job to keep it from going to the main structure," said Capt. John Lovie of the California Department of Forestry. "The owners told us their loss was in the millions."

Officials believe the fire began in a Dumpster. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is assisting in the investigation. It took several hours for about 50 firefighters to extinguish the blaze.

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Wine And A Movie

French movie star Gerard Depardieu has played many roles -- soldier, cardinal, chef, secret agent, musketeer -- but it is possible the role of winemaker may rival all those parts for the sheer passion he throws into the job.

Depardieu was in Kiev, capital city of Ukraine, to meet with President Viktor Yushchenko and his wife, Katerina, at their country house (seen here). The first order of business was to seal a deal to work with a Ukranian film studio on "Taras Bulba," a movie project about a Cossack chieftain who fought the Poles to regain his homeland. (Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis co-starred in a 1962 film of the same name.)

But Depardieu, a fairly well-known winemaker back in France, made no secret of his interest in Ukraine's Crimean vineyards, according to MosNews.com, and said he had brought a group of experts with him. They want to assess the possibility of producing wine with Ukrainian grapes and French technology.

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