Imagine this scenario…

You pour yourself a glass from a premium bottle, the aromatic liquid spilling forth with the tell-tale floral and stone fruit aromatics of high-quality Riesling. You take a long whiff, then a sip, swooshing the liquid around in your closed mouth to get all the volatile compounds going, noting the secondary aromas and overall presentation that identify the growing conditions of the vintage from which the grapes were harvested.

Then you pass the glass to your eight-year old daughter, who downs the rest of it unceremoniously.

This scenario can happen, with no ill effects to your pre-teen offspring, and all quite legally, if the juice happens to be from one of the $10 bottles made by the likes of Virginia’s Oakencroft Farm or Oregon’s Draper Valley Vineyard that are offering high-end, vitis vinifera grape juice – as reported earlier this month on USAToday.com.

As in unfermented grape juice. Like Welch’s, only made from vintage-dated Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Gewurztraminer, and the like. Navarro Vineyards has been doing it for decades, in fact.

Why am I mentioning this? Because I’m fascinated by it, for a number of reasons.

First off, if you have too many grapes on your hands this is a brilliant way to put them to potentially profitable good use. And while alcohol is an important element of body and even flavor, this is also potentially an amazing tool for introducing people (and kids!) to different fine wine grape varieties, without the buzz (apparently, keeping the grapes from fermenting is one of the primary challenges in the fine grape juice biz, by the way). And the juices could spice up recipes that otherwise call for wine (Navarro sort of suggests this via their Verjus cookbook).

I’m not sure I’ll ever look at Welch’s quite the same way again (even if it will be to pause momentarily at the refrigerated section of the grocery store to give silent thanks that those Concord grapes never reached fermentation)…

Cheers!

Before you flame me, Yes, I am already aware of the irony of today’s title.

I realize that some of you might have been trapped for the last several days under your collapsed wine racks and several hundred bottles of your collected vino. Or maybe you are just coming off a severe wine bender, Rip Van Winkle style, one where the hangover lasted for a few weeks. If you’re in any of those camps, I offer the following recap of some recent wine news:

• Blogger breaks story about Wine Advocate critic Jay Miller being in a potential scandal with MW Pancho Campo, regarding allegations of pay-to-play wine tasting/reviews in Spain (yes, that Jay Miller, the one who seems to always be in a story about a potential scandal).
• Chaos ensues on the global interwebs, WA’s Robert Parker sort-of threatens to sue bloggers, and then Jay Miller announces he is leaving the WA, but – ah-ha! – it had been planned all-along and is not actually the result of the blogosphere churning up possible evidence of a pay-to-play scandal.

[Editor's note: at least skim the above links, or the rest of this is not gonna make much sense.]

I can’t tell you if the pay-to-play allegations are true, but I can tell you that the Spanish wine biz seems to be quite relieved by the news of Miller’s departure, based on private correspondences I’ve had with people in the biz there (most of which amounts to them thinking that Jay was “terrible” – names withheld for obvious reasons!).

I’ve been conspicuously absent in saying anything about any of this stuff here on 1WD. Why? Because I don’t really give a rat’s ass, and feel compelled to talk about it now only because I’m getting asked why I’m not talking about. So before the irony gets infinitely recursive, here are the top three reasons why I haven’t been talking about it…

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I’ve been playing around with on-line music-and-cocktails-matching entertainment app Drinkify, and have concluded via completely non-scientific means that it is almost a total failure (at least, when it comes to one pairing in particular).

It’s fun, don’t get me wrong; it’s just that it offers me the booze-pairing “beer” (I use that term loosely) suggestion of Bud Light (!) when I tell it that I’m listening to RUSH – and that, my friends, is a FAILure so epic in size that its scope can only be measured in light years.

While Drinkify might be fun, the pairing of music with imbibing, at least when it comes to wine, isn’t simply a laughing matter: according to a story published on wired.com earlier this month, a recent study (led by Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University), showed some rather scientific evidence that our perception of a wine’s qualities is measurably influenced by whatever music happens to be playing in the background when we drink it.

And I, for one, think that odd bit of news is actually pretty… awesome…

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Everybody knows that I “love” the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board [ Editor’s note: this is a boldfaced lie; I think the PLCB acts like a Communist monopoly and therefore I actually hate the PLCB ].

At least, I loved the recent move by Governor Tom Corbett to appoint Joseph “Skip” Brion (that’s his real nickname, by the way) the new PLCB Chairman, since both Corbett and Brion appear to be in favor of privatizing the state Commonwealth’s monopoly alcohol sales system – and they’re supporting House Bill eleven (HB11) which seeks to amend the existing Liquor Code “providing for the privatization of sales of wine and spirits in this Commonwealth through abolition of the State Liquor Stores.”

But as much as I’d love to see privatization take hold and the free market rein when it comes to alcohol sales in my home state Commonwealth, it’s become clear to me that, technically speaking, HB11 is actually not in the best interests of PA’s wine-consuming public; I would describe HB11 as Bull Honkey. As in, a big, stinking, steaming load of Bull Honkey.

Why?  Two reasons, my vino-loving friends, neither of which portends any favorable outcomes from HB11 when it comes to actually letting the free market into the ring of PA’s liquor sales and distribution…

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