Honestly, I’ve had a very mixed experience with the clearance aisle. Our local wine and liquor shop will coordinate wine tastings on Friday and Saturday nights, but Matt and I have found it’s usually the cheap wine they’ve put on sale and are trying to move. We usually don’t take a bottle. In fact, until we stopped going altogether, it was usually an exercise in not spitting out bad wine.

But I’ve heard some great success stories. My mom’s liquor shop routinely has folks order a case and then decide against it, so the store owners crack open the case and sell it at a discount. I’ve seen wineries discount prior vintages to make room for newer bottles, and brought home some rather lovely wines as a result.

There is a fair amount of buzz (bad pun, sorry) about inexpensive wine on the blogsphere; the Frugal Wine Snob and The Wine Curmudgeon’s $10 Wine Hall of Fame come to mind.

But I haven’t seen much about discounted wine or fortuitous accidents. What have you found? Winemakers, have you had experiences like the ones Mr. McNichols describes?

Local bloggers are celebrating Regional Wine Week, an outgrowth of DrinkLocalWine.com, itself started and spearheaded by Dave McIntyre of Dave McIntyre’s WineLine and the Washington Post and Jeff Siegel of The Wine Curmudgeon. As part of the festivities, Mr. Siegel and Mr. McIntyre are challenging you to write a 47-word essay on local wine; Wine Compass, Swirl Sip Snark, and others have already taken part. And “you” does mean YOU: bloggers, blog readers, wine enthusiasts, wine drinkers, wine curious, wine skeptical, etc.

That’s my 47-word essay, up at the top. Agree? Disagree? Are you chiming in with an essay of your own, or celebrating Regional Wine Week in other ways?

I finally found information about volunteering at the Maryland Wine Festival next month, which again, I highly recommend (my tendency to say yes to volunteer gigs between the Potomac and the Mason-Dixon aside). While I’m not always a big people person, the chance to interact with people who truly love wine, and to interact in person with out a screen in between, was pretty darn cool.

There are several ways to volunteer: Check in with your favorite Maryland winery, and call or email them – many are looking for volunteers now. Many ask volunteers for a couple hours of work before you’re free to enjoy the festival.

You can also work the front gate – checking IDs, attaching wristbands, and handing out glasses. As per the press release from the Carroll County Government, you can “contact Roger Hardman, Volunteer Coordinator at 410-386-3891, or call the Farm Museum office at 410-386-3880″.

Hope to see you there!

The issue at hand is that wine consumers in Maryland cannot order a bottle of wine from an out of state retailer and have it shipped to their house. This is because Maryland law dictates that alcohol retailing in Maryland flows through the Three Tier System: producer-distributor-retailer-(you)

For more on the three tier system, read Tom Wark’s blog Fermentation. He talks about it a lot and he’ll describe it in better detail that I can.

The problem is that the liquor distributors (and some retailers) like things the way they are, so they oppose changes to the system.

Why are they against it?

The public reason

The final argument that they’re clinging to is that underage kids will have access to a world of wine which will be delivered to their door. Maryland will be helpless to enforce the age limit for purchasing alcohol. Society will descend into darkness and oblivion.

This is, of course, total bunk. No college kid is going to pay $7.99 plus $5.99 shipping for a bottle of Yellowtail to be delivered to his dorm room next week. It just isn’t going to happen. See previous post for more.

Second, UPS and FedEx will not just leave a bottle of wine lying around if you aren’t home to receive it. They require an adult to sign for the package if the package contains wine. I know through personal experience that both UPS and FedEx are extraordinarily vigilant about this.

The private reason

The distributors like things the way they are because it is profitable. Can’t blame them. If I were one of the few people entitled to buy alcohol at a discount then resell it to consumers at a significant markup, then I’d probably pull the “it ain’t broke don’t fix it card” too.

It is important to note this: proponents of direct wine shipping to Maryland are not trying to dismantle the three tier system and run distributors out of business. If direct shipping to Maryland becomes legal, distributors will still thrive doing what they do. They provide a service and fill a need to the retailers and restaurants and this need will continue to exist. Millions of Marylanders are still going to buy from their local shop. Very little will change.

Well, do we not have more important things to worry about?

Look, I’ll agree that this is a trivial issue. Maryland has real problems to deal with. Push this through and let’s get on with it.

Do we really have a chance?

In previous years, no. The bill hasn’t even made it out of committee. Now that some committee members have come on board, chairwoman of the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee is threatening to refuse to hear the issue at all. Essentially, she’s saying “well you guys won’t even get the chance to vote on it, because I don’t think it’s fit for a vote.” See previous coverage here and here and plenty of other places.

In short, unless the bill is voted on in committee, then there is absolutely no chance of it passing.

What can I do?

Write to your Maryland state Representative or Senator and let them know how you feel about the issue. Support Marylanders for Better Beer and Wine Laws for they are the ones on the front lines of this. Finally, if you really feel passionately about this, make note of who opposes the bill and vote accordingly come November.

Heard on @fiorewinery

21% off a case, serious stuff. None of this 10% nonsense that we’re normally accustomed to. Nor is it a sham where a store raises prices, then discounts from those inflated prices. Pick up a case to stock your cellar throughout the holidays. Better yet, if you’re in sales or some other job that requires you to thank a bunch of clients so that they continue to shovel you business, grab a case and hand them out as gifts. Fiore, you may have heard me say, is among the best values in Maryland wine.

Quoth the article:

“The wine doesn’t know what package it is in,” said W. R. Tish, a wine educator who writes a blog called Wineskewer. “It tastes the same whether it is in a plastic bottle, a plastic bladder inside a box, or a glass.”

I beg to differ. Plastic is more permeable than gas, so wine contained in plastic will oxidize faster. Wine may not know what it is packaged in, but air will figure it out and invade accordingly. Plastic will work fine for wine packged for short-term consumption. Anything longer than that and I’ll stick with my glass bottles and the Earth will have to deal with it.

Sorry, Earth.

Link to article.

So to get going, we’re looking for someone (maybe you) who really knows how to use Web 2.0 and Facebook and blogs and social media and YouTube and all sorts of good stuff like that — to tell the world about our wines and the place where we live: the Sonoma County Wine Country.

Did they hire a college freshman to intern for them? Did they pick up an outsourced freelancer to blog for them from around the globe? No, that would be boring (plus, I wouldn’t be writing about it)

we’re offering you a “Really Goode Job” — a six-month job paying $10,000 a month plus accommodations!

Murphy-Goode is offering a six-month paid job to work their blogs, twitter, and Internet marketing campaign. Let’s stop right here and give credit to Murphy-Goode and the employee that came up with this. NICE MOVE. Seriously. Love the innovation, love the thinking on it. They’re getting tons of buzz, everyone is applying, and they have a great chance at landing a prominent wine blogger to come on and run their social media marketing. The blogger has an instant network of friends with him, and they have a jump start bringing in Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

So who is in the running? 269 people, as of this writing. The applicants submit video applications and us, the unwashed masses, get to vote on who we want to work for them. Pretty cool.

I humbly endorse two candidates:

Hardy from Dirty South Wine. Hardy writes one of the few wine blogs that I actually read. He knows his way around the Internets but doesn’t get too excited about all the madness. After hearing about the job offer, he up and flew from ATL to SFO to meet with Murphy-Goode at their event. Murphy-Goode would have a hard time finding a better man to handle their electronic empire.

Here is Hardy’s video.

Rick Bakas of Open Wine Consortium and RickBakas.com. Rick knows his way around all things Tweet, has been influential is getting Wine Bloggers together, and spearheaded the inaugural season of the Open Wine Consortium Fantasy Football league (which I won, nooch).

View Rick’s video here.

Don’t take my word for it, flip through the applications and vote with your heart.

…located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains on 117 acres, with a fully stocked 7 acre lake and a 3500sqft house.

It’s all salivating in a romantic, quit-my-job-and-start-a-winery sort of way, which is the angle they’re shooting for I suppose.

Realtor listing, with a ton of pictures, is here.

I’ve never even heard of the winery, anyone tried the juice?

It was only a matter of time that this invaded the world of wine. Crushpad sent an email to inboxes across the land this morning touting their new wine release: Bailout Napa Cabernet. Crushpad had some extra barrels lying around, perhaps having over-anticipated demand for boutique wine making… in….

wait for it….

these difficult economic times.

Yes! Awesome! Difficult economic times, you guys! Sweet.

Here’s the deal, the price is $39 per bottle and for each 100 point drop in the Dow between now and release bottling in August of 2009, the price of the wine drops $2 per bottle. And, you’re protected on the upside. If the Dow goes on a big run, you won’t be paying $100 a bottle.

Ooh, and there it is, right on the The Wine page

Plus, this is a great way for us to have a bit of fun in these dour economic times

Winner!

The kicker is that the price of the wine is $39 and the price starts moving with the Dow on the day you buy it. You can time this. Wait for a huge run up in stocks then sell your shares and go running to Crushpad to order your wine. Warren Buffet could buy up all the Bailout wine, move the market by himself, then have a sweet deal on his hands.

I have no doubt the wine will be good. I suspect that it’ll be closer in quality to $39 than the $75 that they’re hyping it up to be. Crushpad does have a history of getting some serious fruit. One wine maker in the Anderson Valley once told me that he “has no idea how Crushpad gets the fruit from the vineyards that they do.”

Bailout is a blend of fruit from premier Napa vineyards in Oakville, Mt. Veeder and Pritchard Hill that routinely go into $75 to $275 wines.

Sounds good to me, though not good enough to plunk down $100 for a two-bottle gift pack. I don’t think the Dow is going this way or that way with any resolve over the next year or so, so the odds of getting a steal are slim.

Bailout Wine product page.