Wine Producers, Growers, & Labels

Anyone who has tried to buy wine over the internet may be well aware of the obstacle course of wine shipping laws tripping up oenophiles all over the U.S. today.

Unless you are fortunate enough to live in what is referred to as a “reciprocal” state, it may quite literally take an act of congress for you to buy a bottle of that great boutique wine you tried during your wine country vacation last year.

IntoWine recently sat down with Charles Gill, CEO of WineMetrics, to discuss what is an impressive feat to anyone who loves wine, analytics, or both. WineMetrics has assembled an enormous and comprehensive database aggregating the wine lists ofrom restaurants across the US. The resulting data is useful to restaurants and of course wine distributors and producers looking for outlets to sell their wines. To the pedestrian wine drinker, the findings are simply fascinating.

WineMetrics has compiled extensive data detailing the wines that occupy wine lists in restaurants across the nation, from the Olive Garden in Dayton, Ohio to the local French bistro in Lower Manhattan. Acquiring this data must have been a laborious process. How did you go about it?

Much of it is acquired by our distributor clients but a great many restaurants feature their wine lists on their websites, which we utilize. Often we just contact the account and ask for it.

What surprised you as you started assessing the data?

When talk turns to Napa Valley royalty, Robert Mondavi and the Mondavi family indisputably qualify as the ruling monarchy of the Napa Valley –and frankly the US- wine industry. With an almost biblical or Shakespearean flair, the Mondavi family story of the last 100 years is one of passion, pettiness, family squabbling, wild success, dramatic failure, and of course, wine. In her new book, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, author Julia Flynn delivers a masterful narrative on the Mondavi clan. IntoWine.com recently had the privilege of chatting with Julia about the book and the evolution of the Mondavi family story.

Each year at 12:01 AM on the third Thursday of November, millions of bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau begin a journey from a little French village to locales across the globe. Wine stores and cafes enthusiastically greet these shipments with signs and banners proclaiming "Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!" "The New Beaujolais has arrived!". With this begins the annual celebration of the arrival of the French wine Beaujolais Nouveau, a celebration steeped in tradition, frivolity, grandeur, legend, and of course, fabulous wine.