There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal last week about a restaurant in New York that is not just waiving corkage on Sundays to encourage customers to bring their own wine, they're celebrating the idea by discussing each wine with the customer and giving them a corkscrew to keep. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we recently had dinner in Carmel at a restaurant that charged us $45/btl corkage. They had a nice view but....$45? Ouch.

     In a year where restaurants are dropping like flies, we wonder what you're experiencing with your favorite restaurants. Is the economic pinch pushing customer service back to the forefront where it belongs?

     One of the better and most established wine blogs out there (est. 1994) is the one written by Alder Yarrow who posted a pretty amazing report a few days ago you probably haven't heard about.  Now, growing up with a box of wine in the fridge labelled "Chablis", I always assumed that it was just another kind of wine or "Daddy's Happy Juice."  But later in life when I began to appreciate wine, I began to understand why the French were really pissed off that we threw around their centuries old hallowed parcels of land as mere marketing terms for sugary wine (fyi - we're slowly but surely pulling my Dad away from the dark side).   Grand Cru Chablis is about as good as white wine can get on our lovely earth and there it is printed on a box just to sound French.  Add to this the fact that our wine industry also stole "Champagne" and "Burgundy" and it definitely adds up to something pretty egregious.  But as of last week, Europe seems to be fighting back.   If the following terms are on a wine label, that wine can not legally be imported or sold in Europe any longer:

chateau

classic

clos

cream

crusted/crusting

fine

late bottled vintage

noble

ruby

superior

sur lie

tawny

vintage

vintage character

Now let's list the wineries this will effect just by winery name:

Chateau Montelena

Chateau St. Jean

Chateau Souverein

Chateau Sinnet

Chateau Potelle

Clos Pegase

Clos du Bois

Clos du Val

Clos LaChance

Clos Pepe

     Perhaps this is a hangover from the "Freedom Fries" days in '02  or as Alder suggests,  "a bit of sneaky revenge against Chateau Montelena thirty years after the fact".  Many of these terms should be protected but "Chateau"?  Chateau means "estate".  Are Mexico and Spain going to ban "Casa"?   "Vintage"???   This all just really sucks because we were about to bottle and export our first wine called "Chateau Crusty - A Classic Ruby Vintage Superior to Cream"  Guess that one is going down the drain.  Bummer.