JUNE 28, 2024 – Winners have been announced in the 17th annual Women’s International Wine & Spirits Competition (IWWSC). The competition, which took place June 10-12 in Santa Rosa, Calif., was founded on the premise that the majority of wine purchased for home consumption is bought by women. The IWWSC judging panels consist entirely of professional women in the wine and spirits industries — winemakers, distillers, marketers, buyers, sommeliers, educators and journalists.  “As always, the International Women’s Wine & Spirits Competition shined a spotlight on hundreds of deserving wines,” says Debra Del Fiorentino, owner of Wine Competitions Management & Production, which organizes and presents IWWSC. “And even though entry is open to all winemakers regardless of gender, I found it gratifying that six of this year’s sweepstakes wines were created by women. And our overall wine winner also was named Best Woman Winemaker

When the estate winery Lakewood Vineyards found themselves with an especially abundant 2021 harvest and a vision to create an easy-drinking product with the pizzazz to compete with the seltzer crowd, they turned to their Waterloo Container sales team. A solution for how Lakewood could offer an effervescent low-alcohol beverage with appeal to younger consumers would bubble up from our regular conversations with the winery. A favorable price point would be important for Lakewood’s new product launch, and our team quickly identified a stock bottle option aligned with their goals: A pressure-rated 375 ml mini with a twist-off crown cap for their new ready-to-drink single serving Rosé spritzer. Sidekick, which features the likeness of Fizzy the Australian shepherd, companion to Lakewood’s assistant winemaker, has become the top seller at their Wine Wagon, a by-the-glass mobile bar. Sidekick is also gaining market share in the New York City metro area. For every bottle of

Afternoon Brief, August 23rd

Becky Wasserman, American Champion of Burgundy's Small Wineries, Dies at 84: From her farm near Beaune, Wasserman represented small winegrowers from around France to U.S. importers and consumers, and was a valuable mentor...

Everyone associated with the wine industry knows that labor has become more expensive, and it seems that wages are accelerating upward. The pool of largely unskilled or untrained labor is drying up, while those who remain available want more money for their work—and are getting it. Hence, there is absolutely no doubt that vineyards will increasingly adopt mechanical means to replace operations traditionally done by hand. Fortunately, necessity drives invention and innovation, and there are better versions of vineyard machines available all the time. Buying this equipment requires a significant cash investment, so growers will be willing to do so only when the return on the investment makes good business sense. But it is a little more complicated than simply substituting a machine for a human, especially in the fine-wine production sector. We have convinced ourselves that hand-farming is better than machine-farming, and wineries and winemakers are often reluctant to yield to the g

  Posted by Laura Ness of Spirited Magazine | Mar 31, 2020 | Packaging, Equipment, Wine, Production    You have to be just slightly natters to engage in a livelihood that can literally blow up on you—and yet, the sisterhood (and brotherhood) of bubbles runs deep. That’s probably why it’s considered the ne plus ultra of winemaking. There are many ways to sparkle a beverage, but méthode Champenoise is considered the highest form of sparkling art. It’s a process that’s been painstakingly perfected, by hand, over the centuries. It requires two entirely separate fermentations, the second of which occurs in the bottle, which is where the magic happens. Says Todd Graff, winemaker and general manager at Frank Family Vineyards in Napa Valley, “The secondary fermentation in the bottle is the trickiest part, because however many bottles you’re making, each is an individual fermentation.” Méthode Champenoise is time consuming, filled with repetitive tedium, complicated (often by many months o