Napa Valley Vintners Announces Cyril Chappellet to Lead 2024 Board of Directors

12/20/2023 – Saint Helena, CA – The board of directors of the Napa Valley Vintners (NVV) nonprofit association has elected Cyril Chappellet, President and CEO of Chappellet Vineyard as Board Chair […]

While associated with fun and frivolity, sparkling wine is a complex wine of many moving parts that requires serious skill to make. We catch up with some of the leading lights in the fizz industry, from Champagne, Spain and England, to find out the secrets of their craft and the challenges surrounding creating a consistent sparkling wine style in an ever-changing climate. Synonymous with celebration, sparkling wines are easy to enjoy but challenging to create. Crafting quality fizz requires a skilled hand, well-trained nose, razor-sharp intuition and nerves of steel come harvest time, when deciding on the perfect moment to pick feels like a game of Russian roulette. Cellar masters are the wizards of the wine world, able to create a consistent style of wine each year from hundreds of elements amid increasingly erratic weather conditions. They have to be time travellers too, projecting themselves into the future when tasting aggressively acidic base wines, working out how they will harmo

California is one of the world’s largest wine regions, representing more than 80 percent of the wine grown in the United States. The state’s massive wine industry is also engaged in efforts to lower its environmental impact and improve sustainability amid a prolonged drought, wildfires and rising energy costs. Few regions better understand the importance of water conservation and renewable energy than Southern California. In Temecula Valley, where the sun shines an average of 276 days of the year, wineries are increasingly focused on harnessing solar energy and using water more efficiently. Robert Renzoni Vineyards is one of the region’s leaders on sustainability. Robert is always searching for ways to operate the business more efficiently, whether that’s using water conservation techniques or employing an environmentally friendly method of growing grapes that draws on the power of the sun. “We are about to be labeled the very first and only 100 percent s

Wineshipping LLC acquired Pack n’ Ship Direct, 24Seven Enterprises & Vin-Go a little over a year ago, creating the nation’s largest direct-to-consumer logistics provider with 2.6 million square feet of temperature-controlled warehouse space throughout the country. The company, which shipped close to 100 million bottles of wine last year, employs roughly 1300 people.  Chief Executive Eric Lewis joined Wineshipping just prior to the acquisition after working in direct-to-consumer fulfillment and technology for a decade. He was the first employee in fulfillment for Amazon in California, establishing a presence in Southern California before joining Google. More recently, he was SVP of Operations for Casper, which sells mattresses DTC. He worked in manufacturing with Black and Decker and Ford so has experience with engineering and automation as well.  In an interview with Wine Business Monthly, Lewis discussed how the company handled the COVID-19 crisis, managing g