Solar in the vineyards! Danger, danger!

The recently-random bits.

Hello and welcome to the beautiful fail season!

So, with the holidays coming, we all need to know if you like cheese? Like, really like cheese? Do you find it to be… an “addiction”? Well, we have bad news for you because if you’re addicted a) there is apparently a “cheese rehab” center out there but b) it costs $6,500 buckos a week to get that cheese monkey off your back. Cheese responsibly, people.

Now to the more important question of, do you find yourself addicted to wine? Well then, London has a solution to that which is to charge £100 corkage per bottle. If that doesn’t keep you off the grape sauce, nothing will. It does raise the question, if a restaurant fails to make enough money from food alone, is it a restaurant at all or simply an overpriced bar support system?

There’s always a lot of talk about the Unique Selling Point (USP) of various wines. Sessions and seminars. Consultants and conmen. Consumers and… more conmen. But apparently if one is in England, beyond the USP of being in England (they make wine, in England?!!), what’s unique is being “the only profitable English wine company” that’s ever existed. Somehow this is not the uniqueness we were probably looking for though.

Another fine hack job on the evils of wine at the New York Times makes the claim that people under 50 just might be getting more cancers due to wine and other alcohols. It just so happens to be blissfully ignorant about how much processed food people eat now, how little activity they get, how many more toxins are in the environment, and of course that people drink LESS now than they did 60 years ago. Oh, stupid facts, why do they always have to get in the way of contrived, clickbait writing?

From the Desk of That’s Not News!, it appears that 17th century Italians at the peak of the Renaissance were doing cocaine bumps long before sweaty mesh t-shirts at the disco became a thing. “Wow, that’s good medicine” is by far the understatement of the year and sounds far more appealing than a good bleeding.

From the Bureau of Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About This?!! apparently an Italian winery in Puglia put a large solar panel installation on their vineyard. No, that’s not a typo for “winery”. The panels are in the “vineyard”, as in the yard space where they grow the vines, England. The installation in question is able to produce 970kW (0.0008% of 1.21 gigawatts) and apparently allows them to save water, grow varieties otherwise not possible in the region, AND pushes the harvest date back out by several weeks.

All told, this is so, so much better than the other solution which was to have interns stand out in the vineyard with parasols all day, griping about it not being relevant experience and having to be reminded that at least they’re not interning at NOMA.

In what is a first for Galicia, they’re going to be distilling off their excess wine (ES) that’s been accumulating in the region as people around the world are discovering the beautiful embrace of sobriety and boredom. In not reaching out to the Consello de la Xunta, we cannot confirm that their main reasoning for this is that, “Rioja couldn’t have all the fun” but we shall assume as much.

You know that feeling when the diet center is just feeding you crap and you want to run away, but then you find out you're a 17kg cat and you get stuck in a slippers rack? If so, you know Russian cat, Kroshik's plight. This cat diet center is probably still cheaper than “cheese rehab” though.

Oliver “Big Dog” Styles puts forth the argument to end the “perfect score” in wine because honestly, does it really mean anything anymore? Who buys wines based upon scores? In fact, as Galicia has been asking, who buys wine at all?!!

What goes “wump” in the morning? Why the Betavan of course, cruising through the vines in search of its next sonic victim.

And the French are getting ahead of the wine glut by applying for funds to tear out 30,000ha of vines. As the article points out, “French people on average drink 40 litres per inhabitant, per year, compared to 120 litres of wine in the 1960s.” Did anyone ever stop to think “crazy” thoughts that maybe the rise in cancers is actually due to drinking less? ‘Cause, there are like these statistics and stuff that kinda seem to say that. You better start listening. Don’t make us viral this on Twitter!

We close with what is a horribly shocking article, in that the claim has been made to build up a wine region through terrorism! We at the CdC would like to emphatically state that no matter how difficult the current market state of wine is, we in no way condone the use of terror… oh... tourism. Ha ha, our bad. There will be no retractions. Get out.

Until we meet again, up in the cul of the cuvée.