Is It Too Soon to Rant Again?

I asked Stefania that via email at lunch today. She said just “as long as you alternate the rants and don’t bash the industry too much”.

I had this posting in mind:

http://stefaniawine.blogspot.com/2010/04/public-events.html

It explained why we won’t do public tasting events any more. Since that posting we’ve been invited to about a dozen public events. I think it’s time to modify our policy some. We will only do public events that do not charge the winery to attend. Of course that’s like saying we’ll only give away free wine to people named Salma Hayek who stop by our house. We’re pretty sure Selma is not dieing to stop by, and a public wine event that doesn’t charge the wineries is about as rare as having a Hollywood starlet come by for a visit.

I was thinking about that reading the Rolling Stone last night. Which by the way the Rolling Stone has the very best political and foreign affairs writing in the country today. Even if you don’t like the political views, no other publication comes close to the depth and impact of the reporting going on at the Stone. Anyway, back to the main rant, there was a column on all the summer rock festivals.

It got me thinking. Do they charge the rock bands to play at those events? Do the promoters tell the bands: “We’ve got a huge audience of your target market lined up to come, just give us $10000 and we’ll charge them $50 each and let you play for them”?

The wine is the attraction at a wine tasting isn’t it? If you had a wine tasting with no wine, would anyone attend? It just seems we’ve been doing it backwards in the wine industry for a long time.