Bummer squared

1. The blue-law shakeup bill was shot down in committee yesterday. This means still no liquor on Sunday and still no wine in the grocery store.

2. I'm detoxing this week. Mostly because I'm buh-roke, but also because it's good to every now and give the liver a break. So no tasting notes this week (I haven't done them in a while anyway). We'll see how long I can last.

News of note

I'm sitting here doing my Tuesday-night thing: Sipping wine and perusing blogs and reading my e-mails, trying to getting caught up on things I've missed.

I've just cracked open a bottle of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, and the first scent that hit my nose was that of buttered popcorn. I've got a glass poured, and even though I can smell the fruit now, I still can't shake the scent of popcorn. Is that weird?

Anyway two interesting things happening in the wine world today:

1. Ernest Gallo, the famous winemaker, has died.

2. Pinko commie Nashville blogger Sean Braisted has started a website that will track new developments in the legislative quest to de-crappify Tennessee liquor laws. There is pending legislation that would allow wine sales in grocery stores, and allow liquor sales on Sundays.

I'm adding it to the sidebar for easy access. Kudos to Sean!

Oenophilic thievery

Kristin sends along this fascinating story to me, about a huge wine heist in California in which more than 400 bottles were taken from a private collection, totaling about $100,000 in value.

Unlike missing art and antiquities, hot wine has no official registry. “Something like an Amber alert would be very useful,” said George Derbalian, the president of Atherton Wine Imports, an importer of Burgundy and Bordeaux.
Theresa Lawless, a manager for the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company, in Novato, Calif., one of several major American insurers of private wine collections, said loss of wine was typically a result of fire or power failures, not theft. “But this will definitely make people think twice,” Ms. Lawless said.

Wine cellar designers are increasingly installing fingerprint and voice recognition systems and crisscrossing laser beams that trigger alarms (à la the movie “Entrapment” with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones), said Tod Ban, a wine cellar designer in Atlanta who recently completed such a cellar for a private collector with 27,000 bottles.

I like wine, but I just can't imagine a bottle of anything — liquid gold, even — that would merit such measures. Can someone explain to me what makes a wine so valuable that it would require Hollywood-inspired security measures?