mhicken November 3rd, 2009
Sanity has prevailed at City Hall. The City of Vancouver has withdrawn the proposed “anti-wine” bylaw and it will not be considered in its original form. The bylaw would have required restaurants to monitor food and liquor sales and ensure that food sales always exceeded liquor sales in any 8 hour period. The law was administratively unworkable and could have seriously affected the sale of fine wines which would have skewed sales to liquor in the absence of huge expenditures on corresponding amounts of food. There will now be a “rethink” and further consultation with the industry.
Tags: bylaw, city, food, law, liquor, Restaurants, vancouver, wine
mhicken October 23rd, 2009
In two unrelated pieces of news today:
Amazon.com is apparently giving up on its fledgling wine business. This will likely be welcome news for wine retailers in the U.S. who would have had to compete with Amazon. However, it demonstrates the extreme difficulties of dealing with the post-prohibition patchwork regulatory system in the U.S. which make the inter-state shipping of wine a legal nightmare.
Speaking of nightmares and just in time for Halloween, the City of Vancouver has put forth a nightmarish bylaw proposal for city restaurants under which they would be required to continuously check their liquor and food sales such that liquor sales never exceed food sales in any 8 hour period. The proposed law seems ridiculous from a policy perspective as well as administratively unworkable. Theoretically, a restaurant would have to stop selling expensive bottles of wine during the evening if they thought that food sales might not match the wine sales total. Who dreams up this stuff? And, more to the point, why is taxpayers’ money being spent on this?
Tags: amazon, bylaws, food, law, liquor, Restaurants, sales, vancouver, wine
mhicken September 4th, 2008
As you will likely have read, Mission Hill Winery is on a bit of a tear at the moment, having just won an award for Best International Icewine at the London-based International Wine Challenge. Earlier in the year, the winery won Wine Access’ award for Best Canadian Winery. Travel & Leisure magazine also bestowed its winery restaurant with high accolades, ranking it in the top five winery restaurants in the world.
Of course, huge congratulations are in order for Anthony Von Mandl (owner), John Simes (winemaker) and Michael Allemeier (chef). These sorts of accomplishments also provide great benefit to the BC wine industry as a whole particularly in terms of international recognition for the Okanagan. If you have seen the movie “Bottle Shock”, you will have been reminded what affect and impact the “Judgement of Paris” had on the entire California wine industry. While only a few bottles were involved in that tasting, the results reverberated throughout the international wine world and gave Napa instant international recognition. Mission Hill’s accomplishments will likely have similar ripple effects for the BC industry as a whole.
In addition, the great press fits in well with the National Wine Export Strategy intiative (partly driven by Mission Hill’s Dan Zepponi) to establish beachheads of international recognition for BC table wine in key fine wine markets worldwide.
Tags: awards, internet, marketing, Restaurants, wine
