Going upscale: people are spending more money on wine

[Roy Hersh]

Post-recession green light for wine spending, with some interesting facts and stats: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 1H989R.DTL

[Andy Velebil]

I wouldn't say post-recession just yet as we still haven't made a major recovery from all that I've read and seen so far. The one thing that concerns me is the article, and other wine news I get, shows that more wineries are being sold, wines aren't selling and they are sitting on large unsold stocks, wineries are laying off, reducing their overhead, cutting back on products made, etc. What i'd like to know is where did that light up-tick come from? Was it discounted Champagne? Older vintages producers have been stuck with which were discounted to sell fast? I'd like to see the hard numbers broken down because any stat can be tweaked to what they want.

[Roy Hersh]

No argument that we're not out of the woods just yet, but plenty of indictors are in place that 2011 will see a considerably better year than the past 30 months. Growth will be slow ... but from what I am reading we've passed the "bottom" and things will begin slowly rebounding from here. We've already seen the confidence amongst the people who are putting their money into the stock market and retail spending, corporate profits and many other indiactors are positive. It will have to eventually translate into a net jobs gain and uptick in housing starts too. Now back to Port.