Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/754815
8 WINES&VINES December 2016 A member of Wine Communications Group Inc. President & Publisher Chet Klingensmith Chairman Hugh Tietjen Publishing Consultant Ken Koppel Associate Publisher Tina Vierra Publishing Assistant Tiffany Maxwell EDITORIAL Editor Jim Gordon Managing Editor Kate Lavin Senior Editor Andrew Adams Senior Correspondent Paul Franson Contributing Editor Jane Firstenfeld Northwest Correspondent Peter Mitham Columnists Grapegrowing: Cliff Ohmart and Glenn T. McGourty Contributing Writers Laurie Daniel, Richard Smart, Richard Carey, Chris Stamp, Andrew Reynolds, Craig Root, Ray Pompilio, Andy Starr, Fritz Westover Practical Winery & Vineyard (PWV) Editor Don Neel Wine East Editor Linda Jones McKee DESIGN & PRODUCTION Graphic Designer Rebecca Arnn DATABASE DEVELOPMENT AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Vice President—Data Management Lynne Skinner Project Manager Liesl Stevenson Database & Web Development James Rust, Peter Scarborough EDITOR'S LETTER THIS ISSUE WRAPS UP Wines & Vines' coverage of the North American wine industry for 2016. From where we sit it's been a great year. Most grapegrowers and winery owners made good money in 2016, as consumer demand kept growing and supplies of grapes and wine were sufficient but not in a surplus situation—balanced, in other words. And balance is a good thing for the business of wine, just as it is for the taste profile of an individual wine. For the third year in a row, the December issue cover story reviews the best and biggest stories of the year. Graphic designer Rebecca Arnn put together a luxurious-looking cover using her studio shot of an elegantly packaged bottle of Inniskillin ice wine, which symbolizes the biggest deal of the year. We chose "2016: Year of the Deal," as the main cover headline because it truly was a year dominated by high-priced mergers and acquisitions activity in the industry. Senior editor Andrew Adams wrote the "year of the deal" piece on pages 30-31 based on several writers' contributions throughout the year. The Inniskillin bottle represents the divestiture by Constellation Brands of all its Canadian wine holdings for $1.03 billion (Canadian). Inniskillin is likely the Constellation Canadian property with the highest profile in terms of brand recognition and prestige. The 40th anniversary bottle in the photo- graph has a retail price tag of $500. All other "best-of" items were researched and written by Adams, managing editor Kate Lavin and myself. For a little background about us, we are all news reporting veterans who learned good old-fashioned journalism techniques and ethics in college, spent numerous years each writing for daily newspapers and other publications, and have found a good home at Wines & Vines in the past 10 years. Together we have 60-plus years of journalism experience, and a majority of those years were spent covering wine. We enjoyed poring over the piles of data we collected and the more than 250 individual, original news stories that we and other contributors wrote for Wines & Vines throughout the year, in order to select the most interesting and outstanding items. We hope you enjoy reading the report as much as we did writing it, and we would love to hear your feedback about it. Please feel free to email me with comments at jim@winesandvines.com. Elsewhere in the issue you'll find articles spanning the whole cycle of grape and wine production—everything from planting vineyards with "big vines" to save money and time (page 26) to how oxygen affects wine years after it's been bottled (page 56). The oxygen theme continues in an article about research done at Ohio wineries on how much oxygen is entering their wines during bottling (page 74). Also worth noting is Northwest correspondent Peter Mitham's Technical Spotlight about an ambitious new Pinot Noir estate in Oregon named Domaine Roy (page 64), a look at where barrel prices may go in 2017 (page 52), and a preview of the educational sessions slated for the wine industry's biggest gathering of the year, the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium (page 42), which takes place Jan. 24-26. It's been a pleasure to serve you in 2016 with the best news, data, scientific findings and practical advice that our team could provide. We hope to hear from you frequently and see you soon, most likely at the Unified Sym- posium in Sacramento, Calif. Best wishes from all of us at Wines & Vines. —Jim Gordon Our editors enjoyed poring over the piles of data we collected and the more than 250 individual, original news stories that we and our other contributors wrote throughout the year. CONTACT US SUBSCRIPTIONS Email: subs@winesandvines.com Online: winesandvines.com/subscribe Phone: (866) 453-9701 EDITORIAL Email: edit@winesandvines.com MAIL 65 Mitchell Blvd., Suite A San Rafael, CA 94903 CONNECT WITH US facebook.com/WinesandVines twitter.com/WinesandVines youtube.com/WinesandVines1919 The Best and Biggest Stories of the Year