A couple of stories stuck out for me in my wine blog reading over the past couple of days. The first one was from my friends across the pond at Decanter who posted a slightly snarky entry about Disney pulling the plug on their Ratatouille wine. No, Mr. Lechmere, I’m sure the California Wine Institute would have been equally opposed to California wine being in the Ratatouille bottle.

I have to say I was very surprised to see this brand emerge and was only going to buy the wine for it’s potential resale value on eBay. Whoever put the kibosh to this at Disney is to be commended. I think the potential damage to the Disney/Pixar brand would have been immense if this wine made it into Costco. A very good call from my perspective.

The other story that had me thinking was a post over at the Wine Direct Shipping Compliance blog. They site some pending legislation in Ohio that would limit households in that state to, “…twenty-four cases of nine-liter bottles of wine in one year.” Huh? Is that 24 Salmanazars or 24 cases of one-liter bottles?

Whatever the proper interpretation of this law is it’s clear that legislators in Ohio are not wine lovers. With similar legislation pending in other states it’s becoming clear that the forces against the free distribution of wine are starting to restrict the freedoms gained a couple years back. A very bad turn of events in my view.

Call me a “wine libertarian” but why can’t we just pay our taxes and enjoy whatever wine we want without any more government meddling?