Every year at this time I channel the ectospasm of Jean Dixon, who gives me access to a smattering of trade journal wine headlines that will appear throughout the upcoming year. 

Use this information with wisdom and circumspection, my children, because it is entrusted to few.

‘Low Alcohol Wine Reaches Final Nadir‘
Practical Winery & Vineyard, January, 2015:

Frē, the ethanol-less wine from Sutter Home, should have been the final nail in the coffin of the lower-alcohol wine movement, but a couple of doctoral students at Brigham Young University have come up with something even more insidious: A wine containing cobaine—a killjoy molecule named after Kurt ‘Headless In Seattle’ Cobain, which actually enters the hippocampus and robs the body of serotonin, dopamine, gamma-aminobutyric acid and other neurotransmitters responsible for making life seem worth living.

Biff McQueeferson

“Far from offering the soft, uplifting, wholly Satanic buzz of normal wine, a single glass of our product leaves you with the physiological and emotional fallout of a four-day bender without forcing you to undergo that silly, life’s-a-bubble phase of inebriation,” says inventor and LDS Church History Major Biff McQueeferson.

The wine is called Carrē (after the teetotaling psychopath Carrie Nation) and will be on the market in time to ruin everybody’s weekend.

‘Millennials Embrace Dried Wine’
Food & Wine, March, 2015:

Fahrblunget Shaygetz

“Millennials are storming the wine market and they want adventure and demand more innovation from the industry,” says Fahrblunget Shaygetz, CEO of Ferklempt Wines in Gorxheimertalhausen, Germany.  “That’s why we came up with ‘Sweet, Dry ‘n’ Dried’, a product line that offers estate wines in a dehydrated format which can be snorted off a toilet seat.” She added, “We discourage smoking it for health reasons.”

Snorting wine hygenically

The new-wave of dried wine descriptors include ‘Mucous membrane-ruputuringly dusty,’ and ‘Chronic nosebleed followed by light notes of nasal gangrene.’

“Historically, wine has been marketed to older generations and came with a huge pretense,” says Maria Conchita Consuela Repomuceno y Gomez, owner of Sea Donkey Brands.“But this generation is blowing all of that out of the water. They don’t care about the pretentiousness of a wine, its pedigree or its history—what they want, what they really, really want, is something that can be ingested nasally.”

‘Natural Wine Found To Contain Leprosy’
New York Times, June 20, 2015

Adhémar Laizoraclevonbontrain

When it comes to the Emperor’s new clothes, ‘natural’ wine (as opposed to unnatural wines like Pétrus and Châteauneuf-du-Pape) has been shedding garments quicker than Gypsy Rose Lee in her prime, but the coup de grâce may have finally come with l’Ecole d’Anciens Elèves’ isolation of infectious Mycobacterium leprae in over six dozen bottles of wines that wear the ‘natural’ label.  According Adhémar Laizoraclevonbontrain of the the academy’s research department, “Refusing ze use of preservatives, vitamins, enzymes allows the proliferation of ze funny little bugs wizzin ze wine, including zose related to ritualized impurity.”

Joe Walsh

Leprosy, of course, is the Biblical scourge that presented the Living Incarnate, Our Lord Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, Son of Man, with his most opportunistic photo-op miracle-working moments, but today—lovers of natural wine take note—it is fully treatable, leaving the infected with after-effects no worse than a  complexion like Joe Walsh’s.

Laizoraclevonbontrain was very quick to point out that no ebola virus was discovered in the natural wines, putting to rest a rumor that had spread in wine circles quicker than pus on a griddle: “Zat was E. coli,” she assured us.

‘Chinese Discover Red Bean Wine’
winebusiness.com, August 4, 2015

“We’ve come full circle!”

Chin Fat, journalist

That’s how drink journalist Chin Fat of the People’s Wine Daily describes China’s recent move toward a thousand-year-old chinkabilly brew made from indigenous adzuki beans.

“It couldn’t have come at a better time for us, either,” Chin noted. “We Chinese have already purchased all of Bordeaux and most of Burgundy, but there still isn’t enough red wine to satisfy the thirteen billion chorks with corks. We’ve search in our ancestors vaults amd have discovered that the ancient Chinese secret isn’t Calgon, but shōzu pútáoji.

VaChina, a wine importer based in Beijing, carries several brands of shōzu pútáoji, which critics have described as tasting like a cross between raw sewage, yellow soybean paste and fermented descending colons.

Adzuki, of course, is a loan word from Ebonics and is a mispronunciation of ‘dookie’.

‘Pinche Pendejo Introduces Fruity Pebbles-Flavored Moscato’
The Gray Market Report, October 13, 2015

Mindful of the unprecedented popularity of Moscato among the young, the hip and the non-Caucasian, Málaga-based importer Pinche Pendejo has introduced a line of ghetto Moscato in various flavors mimicking the sugar bomb cereals that we buy our kids to shut them up.  “We know that marketing wine to a younger generation involves making them comfortable with the taste,” says sales director Nacho Nacimiento.  “So we opted against the costly alternative of education and decided to make wine in flavors they already knew and craved.”

The first of those offerings is Fruity Pebbles Moscato, released through a select group of inner-city liquor stores, where a random sampling of tasting notes has included, “Molar crumblingly cloying, with fresh notes of niacinamide, pyridoxine hydrochloride, toasty zinc oxide and ample layers of ripe unnecessary sweetener. Rich, concentrated and filled with depth of artificiality, this special wine offers beautiful impurity and imbalance while coating your palate with hydrogenated vegetable oil and sensations similar to an untreated dental abscess.”

Buoyed by such success, Pinche is poised to release Cap’n Crunch Cabernet, Golden Grahams Grenache and Count Chocula Băbească Neagră by early next year.

‘Homeless Protest To Remove Poison From Ethanol’
Wine Spectator, December 3, 2015

As we all know, the largest single expense in the daily life of the homeless is alcohol, and the single cheapest source of bulk alcohol is the ethanol pump at the gas station. That’s why the recent WikiLeaks exposé showing that ExxonMobil intentionally adds paraquat—a pesticide used by Monsanto in the eradication of non-GMO cornfields—to ethanol intended for car fuel in order to discourage poor people from consuming it is drawing such condemnation from the homeless.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, DeMarcus G. Demeter of sidewalk outside 23 West 116th Street, New York, said, “Alcohol is a right, not a privilege. This is a conspiracy perpetrated by big business in Temperance Movement uniforms.”

‘Drunk Lives Matter’

Other cities have recently seen mass demonstrations by the domestically challenged, including a march on the White House led by legendary alcoholic David’s Hasselhoff, where the chant du jour was, “Drunk lives matter.”

In other cities, police in riot gear have dispersed the crowds of thirsty, sober homeless people by dousing them with Thunderbird from high-powered fire-engine hoses.

Contacted by Ouija Board, President John F. Kennedy, who asked not to be identified, said, “Those who make peaceful imbibing impossible make violent imbibing inevitable.”