Why you should make your alcohol % easy to find

It's a pet peeve of mine. I write a weekly column on wine for the Tahoe Weekly, which might not have the clout of The Pour in the New York Times, but still, lots of people (people with money) read my column and buy wine. I am limited to 600 words, and today I just hit "delete" for reviews of two wines where I couldn't find the alcohol content easily on an internet search. I had plenty of other options for those 600 words; who could be bothered search-search-searching for information that should be readily accessible on a wine?

I always include alcohol percentages in my wine reviews; that's my own personal policy and my way of encouraging responsible wine drinking. So, perhaps I should have paid more attention and taken more thorough notes while I was tasting those 12 wines at the charity event. But it was a warm summer day, the appetizers appealed, the string quartet was sweet and the sailboats were gliding on the lake. I took some notes, yes, but I figured I could use the internet to fill in the technical info gaps.

Surprise!

Search search search, snooth, wines.com, wine-searcher, KL etc.... I could find no notes of alcohol content for two of the ten wines. So, bye bye. Tough luck.

I don't mean to cheat my readers out of information on a good wine. However, I write under deadline and I have lots of other stuff going on in my life (like research for my book on Moutain Wineries of the Sierra and Its Foothills, publ date April 2011 by the way). I am not going to chase this information for more than five minutes. When in doubt, as the old English professor said, leave it out.

If you are a winery, winemaker or wine sales rep, and your internet search on your wine does not easily yield information on its alcohol level, you are missing the mark. More and more consumers are concerned about what they drink and what they serve to guests.

California Highway Patrol gives a lot of citations for DUI's on Lake Tahoe's meandering roads every winter. Summer too. So help me, the time-pressed writer, out. But beyond that ... it's important information for consumers. Make it readily available. Just do it.

Thanks.