Fashion Week Wine Accessories in New York

By 2011-2-21 10:58:06

Plus, a six-digit wine theft in Los Angeles, and the Grammy Award wines go green

Actor Matthew McConaughey joined the Apprentice winner Bill Rancic and singer Kat Deluna at New York Fashion Week.

• Unfiltered makes no pretense of being a fashion plate—more like a fashion cafeteria tray—but that doesn’t keep us from checking up on New York Fashion Week, which is reliably short on solid food but long on wine and the beautiful people who love to drink it while checking out the new threads on the runway. This year, New Zealand’s Kim Crawford is the official wine sponsor of Fashion Week and, in a true display of good design sense, they’re dispensing their wines into recyclable, shatterproof GoVino “glasses.” It’s not easy to hold onto crystal stemware while simultaneously air-kissing your frenemies, re-applying lip gloss, clutching a tiny accessory dog and elbowing your way to the front row, so cheers to GoVino, which is making sure that names are the only things that get dropped alongside the runway.

• Last year’s wine capers mostly involved stealth vintners shearing grapes off vines in Washington and the Languedoc and making away with them under cover of darkness. This past week, however, detectives near Los Angeles arrested two ne’er-do-wells who employed a scheme further down the production chain—they hopped into a Robert Mondavi semi-truck while the drivers were taking a snack break and drove off with 1,000 cases of Cabernet Napa Valley 2007 all bottled up and ready to sell ... which they tried to do in a parking lot. Yes, the perps had some $500,000 worth of a luxury good, but about zero understanding of the finer points of black marketing. Add wine to the list of things you should never buy out of a parking lot—along with just about everything else.

• The Grammy awards joined up with ReCORK this year, a cork recycling organization. Only wines sealed with natural corks were served during the awards ceremony, and not one cork pulled at the event went unrecycled. The discarded Grammy corks will go to SOLE, a Canadian company that specializes in footwear made from cork. Imagine that: You too can wear shoes that came from a Grammy winner’s table.

From www.winespectator.com