On October 1st tickets for the largest wine expo in America go on sale. The wine expo, held every year in Boston Massachusetts, is the largest trade and consumer wine show in the country. Celebrating it’s 16th year, the show at the World Trade Center is going to house over 440 domestic and international wineries from 13 countries across the globe, equalling over 1800 different wines!

Over the two day event you can wander around sampling world class wines, or watch one of the 15 celebrity chefs on 2 large stages creating delicious meals, or perhaps you would rather sit in on one of the 25 continuous tasting seminars with topics for both the novice and the connoisseur.

The Seaport World Trade Center is huge, with a 118,000-square-foot exhibition hall, a 400-seat, state-of-the-art amphitheater, 35,000 square feet of conference and meeting space it is no wonder that the Wine Expo has chosen to call it home.  And what better way to spend a cold February weekend than surrounded by thousands of your best friends enjoying some good wine?

There was an interesting article on the BBC news website yesterday with regards to the quality of French wines under the “appellation” system. Apparently over the past few years the controls of the appellation d’origine controlee have become more lax and thus causing the quality to suffer by as much as almost a third. In many cases definitive links between the regions and varieties of grapes claiming to be where the wine was from could not be established.

I thought I was the only one who realised this, and I realised this ages ago. Anyone who likes the occasional bottle of wine could see (or rather taste) that the quality of French wines was declining rapidly over the past few years. I like many other people at first thought it was simply because other regions around the world (Australia, South Africa, Napa, etc) were starting to make a name for themselves and increase the market competition. However, I now believe that the increased competition coupled with the declining quality is what doomed the French wines.

Unlike members of the UFC-Que Choisir, I am not convinced that an overhaul of the system is going to make much of a difference in protecting “wines under the most prestigious AOC label.” Why? The answer is really quite simple, because once people get a bad taste in their mouth they are unlikely to go back for seconds. People recall good wines they have had but they also never forget the bad ones.