The Year in Wine

Even though 2009 was a money-conscious year, most of us did not make a foolish decision to abandon wine. Because who doesn't need a heart-stopping bottle to pair with your favorite cheese or impress dinner-party guests?

Winemakers scrambled to keep their audience of sippers happy by offering value-oriented choices without compromising quality. Drinking wine at home -- instead of the local, hip wine bar -- became just as cool, and cheaper still. And lots of wineries and vineyards adopted green stripes by folding sustainability into their business models.

Here is a recap of the year's hottest wine stories.
Focus turned from high-scoring wines to value wines. It's not so much that a wine got 94 points from Robert Parker or was written up in one of the wine or food glossies. It's that it costs less than $15 -- a quality wine at a price that is easy to swallow? That, to most consumers, defined a must-have wine.

Celebrity status continued to push wines, with some of the year's debuts a Syrah/Cabernet Sauvignon blend from ANNIKA Vineyards (Swedish pro-golfer Annika Sörenstam) worked with California-based Wente Vineyards to develop the wine) and multiple wines from Ed Hardy (a streetwear-imprint from Christian Audigier).

Aluminum bottles replaced box wines as the It container. Wineries learned it's no longer a shatter-proof business model to use heavy glass bottles. Less fossil fuels and cash are needed to ship aluminum than glass. And "green" – not to mention being different – sells. Think Wines from Portugal are simply labeled as red, white or pink. A reminder to "recycle/be cool" is printed on the front of each 100-percent recyclable bottle. Volute Wine launched a single-serve wine –- three types of Bordeaux –- inside an aluminum bottle, perfect for solo picnics or a wine-flight on the go.

Sustainable grape-growing and wine-production methods continued to click with consumers. For every winery in Napa that tossed around the word sustainable, there were three more wineries who did too. Aspects like building a tasting room that's constructed from locally procured or eco-friendly materials, making the winery carbon-neutral or using sheep to eliminate weeds were marketed just as much as the wines themselves.

In no way snubbing Napa or Côte de Nuits, an affection for local wines emerged, with "local" defined as within the region in which you reside. A group of wine bloggers hosted the first conference exclusively about local wines; it was held in Texas during the month of August. Inspired, I picked up a red wine composed of grapes grown, pressed and bottled in Wisconsin. I won't say it was the best wine I've drank, but it wasn't terrible either. It's never a bad idea to support a local agricultural product, which is something that supporters of regional farmer's markets and creameries already know.

Wineries hopped onto Twitter and began tweeting news of their harvests, wine releases and events around the country to its followers. Similarly, many wine bars treated their Twitter followers like gold, offering special deals only announced on Twitter. Lesson learned for wine drinkers: if you want to be in the know, you have got to be on Twitter.

Several national newspapers, struggling to stay afloat with shrinking advertising revenue, created wine clubs. These papers include the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.