Some of us are in it for the romance of wine, the change in lifestyle or the opportunity to create something, as opposed to making massive amounts of money.

Maybe there needs to be a cutoff point for compliance? If you make less than 100 cases of a wine, you are exempt from providing the information.

I also believe there needs to be an allowance if you are changing nutritional information, you do not have to re-submit labels for approval, just like a vintage year change. This would help reduce the costs for the winery when merely updating information.

I propose T-BAGGING as the word for this. Here’s why it may fit:

1. T is the symbol for AT&T, the biggest, baddest monopolist during much of the nation’s history (arguably).

2. The evidence is here: http://www.slate.com/id/2156918/pagenum/all/. AT&T mounted a herculean, many-decade effort to close out all long-distance competitors, on some wacked out theory that it would break the system. To what extent did the government watch their back and play along? Is there a better example of a company that carefully arranged the laws as a moat around their castle?

3. I admit that “tea bagging” is all the rage this weekend, as explained here: http://www.examiner.com/x-1765-Underground-Examiner~y2009m4d10-Who-is-going-to-tell-them-Teabagging-explained. But that makes it more, not less . . . fitting. More than a few small companies will choke on what Diageo is dangling.

4. The similarity to sandbagging doesn’t hurt either.

What do you think Gumpinski and others? Does the bag fit? By the way, this is not meant to imply that the big company proponents of new labeling are acting in other than a rational manner.

We have shopped around for the cost of analysis, and if we do the alcohol measurement ourselves, we can have the necessary analyses done for about $350-500/wine. Add to this the cost of revamping every label, including new steel rule dies for new label sizes, and the hassle of re-approving every label, and we estimate this will cost each winery about $10,000 to $15,000 per year. This will not drive the larger winery out of business, but it will mean that we will have to reduce salaries for key employees or ask the survivors to take on additional work if others are dropped from the payroll. For the smaller winery, this is at least half of our annual operating income, and would mean we could no longer pay a winemaker to produce the excellent wines we now make. Thus, the smaller winery would likely disappear from the marketplace, along with the revenue we have enjoyed for years.

The administrative burden is harder to estimate, but ordering all the analyses, collating the data and funneling it to the correct wine each year is not insignificant.