Drinking Data II

We hadn’t seen these examples when we made light of the assertion that drinking was up when alcohol sales at package stores went up.  The data problems include the TP effect (hoarding), fear of stores being shut down, saving trips to the store, and missing the impact of bars.  The WSJ editorial board has some examples of this happening.  First they look at Pennsylvania closing its liquor stores:

Pennsylvania’s Liquor Control Board announced March 16 that liquor stores would close the next day. The state hoped to keep residents at home, but instead Pennsylvanians flocked to buy booze while they still could. Lines stretched around the block, and sales spiked to $29.9 million in a single day—“the most spent on booze in Pennsylvania in one day, according to complete sales records dating back 12 years,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week.

Giving everybody just one day to stock up is a history making foolish governmental policy.  Of particular interest to us is the date.  The Pennsylvania spike happened during the week used to support higher sales in the previous article.  It also points out the folly of government prohibitions without citizen support.

Denver trying to do the same thing is even sillier.  It might be hard to leave a big state like Pennsylvania but it is easy to leave Denver.  Still they tried:

Denver saw a similar rush on March 23 when Mayor Michael Hancock announced that liquor stores would not be considered essential businesses. “It’s created a safety issue in the short term,” Argonaut Wine & Liquor co-owner Josh Robinson told the Denver Post. “The mayor said not to panic buy, but that is exactly what he encouraged people to do by shutting us down.”

We conclude that major purchases of alcohol could be a rational decision based on observed governmental actions.  That is one of the reasons why sales might not match consumption.  We still don’t understand TP.  Perhaps folks behave differently than us.

 

 

 

Grappa And DeMille

We have just discovered Nelson DeMille and we really like what we have found.  We picked up The Charm School at the library and it was a great story of Communism and spies.  We gave The Gate House from the same library run to the Gloves-in-law but it was too big a volume for her.  Nelson tends to run 500-600 pages.  We started The Gate House but realized that The Gold Coast came first so we switched over to that and are finding joy in mid-life John Sutter and old money.  As a New Englander we recognize the commonalities of the Gold Coast and The Cape.

Nelson’s books are great on details like flying helicopters or the old rich on Long Island.  That’s why it is so surprising when Frank (The Bishop) Bellarosa, a mafia don, says grappa is like brandy and sips it.  Well, it is kinda like brandy.  Brandy is distilled wine.  Grappa is, as the Rome File says:

The main ingredient of grappa is pomace, which consists of the grape skins, seeds and stalks that are left over from the winemaking process. These are taken through a second process of distillation, which extracts the remaining flavours from the pomace before the waste is discarded.

So grappa is distilling the remnants of the wine making process while brandy is distilling wine.  It is not sipped as the Rome File says:

Grappa is a wonderful way to end a meal, drunk either as a shot on its own or added to an espresso (in which case it’s known in Italy as a caffè coretto, or a “corrected coffee”).  [Emphasis added]

The Rome File is consistent with our guidebook.  When traveling you want to know these things.  Throwing back vodka shots and eating pickled herring help cement relations with the Poles.  It is a small complaint and we haven’t finished this otherwise wonderful book.  Perhaps Frank will act differently while enjoying grappa with his countrymen.