A funny thing happened on the way to my September column in The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

The column highlighted Spotted Dog Winery, a micro-winery in Saline that successfully markets its kit-made wines through a raft of local retail stores. It recently announced an expansion that will triple its capacity to 3000 cases, in order to meet demand for its wines -- and managed to land admiring press coverage not only on annarbor.com, but a filmed-on-site segment on Detroit's Channel 2 .

Whatever your take on kit wines -- and mine isn't especially positive -- when it comes to selling them, many small, from-scratch Michigan wineries would do well to emulate Spotted Dog's example.

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So now it's come to this.

Last week, New York wine writers Lenn Thompson and Evan Dawson announced that they would no longer judge at large, medal-awarding wine competitions. They urged fellow journalists to follow suit.

Thompson and Dawson aren't just a couple of basement bloggers grabbing for a headline. Their consumer-oriented wine site, the New York Cork Report, is considered the gold standard by many of us who toil in the backroad vineyards of regional wine journalism. They've got the American Wine Blog Award to prove it.

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Michigan growers and winemakers have good reason for cautious optimism about the grapes currently ripening on their vines. An early spring followed by an unusually warm summer have vineyardists across the state reporting bumper crops that are maturing between one and three weeks ahead of usual.

In other words, visions of a potential top vintage, like 2007 or 2005, are starting to dance in their heads.

The numbers at MSU's Enviro-weather --  the go-to website for obscure state weather data -- tell the story. On Monday, August 16, their Benton Harbor station, smack in the Lake Michigan Shore wine appellation, showed 2296 degree-days since March 1. The comparable numbers were 2238 in 2007, and 2232 in 2005.

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I confess to some small satisfaction when voters gave the hook to two of Michigan's most anti-wine consumer officeholders in the state gubernatorial primary earlier this month.

Both losers -- Republican Attorney General Mike Cox and Democratic House Speaker Andy Dillon -- had dined frequently and well at the trough of the Michigan Beer & Wine Wholesalers Association. And both repaid their patrons in kind. Cox squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars in scarce state funds in 2005's winery shipping case, betting a losing hand all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, who finally called his bluff.

He seemed prepared to do the same over retailer shipping three years later, but that proved unnecessary, thanks to Dillon. Determined to avoid the pesky public scrutiny and outcry that sank a legislative ban on winery shipping following 2005's case, Dillon quietly slipped a retailer shipping ban into a no-notice committee hearing, then rammed it through the 2008 lame-duck House session in the dark of night.

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8:10 AM

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It looks like our live chat isn't working, so we'll make do with just blogging for now.

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Welcome to Regional Wine Week, when wine writers and bloggers nationwide take up arms in support of their local juice.

It's the brainchild of newspaper wine guys Jeff Siegel, who writes for papers in Dallas and Fort Worth, and Dave McIntyre, of The Washington Post. Last year, they jointly started the Drink Local Wine website and recruited wine writers from around the country to participate in the Regional Wine Week project.

Now around here, scribbling about local juice happens year 'round. Asking MichWine to "Support your local winemaker" carries all the impact of suggesting a vegetarian give up steak for Lent.

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When it comes to Michigan wine prices, ice wine usually rises to the top.

Last year's trophy-winner for Best Dessert Wine, Brys Estate's 2007 "Dry Ice", weighs in at $70 for a 375ml half-bottle. Black Star Farms' 2007 "A Capella" Riesling Ice Wine -- which Barack Obama served at the White House earlier this year -- tips the scales at a whopping $92.50, according to the winery's website.

Price tags like these mean that most of us can only afford to pour ice wine on special occasions -- if at all.

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Here's a new wine web page we'd never see in Michigan.

On it, you'll find a list of Chicagoland restaurants where diners can BYO, complete with addresses and corkage fees.

That's right. People can actually walk into restaurants in Illinois or New York or California with a bottle of wine and, if the restaurant concurs, ask the server to pour it with the meal. It's a practice both consumer and business-friendly, encouraging folks to eat out far more often than we otherwise might.

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People who run wine competitions around the U.S. must wish they never heard the name Robert Hodgson.

Hodgson, a winery owner and retired professor from Cal State University (Humboldt), recently embarked on a new career: statistically debunking the reliability of wine competition medal awards.

Earlier this year, he published a study in the scholarly Journal of Wine Economics (who knew?). He concluded something that many winemakers and critics have long suspected: which medals wines get at competitions depends at least as much on who does the judging as on the wine itself.

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You don't often see the word "epiphany" in a blog post.

But last Saturday, for the second time in two weeks, I watched group attitudes toward Michigan wine evolve just as notably, if less publicly, than at Harding's Cab Franc Challenge.

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