Business

FDA Regulations Pose Serious Problems For Small Wine Business

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Casey Harper Contributor
Font Size:

A small business trying to innovate the wine industry is having its hopes dashed by federal agencies, but it’s not going down without a fight.

Jim Dyke, co-founder of the small premier wine company Mira, began putting wine bottles in the Charleston Harbor as an experiment to see if it improved the wine. Turns out, the results were very promising.

But now the federal government has told Mira its wine is infected with sewage-like materials, even though the government hasn’t inspected the bottles or tested the wine.

“Unfortunately, innovating and challenging conventional wisdom with 12 cases of wine has now attracted the attention and heavy handedness of the federal government,” Dyke told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “For the government to be able to come in and say you cant do something without reasonable cause, that’s frightening.”

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau first contacted Mira about the problem, but then got the Food and Drug Administration involved before banning the company from continuing its experiment. The government said the wine bottles, which were sealed with wax and corks and stored in steel cages, were on the same level as products spilled into the sea during a shipwreck.

“The FDA has advised us that aging wine in a way that bottle seals have contact with sea or ocean waters may render these wines adulterated under the FD&C Act in that they have been held under unsanitary conditions whereby they may have become contaminated with filth or may have been rendered injurious to health (21 U.S.C. § 342(a)(4)),” the TTB said in an announcement Tuesday.

Dyke said the announcement doesn’t mention Mira specifically but is targeted at his company. It effectively bans Mira’s practice. He added that this is not a massive production scheme, just a few bottles underwater for experimentation.

Dyke, who has repeatedly tested his bottles to make sure they weren’t adulterated, said not one of his bottles has been contaminated and neither the FDA or TTB have taken the time to test them.

“It is in no ones interest, especially a small producer of premier Napa Valley wines, to produce a product for the consumer that is adulterated,” Dyke said.

Dyke pointed out that the same water described as sewage is where people fish and children play on the beach and swim.

“And if Charleston Harbor is too dirty for wine bottles with wax seals over the cork shouldn’t folks who eat the shrimp, fish and oysters have concerns?” Dyke told TheDCNF. “How about a swim?

Dyke said what he learns about pressure and motion from the experiment, which effectively made a 2009 bottle taste like a 2007 in only three months, could be applied to how wine is aged on land and revolutionize the industry. But not if the government stops it in its tracks.

Dyke has hired a lawyer and submitted FOIA requests to figure out why this practice is being targeted.

“It’s frightening because we don’t have the resources to have a fight with the FDA and TTB especially when they seem completely uninterested in the details of what we’re doing,” Dyke said.

Follow Casey on Twitter and like him on Facebook

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel