THIS ISSUE WRAPS UP Wines & Vines’ coverage of the North American wine industry for 2016. From where we sit it’s been a great year. Most grapegrowers and winery owners made good money in 2016, as consumer demand kept growing and supplies of grapes and wine were sufficient but not in a surplus situation—balanced, in other words. And balance is a good thing for the business of wine, just as it is for the taste profile of an individual wine.

For the third year in a row, the December issue cover story reviews the best and biggest stories of the year. Graphic designer Rebecca Arnn put together a luxurious-looking cover using her studio shot of an elegantly packaged bottle of Inniskillin ice wine, which symbolizes the biggest deal of the year. We chose “2016: Year of the Deal,” as the main cover headline because it truly was a year dominated by high-priced mergers and acquisitions activity in the industry.

Senior editor Andrew Adams wrote the “year of the deal” piece on pages 30-31 based on several writers’ contributions throughout the year. The Inniskillin bottle represents the divestiture by Constellation Brands of all its Canadian wine holdings for $1.03 billion (Canadian). Inniskillin is likely the Constellation Canadian property with the highest profile in terms of brand recognition and prestige. The 40th anniversary bottle in the photograph has a retail price tag of $500.

All other “best-of” items were researched and written by Adams, managing editor Kate Lavin and myself. For a little background about us, we are all news reporting veterans who learned good old-fashioned journalism techniques and ethics in college, spent numerous years each writing for daily newspapers and other publications, and have found a good home at Wines & Vines in the past 10 years. Together we have 60-plus years of journalism experience, and a majority of those years were spent covering wine.

We enjoyed poring over the piles of data we collected and the more than 250 individual, original news stories that we and other contributors wrote for Wines & Vines throughout the year, in order to select the most interesting and outstanding items. We hope you enjoy reading the report as much as we did writing it, and we would love to hear your feedback about it. Please feel free to email me with comments at jim@winesandvines.com.

Elsewhere in the issue you’ll find articles spanning the whole cycle of grape and wine production—everything from planting vineyards with “big vines” to save money and time (page 26) to how oxygen affects wine years after it’s been bottled (page 56). The oxygen theme continues in an article about research done at Ohio wineries on how much oxygen is entering their wines during bottling (page 74).

Also worth noting is Northwest correspondent Peter Mitham’s Technical Spotlight about an ambitious new Pinot Noir estate in Oregon named Domaine Roy (page 64), a look at where barrel prices may go in 2017 (page 52), and a preview of the educational sessions slated for the wine industry’s biggest gathering of the year, the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium (page 42), which takes place Jan. 24-26.

It’s been a pleasure to serve you in 2016 with the best news, data, scientific findings and practical advice that our team could provide. We hope to hear from you frequently and see you soon, most likely at the Unified Symposium in Sacramento, Calif. Best wishes from all of us at Wines & Vines.