Your Local Park Should Sell Beer and Wine on Nice Summer Nights

Why don't more communites encourage park use & raise revenue by letting people buy a drink at parks on select days?

There are plenty of successful examples like Washington's National Sculpture Garden's wildly popular Jazz Fridays. Now Philadelphia is looking to expand its experiment with letting food trucks sell drinks at parks:

The city wants to schedule 12 to 18 consecutive weeks from June through October.

The venues identified include Aviator Park/Logan Square; Paine’s Park (Franklin’s Paine Skatepark); Schuylkill Banks (between Walnut & Market); Water Works / Lloyd Hall, lawn area between the two along the Schuylkill; Lemon Hill Mansion (park also available if desired); Playing Angels (Kelly Drive); Sedgley Woods Disc Golf Course; Mount Pleasant; Clark Park; Belmont Plateau; Japanese House & Gardens (Shofuso); Horticulture Center; Smith Memorial Arch/Whispering Wall; FDR Park; Jefferson Square Park; Hawthorne Park; Penn Treaty Park; and Powers Park.

Applicants must have a minimum of three years of experience operating a successful food and beverage venue that is currently in business and must hold a current Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board liquor license in good standing and be capable of securing a PLCB Off-Premises Catering Permit.

There are some obvious, common-sense limitations you want to follow: You wouldn't want to do this in troubled neighborhoods and you don't want to serve drinks long enough or late enough to cause problems.

I've lived in many places and the park closest to me is rarely the one I've used the most. I usually go to destination parks - the ones with the best trails, best basketball courts, or best views. The closest park is usually a barren patch of grass that I walk briskly past to a more fun place.

But there's no reason you can't take a bland park and cheaply & easily encourage its use. Summer movie nights in the park are a staple across America, and some communities like my own Fairhaven offer things like yoga in the park.

Why not also encourage people to picnic by selling wine & beer? If you're feeling really Big Governmenty, you could even pay a local band a couple of hundred bucks to play some music.

Green Summer Choices: Boxed Wine and Canned Beer

Why are boxed wine and canned beer better for the environment, more economical, more convenient?

• They have much lower carbon footprints thanks to the reduced weight of the packaging (glass bottles make up 35% of the weight of a full bottle of beer & 40% of a full the weight of a full bottle of wine). That also makes them much lighter to carry to the party or picnic.
• They're more affordable - a box of wine hold four bottles worth of wine but may cost about the same as one mid-range bottle, and unless you're a hardcore oenophile you won't taste much difference. For beer, a 24-pack of cans usually costs the same as an 18-pack of bottles.
• Don't drink that much wine in one sitting? All the more reason to go with a box, which keeps the wine fresh up to 45 days compared with just a day or two for an opened bottle and also avoids cork taint. Similarly, beer cans block the sunlight that can skunk bottled beer.

Check out the New York Times' in-depth review of higher-end boxed wines and CraftCans.com for reviews of canned beer.

Warm Spring is Bad News for Virginia Wine

The global warming-fueled heat wave that's gripped much of America this month may be good news for March picnics, but it's terrible for Virginia wine lovers. Wine grape vines are already waking up, posing a twofold threat - hotter temperatures can mean less flavorful wine, and a sudden frost could devastate the crop:

Workers at Tomahawk Mill Winery in Chatham are certainly concerned. They say they are usually working in the cold right now wearing two pairs of socks and gloves. But while it's nice to work in this weather, the grapes don't like it one bit.

Corky Medaglia, owner of Tomahawk Mill Winery, always says: "When God gives you lemons you make lemonade. And when God gives you grapes, you make wine."  

But within his 17 years working the vineyards, he has never seen a winter like this one. "Sap is coming up because the temperatures are going up. And this guy thinks it's spring time," said Medaglia. 

Meteorologists say there's a 50/50 chance of a surprise frost. And looking ahead, hotter summers are no kinder to wine grapes - when temperatures top 95 degrees, the vine's respiration system can shut down.

(To be clear, the photo with this story is from 2007, not a photo of what the grapes look like right now.)