The Wine Curmudgeon

Winebits 301: Drink Local Wine, wine costs, wine experts

• Regional wine week: Drink Local Wine will hold its sixth annual Regional Wine Week from Oct. 6 to Oct. 12, which means everyone has a chance to be a wine writer. Maybe that's my legacy as one of the group's co-founders? Anyone –- professional wine writer to bloggers to wine drinkers with Facebook or Tumblr -- can send a link to their story or post about regional wine. This year, as a bonus, there's a photo contest with wine-related prizes. Over the past five years, writers from across the United States and Canada have posted stories and sent DLW links from blogs, websites, magazines, and newspapers about their favorite regional and local wines, wineries and events. I'll have my annual post on Oct. 6.

• Breaking down the cost of wine: One of the great mysteries about wine is how costs are allocated; that is, how much does each part of the process cost, whether grapes, bottling, marketing, and so forth. I cover this in the Cheap Wine Book (with a nifty graphic), and Jo Diaz, a long-time wine industry insider, has come up with similar numbers. What's important to note is how little the grapes cost -- about seven percent of a $50 bottle of wine.

• Who do consumers trust? Not, apparently, wine writers if one study is to be believed. We're so far down the list it's hardly worth mentioning. This has caused all sorts of kerfluffle among those of us who do this for a living, which I'm mostly ignoring as part of my new policy of not writing about wine writing. It's worth mentioning that the study's author, the respected John Gillespie, has said that the survey "may not fully capture market influence." But it sure is fun to write about, no?

 

 

Winebits 300: Wine prices, Texas wine, Google

• Pricing pressure – in the other direction: Just in time for the Cheap Wine Book (and the shameless plugs will eventually stop) comes this blog post from banker Rob McMillan. “Attempting to increase bottle pricing --even in an allocated environment -- has been like pushing a wet string up the hill.” Wine prices have been mostly flat since June 2012, well behind the rate of inflation. Throw in the 2012 California grape harvest, which was a record, and what looks to be an equally as large 2013 harvest, and we'll be drinking cheap wine for the foreseeable future. “Consumers haven't been willing to pay more for wine and based on the recovery sluggishness, I can't see them willing to pay more going into the holidays or even 2014 at this point,” says McMillan.

• Impressive hire: One of the obstacles facing regional wine has been the inability to hire the best qualified people, who have traditionally preferred to work elsewhere. That has been changing, and one example came this month Texas Tech hired a a Cal State-Fresno graduate. Maureen Qualia, whose family owns Texas’ Val Verde Winery, spent the past five years working in California before taking a job in the Hill Country to work with winemakers, do extension work, and teach classes. Fresno has one of the top three or four winemaking programs in the world.

• Google’s affect on the wine business: The Wine Curmudgeon, watching his visitor stats this year, saw a marked drop this spring when Google changed its search algorithm. But I’m not the only one who has suffered. Changes to Gmail, used by as many as three-quarters of a billion people, are sending wine retailer emails into spam, even though they may be legitimate. One of the untold stories of the post-modern world is Google’s influence on the non-technology part of our lives because of its tremendous power in shaping the Internet. Who would think the search giant could change how wine drinkers buy product or find wine reviews?

Winebits 299: Cheap wine, wine prices, wine temperature

• It’s OK to drink cheap wine: Not shocking news, I know, but it always makes the Wine Curmudgeon smile when others realize it. The latest affirmation comes from the International Business Times. The piece rambles quite a bit, touching on classical music and science of snobbery, but the point is well made: “When we judge the quality of wine, it’s hard not to imagine that the more expensive something is, the better it must be. But if the price labels are covered, expense doesn’t translate into quality, it turns out.”

• Wine prices and quality: Jancis Robinson, one of the two or three most important wine critics in the world, has a warning for those who buy wine: “In inexperienced markets there is wide and misplaced belief in a correlation between price and quality.” Who knew she and I would have so much in common? The article deals mostly with over-priced wine made for emerging wine markets like China, but the point is consistent with all over-priced wine. Just because something is expensive doesn’t mean it’s worth what it costs.

• The best temperature for wine: This is a common question whenever I talk to consumers, and my pal Dave McIntyre offers a terrific primer in the Washington Post. Too cold white wine, writes Dave, deadens the wine’s fruit flavors, while too warm reds taste flabby. And even those of us who do this for a living have to fight this problem, he notes, describing his own experience with a white that was too cold.

Winebits 298: Penguins, Brazil, grapes

Yes, quite possibly the weirdest headline ever on the blog.

• A benefit for a good cause: Let it not be said that the Wine Curmudgeon won’t do a favor for a good cause.The Wildlife Conservation Society is hosting its first Sip For The Sea benefit in Manhattan on Sept. 12 to support the New York Aquarium as it recovers from Superstorm Sandy. The event features sustainable food and wine, and ticket information is at the link.

• Bubby in Brazil: And it’s damned good, writes Chuck Byers on the Canadian MetroLand Media website. A “number of ‘houses’ produce first class sparkling wine,” he says. “Casa Valduga, Aurora, Salton, Garibaldi, Don Giovanni among others, produce some of the nicest traditional sparkling wines tasted anywhere.” This is especially interesting in the U.S. because what little experience we have with Brazilian wine was Marcus James white zinfandel, popular during the height of the white zinfandel craze in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

• Yes, grapes in California are a big deal: How about the second most important agricultural crop in the state, according to figures from the federal agriculture department? The value of the 2012 grape crop was almost $4.5 billion, second only to milk. It rose percent from 2011, the second highest increase in the state. Wine grapes account for about 90 percent of the tonnage, which points to how crucial the wine business is to California’s economy. Given that those figures are something that even those of us who follow the industry take for granted, you can imagine how little the rest of the world – including politicians who make three-tier and liquor law decision – know about it.

Winebits 297: Sweet wine, imported wine, regional wine

• The Winestream Media always acts like the Winestream Media: Shanken News Daily, a news service for the wine business, ran an item last week noting that Indiana’s Oliver Winery was taking advantage of the sweet wine trend to boost sales. What the story missed was that Oliver was selling hundreds of thousands of cases of sweet wine long before it became a national trend, and is actually one of the regional wineries that started the trend (along with Missouri’s St. James, North Carolina’s Duplin, and Texas’ Llano Estacado). How did Shanken get this so wrong? Because, as with all members of the Winestream Media, nothing happens unless they say it does, which is why so much wine writing, wine analysis, and wine criticism in this country is so poorly done. I once did a piece for a trade magazine owned by the same company that owns the news service, and had a fight with an editor who insisted that Texas’ liquor laws were so unbelievable that what I wrote couldn’t be true. She just knew the way the world worked, and wasn’t going to let the facts disturb her.

• Where’s all that French wine? W. Blake Gray, who started out to defend the quality of Australian wine, has done yeoman work in analyzing where the imported wine comes from that most of us drink. I think even Blake was surprised to find out how popular Argentine wine, and specifically malbec, was, and how much less popular French wine was. Of course, if you read most mainstream wine criticism, you’ll get the opposite impression, because who wants to write about $8 malbec when there’s all that Bordeaux and Burgundy to drool over?

• The problems with regional wine: My pal Kyle Schlachter, long a defender of regional wine, is also smart enough to know that not all regional wine is created equal. This blog post, focusing on how consumers use social media to critique wineries, is pointed, excellently written, and painfully accurate in discussing how too many regional wineries don’t understand customer service, don’t care enough about wine quality, and don’t want to work with anyone else to improve their business. I saw this all the time when I did Drink Local Wine, and it always made me crazy; Kyle has more patience than I do.

Winebits 296: Pricing, Australian wine, expensive wine

• The old days are gone: If there was any doubt that consumers, post-recession, care about price above all, pay attention to this report from Forbes, discussing much improved sales at clothing retailer the Gap: The company said “its brands have been driving month after month of sales growth due in part to an e-mail marketing strategy that rests largely on discounting everything from basic pieces to trendy items such as colored jeans. The strategy resounds with the 75 percent of women who said in a WSL/Strategic Retail survey that it's important to get the lowest price on everything they buy.” The Gap’s customers are probably a touch younger than the typical female wine consumer (who drives retail wine sales), but the lesson is there for anyone to see who wants to see it. Though, of course, the wine business won’t.

• The plight of Australian wine: W. Blake Gray addresses the critical conundrum that is Australian wine: “Australia is the second-largest exporter of wine to the US, behind only Italy. We buy more Australian wine than wine from France and Spain combined.So why don't you read much about Australian wine?” It’s a deft piece of media criticism, and speaks to the one-size-fits-all approach of the Winestream Media, in which price and glamour matters above all else. And Gray is correct – Aussie riesling, when you can find it, is amazing.

• Pity the rich: Apparently, some of New York’s elite are hocking their best wines to raise cash, as much as $100,000. This appeals to the Wine Curmudgeon on so many levels that I could probably get an entire blog post out of it, but who wants to be that snarky, reveling in the wealthy’s misery? How desperate are these people? They’re not only pawning some of the best wine in the world (and which most of us will never taste), but paying 2 1/2 to 4 percent interest a month for the privilege Those are practically break your legs if you don’t pay the vig rates.

Winebits 295: Liquor stores, riesling, Canada

• Prepare for a rant: Marketwatch, which usually does a decent job of covering the business world, decided to do one of those “Let’s write a story because it sounds good even though it isn’t much true” pieces – “Could liquor stores go the way of bookstores?” The difference, regardless of anything else, is that wine sales are regulated and books sales aren’t, something that isn’t mentioned until the fourth from the final paragraph of the story. There’s also the cost of shipping, which isn’t mentioned at all. Sometimes, I wonder what assignment editors are thinking of when they do these stories. This piece is so bad that it immediately becomes a finalist for a Curmudgie.

• Getting a handle on riesling: Mike Veseth at the Wine Economist has a nice look at the dilemma facing riesling, which is sweet but not popular, made in weird places, and known pretty much only to Germans and wine geeks. He did a panel where they tasted great riesling from Idaho. Ah, go Drink Local.

• Love those Canadian liquor laws: Canada, which did not have Prohibition but still ended up with a highly regulated retail liquor system, always offers a good example that makes us feel better about three-tier. Witness this, from a study that says the Ontario provincial store system drives up beer prices by as much as C$9.50 a case. To make the results even more ironic, the study was paid for by a convenience store trade group that wants to sell beer. And we know how cheap beer is at convenience stores, don’t we?