Category:A Featured Post

The final post

man making a point
Ah, the WC look. Who else could get away with that?

“My necessaries are embark’d: farewell”

Yes, the quote is from Shakespeare (“Hamlet,” Act 1, Scene 3). And why not go out by stealing from the best?

Today’s is the blog’s final post, and it has been a grand and glorious run — some 4,700 posts over more than 16 years. Which, actually, was even longer than my time in the newspaper business (and I didn’t have to cover one high school football game in the process).

Who knew that would happen?

The blog survived the Trump wine tariff as well as the worst recession in 45 years, and it even survived all those people – and there were entirely too many — who never understood why I didn’t want to write about $40 wine. “Because most of us can’t afford it!” “No? Really?”

What it couldn’t survive was the 21st century wine business, and that I wrote about entry level wines at a time when there were fewer and fewer entry level wine drinkers. Or, as my brother told me when we discussed this, “It’s so hard to stay fresh when the industry you cover is so stagnant and status quo.”

Which I wish I had written, say, 10 years ago.

As noted, I’ll take the paywall off the old blog at winecurmudgeon.com later this week, so anyone who wants to can pick and choose and hopefully get a chuckle from some rant back in 2011. The Substack will go away, also later this week; I’ve been assured that paid subscribers will get refunds for their unexpired terms.

Thanks to everyone for the kind and more than gracious remarks they’ve emailed, commented, and even posted elsewhere on the cyber-ether since I decided to close the blog. I am flattered and even a little embarrassed. At heart, I guess, I’m still a newspaperman, and we’re not used to that sort of attention.

In the end, I have my cheap wine – my quality cheap wine, I should add — and I have my memories. They are fabulous, wonderful memories of drinking and writing about the wine that most of us drink and sharing it with everyone who read the blog.

We had a marvelous time, didn’t we? Which, in the end, is all that really matters.

2024 $10 Hall of Fame

woman drinking wine at dinner
“Thank you, WC, for another terrific $10 Hall of Fame.”

10 wines entered the Hall of Fame this year, while 5 dropped out

The blog’s final $10 Hall of Fame reflects all of wine’s troubles and travails over the past several years — supply chain woes, even more availability conundrums than usual, and the scourge that is premiumization.

Yes, 10 wines entered the hall, the most since 13 joined the Hall in 2018. But five dropped out, mostly for availability, and only a dozen or so merited consideration. That was down from the 18 I considered last year, and it’s only a third of the three dozen or so that were usually good enough to be considered in the blog’s pre-pandemic days.

The reason for the latter is simple: There are fewer and fewer quality wines that cost less than $15, as the wine business continues to ignore everyone who doesn’t consider $30 or $40 affordable and just the thing for a week night dinner. Nothing illustrates this more than the lack of decent rose for $15 or less — and that is actually available. That only one rose made the Hall this year is an affront to wine drinkers everywhere.

Nevertheless, the Hall is going out in style. The wines that earned selection demonstrate that it’s possible to make quality wine costing $10 or $12 — and that there is a market for such wines.

The 2024 inductees include:

• Six whites: Three French wines, including two picpouls — the Jadix and the La Chapelle du Bastion — and the Domaine Bel Air Muscadet; two Spanish whites, the Protocolo Blanco and the Marques Cacera verdejo; and South Africa’s Wolftrap white blend.

• Two reds: California’s Shannon Ridge Vineyard Wrangler Red and Wolftrap’s red blend.

• A sparkling: The Italian Jeio Bisol Prosecco Brut, a Prosecco.

• A rose: France’s Paul Mas Cote Mas Aurore — and in a 1-liter bottle, no less.

The dropouts: The French Le Petit Gueissard and the Chilean Tres Palacios roses, both for availability. The 1-liter Azul y Garanza tempranillo from Navarre in Spain and the French Little James Basket Press white blend for quality, prices increases, and because they’re  more difficult to find. The French Mont Gravet carignan is, apparently, no longer made.

The complete 2024 $10 Wine Hall of Fame is here. The Hall’s selection process and eligibility rules are here. Know that I considered wines that cost as much as $13 to $15 to take into account price creep and regional pricing differences.

Photo: “Kyla at dinner tonight at Cobre eating tacos and drinking Rose (not cougar juice)” by Chris Breikss is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

 

2024 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year: Stemmari Grillo 2022

Stemmari grillo bottle
Stemmari Grillo 2022

Sicily’s Stemmari Grillo 2022 is the blog’s seventh annual Turner Cheap Wine of the Year

Usually, one of the wines on the shortlist for the blog’s Turner Cheap Wine of the Year award is just enough better than the others so that I don’t have much trouble choosing the winner.

Not so this year. All six of the wines were award worthy, and each would have been a fine choice. So how did I settle on the Stemmari Grillo ($8, purchased, 13%)?

Call it a shout out to the late Mack Turner, who the award is named after. He and I  spent more than a few Sunday afternoons drinking this wine, and we were rarely disappointed. And, without fail, he wold always ask,”Where did you get it?” and then we would wax poetic about Jimmy’s, the Dallas Italian grocer that sells this.

What to know about the wine? Nutty. Spicy. Green apple and stone fruit. Fresh. Clean. Drink chilled, on its own or with almost anything except big red meat.

The award’s shortlist is here. Selection criteria are here; I considered wines that cost as much as $15 to take into account price creep and regional pricing differences.

More Turner Cheap Wine of the Year:
2023 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year: Matchbook Cabernet Sauvignon 2020
2022 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year: Scaia Rosato 2020
2021 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year: MAN Chenin Blanc 2019

Wine of the week: Chateau Bonnet Blanc 2022

Wine of the week: Chaeau Bonnet Blanc 2022
Chateau Bonnet Blanc 2022/$8-$20

This French white blend remains one of wine’s great values

The blog’s final wine of the week is a French white blend, Chateau Bonnet Blanc — one of the great cheap wines of all time. It has been a wine of the week five times and has been a regular in the Hall of Fame since the first hall appeared on the blog in 2008.

Of course, wine being wine, I haven’t reviewed the Bonnet Blanc for three years. For one thing. I haven’t seen it much on store shelves since the 2018 vintage. For another, when I have seen it, the price has been as high as $20, which is ridiculous. It’s a great cheap wine, not a mediocre supermarket wine.

So be glad I found the Chateau Bonnet Blanc 2022 ($12, purchased, 13%) in time for this post. This vintage is mostly what it has always been, a traditional white Bordeaux blend of sauvignon blanc and semillon. The semillon is still noticeable, and it adds some richness and a little spice.

But there’s also a touch more lemon fruit and less minerality than in previous years, so the wine tastes a bit less French in style and more like New Zealand. Still, that could be a vintage difference and not a deliberate attempt to focus group the wine.

Regardless, I bought six bottles of it (with a new label, even) before tasting it, and I haven’t been disappointed. You can’t offer higher praise than that, can you?

Imported by Monsieur Touton Selection

Winebits 834: The final edition

Toronto Star newsroom
How many reporters does it take to make sense of news stories about wine?

Three news items that show just how detached the wine business is from reality

When I worked at the late and much missed Dallas Times Herald, the two sports columnists couldn’t stand each other and didn’t speak. So when they covered the same event, like a Cowboys game, they would often write the same column, which wasn’t good, or write the complete opposite of each other, which was even worse.

The latter happened a lot. So the guy who ran the copy desk coined a term: Dueling columnists. As in, “What did the dueling columnists write this time?”

Which happens all the time in wine — call it dueling news. So, for the blog’s final news briefs post, these three stories (which appeared just before the holidays):

Is the Negative Shift in Alcohol Spending Behavior Temporary?

Americans Spending on Holidays After all?

Luxury brands brace for lackluster Christmas, inventory pile-up?

The first says the decline in booze is because it’s too expensive, so when it gets cheaper (or we have more money), we’ll come back. The second says price isn’t a problem, really. And the third says it is, and wonders if it’s time to panic.

Trying to make sense of all of this is exactly the sort of thing I won’t miss.

Photo: “Toronto Star newsroom” by Toronto History is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Wine trends 2024

man guzzling boxed wine
Yes, this behavior appears linked to genetics. Who knew?

Three stand out — the continuing decline in demand, even more consolidation, and the Neo-Prohibitionist assault on moderate drinking

This is the second of two parts looking at wine prices and wine trends in 2024. Part II: Wine trends 2024. Part I: Wine prices 2024.

Writing this post was easy; in fact, almost anyone paying attention to the wine business could write it. Which doesn’t mean there is any good news — far from it, in fact.

In 2024, wine will revolve around three things:

• The continuing decline in demand. How bad do the numbers look? Even those who have used rose colored glasses are becoming more glum, and those who see clearly pull no punches: “I do not anticipate a return to outright growth in wine consumption anytime soon because of longer-term shifts in consumer behavior and demographics.” Throw in a larger than expected 2023 California harvest, and we have more wine chasing ever fewer wine drinkers.

• Even more consolidation, as producers big — and not quite so big — try to gain a bigger share of a pie that keeps getting smaller. One analyst told me that middle-tier companies, those who rank among the middle 50 of the 100 biggest U.S. producers, are mostly likely to make acquisitions. Currently, the 100 biggest producers account for 90 percent of the wine made in the U.S.; how much bigger will their share get?

• The Neo-Prohibitionist assault on moderate drinking. Prohibition didn’t work; nevertheless, we’re going to see repeated calls, more “scientific” studies, and all the rest. The latest? That certain traits for what’s called “problematic alcohol use” are linked to genetics. Though, of course, I wasn’t aware this was an especially new finding, and it’s also fascinating that the story in the link doesn’t define “problematic alcohol use.” Could that mean any alcohol use?

Wine prices 2024

three men laughing while looking in the laptop inside room
“Can it be? Finally? Lower wine prices?”

Did the WC get it right last year?

This is the first of two parts looking at wine prices and wine trends in 2024. Part I: Wine prices 2024. Part II: Wine trends 2024.

So, in 2023, wine prices remain high. Wine sits on store shelves. Back vintages pile up. And, at some point, either later this year or early next, the fizzing and sputtering turns into an explosion and prices finally start to obey the law of supply and demand.

I wrote that a year ago, in the 2023 wine prices post. And you know what? I may have been correct. Prices did pretty much stay high — or go higher — for most of last year. And yes, wine sat on store shelves, waiting for buyers, while back vintages piled up (as almost every sales report confirmed).

And then, around the holidays, I saw some almost unprecedented discounting. Wine.com offered free shipping for almost a month, something it almost never does. My local Kroger offered not a 10 percent discount on a case during that period, but a 25 percent discount on six wines (and yes, I bought quite a bit of $8 vinho verde for $6).  Discounting elsewhere in town wasn’t quite that steep, but even retailers that don’t usually do much price cutting found a way to cut prices in the run-up to Christmas. How does $2 off a $15 wine for buying a mixed case sound?

Now, the caveats. Dallas may not be representative of the rest of the country. Wine.com’s free shipping may have been more about Wine.com than the wine business in general; I didn’t notice the same sort of discounting (though there was some) at other on-line retailers. But the Kroger discounting, to my mind, speaks volumes. That it sold the wine so cheaply means it paid less for it, which means its wholesalers had wine stacked up in warehouses that they needed to sell. So they made Kroger an offer it didn’t refuse, and I got lots of $6 wine. And it’s worth noting that it was sold out of the La Vieille Ferme rose, which was $6.75 a bottle with the discount. So, yes, wine was selling at lower prices.

Does this mean we’ll see “the fizzing and sputtering” from late last year turn into a price-cutting explosion sooner rather than later in 2024? As I have written many times, predicting wine pricing is not for the faint of heart. But maybe, just maybe, we’ll see that explosion this year.

Photo: Priscilla Du Preez, three men laughing while looking in the laptop inside room via Unsplash