Tag Archives: Yellow Tail

Winebits 786: Cheap wine, Mike Dunne, Stella Rosa

Woman drinking wine
“No more Yellow Tail for me — Stella Rosa.”

This week’s wine news: The cheapest countries for buying wine (and we know what isn’t), plus Mike Dunne’s new book and Stella Rosa tops Yellow Tail

Not the U.S.: Regular readers of the blog won’t be surprised to hear this – the U.S. ranks as one of the most expensive countries in the world for wine. That’s according to Food & Wine, which parses a study that says Portugal is the least expensive, averaging $4.30 per bottle. Hungary ($4.81), Chile ($5.13), Slovakia ($5.37), and Germany ($6.02) complete the lowest five. The fourth most expensive – and the only one among the priciest that is a major wine producer – is the U.S. at $15.18 a bottle. What makes this that much more depressing is the most expensive countries either don’t drink much wine or don’t make any, like Iceland, Norway, and South Korea. But that’s nothing we didn’t know, is it?

Mike Dunne: Dunne, a long-time friend of the blog, plugs his new book, “The Signature Wines of Superior California,” on YouTube’s The Varietal Show. The book has been a work of love for Mike; he has talked about it for years. The book’s website is here; I’ll get with Mike and see if he wants to give one away as part of the blog’s upcoming Substack anniversary celebration.

Topping Yellow Tail: Stella Rosa, the producer whose roots are in Los Angeles’ tenure as a key wine region, is the top imported wine in the U.S. It replaces Yellow Tail, which has been the leading import for almost two decades. The change is a combination of Yellow Tail’s sales decline (about a 14 percent drop since 2020) and Stella Rosa’s rapid growth. Stella Rosa has showed up on the blog a time or two – an example of a popular, sweet-style wine that has made inroads among younger drinkers.

Winebits 687: Cheap wine test, luxury wine cellar, fake Yellow Tail

cheap wineThis week’s wine news: BuzzFeed does a cheap wine tasting, and cheap wins. Plus, do you need a 1,000-bottle wine cellar? And is fake Yellow Tail flooding Britain?

Cheap wine! BuzzFeed’s Hannah Dobrogosz blind tasted five cheap wines against five more expensive ones, and the results went the way most of these tastings go. She found that, dollar for dollar, she preferred the less expensive wines. The piece is worth reading for variety of reasons, and not just the results. First, Dobrogozs is not an old white guy, so seeing someone younger go to all this trouble is encouraging. Second, she writes knowledgeably and without the snark most of these stories revolve around. And how can the Wine Curmudgeon argue with a post that ends with: “Don’t let anyone shame you for enjoying a $6 bottle of wine. As this experiment has taught me, price does not mean you will or won’t like something. Find what you like and what works for you, and enjoy it!”

How big? Fox broadcaster Joe Buck is selling his palatial St. Louis home, and one of the highlights is what the story calls “a wine room that can hold close to 1,000 bottles.” This raises any number of questions for the WC to ponder: First and foremost, how does one drink 1,000 bottles of wine? That’s close to three bottles of wine a day for a year, something not even I am willing to try. Ah, WC, you answer: It’s not about drinking – it’s about storing. So how does one accumulate 1,000 bottles of wine worth storing? And then decide when to drink them – and what to drink them with. Frankly, it’s easier to illegally buy Domaine Tariquet.

Yellow Tail: I report this story, though I don’t necessarily believe it. The Mirror, one of those British tabloids that is best known for gossip and racy headlines, claims that Chinese gangs are flooding Britain with fake bottle of Yellow Tail, the $6 Aussie brand. Read the story more closely, and it notes that 41 counterfeit bottles were found in a supermarket in a town near Birmingham in central England, and that “other bottles have been found elsewhere in the country.” Which, of course, is hardly flooding. Besides, there’s little incentive to counterfeit cheap wine, since the fake ingredients don’t cost that much less than what’s normally in the bottle. If the wholesale cost of Yellow Tail is a couple of dollars, what’s the point of making counterfeit Yellow Tail that costs $1 to make, as the story says? And hasn’t Yellow Tail suffered enough?

Winebits 499: Rose’s popularity, Yellow Tail, Texas wine

Instagram
No need to put this on Instagram. We’re not drinking rose.

This week’s wine news: Instagram made rose popular – who knew? Plus Yellow Tails’ profitability and a Texas wine overview

Hipster rose foolishness: The reason for rose’s surge in popularity? It’s not quality or price or improved availability. It’s Instagram, the social media network that is popular among young people. The Wine Curmudgeon does not dispute the power of social media, but I will point out one thing that the woman who wrote this post apparently didn’t know. The people who buy the most wine in the U.S. are older than 40 or so. Nine out of 10 Instagram users are younger than 35. That’s a contradiction that needs to be explained. Until then, I will settle for quality and and price.

Yellow Tail profitability: Want to know how the family that owns the Australian Yellow Tail brand makes so much money selling cheap wine? David Morrison has one answer on his Wine Gourd blog: Look at the exchange rate between the U.S. and Australian dollars. Every one penny movement in the currency equated to around $A2 million in higher sales revenue for Yellow Tail. Hence, a weak Aussie dollar means more money for the Casella family. That Yellow Tail and Barefoot can make money – lots of money – selling $6 wine in the age of premiumization speaks volumes about how well they understand the wine business and how well so many of their competitors don’t.

Spot on on Texas: The Wine Curmudgeon regularly laments the poor coverage regional wine gets from the Winestream Media, as well as from the non-wine press. But that’s not the case this time, with a well done piece from Courtney Schiessl on Vinepair. Other than the very tired “things are bigger in Texas” opening (where was an editor?), she gets Texas right – what has happened here, what is happening, and what we need to continue to do to improve quality. That’s not always easy for someone not familiar with a region to do, but good to see when it happens.

private label wine

When you know way too much about cheap wine

cheap wineBring on the cheap wine; who else but the WC can identify it blind in a competition?

Is it possible to know too much about cheap wine? That’s what happened to the Wine Curmudgeon during last month’s judging in the TexSom International Wine Awards.

We did a blind tasting of a sauvignon blanc in a category called “Multiple countries, all other white varieties,” which is about as odd and unusual a category as possible. But I thought I knew what the wine was, since it’s my fate to know more about cheap wine than almost anyone else in the world.

“That must be the Yellow Tail sauvignon blanc,” I said. “They blend New Zealand sauvignon blanc with sauvignon blanc from Australia. It wasn’t bad the last time I had it.”

The other three judges, each of whom was incredibly accomplished and who I liked and enjoyed tasting with, looked at me as if I was babbling baby gibberish. And why not? Yellow Tail is probably not something they drink regularly, and there is no reason why they should. And they probably didn’t expect to be judging with someone who could identify cheap wine the same way they can recognize a bottle of high-end cabernet sauvignon from California’s Santa Cruz Mountains (which they did during our judging).

So when the competition results were announced last week, the sauvignon blanc in the “Multiple countries, all other white varieties” category was, in fact, the Yellow Tail (which got a bronze medal). How many people in the world who don’t work for Yellow Tail would have been able to identify the wine just from the category?

I will leave it for you to decide if that’s a good or a bad thing.

The horror, the horror: Return of the Yellow Tail TV ad

Yellow Tail TV adBrace yourself: Yellow Tail says its Super Bowl ad worked so well that it’s going to make $40 million more of them

Who needs movies with an alien jumping out of someone’s chest? Or a lunatic running around with a chainsaw? We’re going to have more Yellow Tail TV ads.

The horror, the horror!”

The Aussie wine company, whose $7 label is the best-selling import in the U.S., was so excited about the success of its Super Bowl TV ad, reports the Wine Spectator, that the company plans “to pursue a three-year campaign (estimated to cost more than $40 million) centered on TV spots. It’s an unusual venue for promoting wine.”

No kidding, especially since the ad – to put it nicely – was terrible (and you’ll have to click the link to see the ad, since I’m not linking to it again). It caused a furor in its native Australia, eliciting comments like “it humiliated my country,” while the humor that was supposed to be its selling point was about as funny as a Dostoevsky novel. “Pet my roo?” indeed.

But an official for Yellow Tail’s U.S. distributor said the ad boosted sales and social media impressions, so they’re ready to spend the equivalent of 476,190 cases of Yellow Tail for the next round of TV.

Perhaps. But the Wine Curmudgeon should note two things, as part of my campaign to rescue TV wine advertising from its decades-long misery. First, increasing Yellow Tail sales 19 percent by volume and 13 percent by dollars in the ad’s aftermath doesn’t necessarily mean the ad did any good; it could just as easily reflect steep discounting by retailers to move wine that they bought in anticipation of the ad. Second, that the ad generated social media buzz may not be a good thing, since I have a feeling many of the tweets were like this one:

Please, Yellow Trail, change your mind. The wine world has enough problems as it is without any more roo petting.

The fifth Super Bowl wine post

super bowl wineCan Yellow Tail pull off a Super Bowl wine ad winner?

This year’s Super Bowl wine post combines two of my least favorite things – the Super Bowl and TV wine advertising. Because Australia’s Yellow Tail, the best-selling import in the U.S., is advertising during the game on Sunday.

Which fits neatly into this almost annual post, which started when I discovered that Super Bowl Sunday was the worst day of the year for blog visitors, even worse than Christmas. I don’t know why this is, and I don’t want to think what it says about Americans, pro football, and how we celebrate Christmas.

Know that I haven’t watched the game since 1986, which was more or less the last time I got paid to watch it. Know, too, that I have tried desperately to raise the quality of TV wine commercials over the blog’s history, and to little avail. Rose and local wine were easy, compared to TV wine ads. For the most part, they’re still as awful as they’ve ever been – not very creative or clever while reinforcing every annoying wine stereotype.

Hopefully, the Yellow Tail ad will be different. For one thing, the company went to a lot of trouble to advertise, piecing together time in 70 local markets because it couldn’t buy a national ad; a beer company bought those rights for all booze ads for the game. Second, it is spending what the normally authoritative Ad Age reports as more than $5 million for a 30-second spot – the equivalent of some 60,000 cases of Yellow Tail.

But I don’t have high hopes. The company’s last TV ad was – to put it politely – a dud, and this quote, from Yellow Tail’s U.S. importer, doesn’t make the Super Bowl ad sound much better.

“And we think that if we bring the message that wine can be fun and that wine can be present in all of these occasions where you celebrate, we think we can make a big impact.”

Because that approach sounds a lot like this 1970s ad, which was also someone’s idea of fun.

More Super Bowl wine posts:
Once more into the Super Bowl breach
Why the Wine Curmudgeon doesn’t like the Super Bowl

Winebits 312: Sales trends edition

? YellowTail growth resumes: Remember all those stories about how the strong Australian dollar and YellowTail’s financial problems were going to mean the end of an era for Aussie wine? Not true, apparently. The biggest imported brand in the U.S. expects 2 1/2 percent gorwth this year, reaching almost 9 million cases. Driving that growth are the brand’s two sweet red labels, including a sangria. That YellowTail has rebounded from its problems says much about its marketing skill, but also speaks about its clout with retailers. How many other brands could have slumped the way YellowTail did, but not lose shelf space and even added space for two more wines? In this respect, Big Wine is becoming more and more like other consumer goods, be they ketchup or detergent, with all the means — good and bad — for the consumer.

? Is craft beer headed for a bust? This matters to wine not only because craft beer competes for drinkers with wine, especially in the younger demographics, but because the growth in craft beer (“But even such a healthy rise in consumer demand won’t be enough to sustain the many new breweries jumping into the marketplace“) has similarities to what happened in California with “boutique” wineries heading into the recession and with the unprecedented growth in moscato and sweet red over the past couple of years. What’s interesting is that someone in craft beer has noticed what ?s going on, while almost everyone in wine was in denial before the recession and during the moscato and sweet red boom.

? If you can sell wine on-line. ..: You can sell a lot of it. That was the experience of the British supermarket chain Tesco, which doesn’t face the three-tier restrictions that U.S. retailers face in this country. The story, on the drinks business trade magazine site, says sales may have gone up as much as 51 percent over the same period last year, and offers all the reasons why that is so. Contrast this with Amazon’s wine marketplace, which after nine months still can’t sell wine in all 50 states.