No, wine business, expensive wine is not better just because it’s expensive

Premiumization’s battle cry is nothing more than another wine flim flam

The headlines show up every time the depressing numbers are released. Wine consumption in the U.S. continues to decline (and around the world, for that matter), but that’s OK:

“BECAUSE WE’RE DRINKING BETTER!”

How do we know we’re drinking better? Because we’re buying more expensive wine – and, as we hear every day from the Winestream Media, expensive wine is always better. Regardless.

Cue Wine Curmudgeon sighing.

Call this wine’s newest flim flam, so that it can pretend that everything is OK even though it’ not. As Paul Tincknell, the blog’s official wine marketer, explains: “The industry can welcome a massive contraction as consumption decreases due to the ‘drink better, not more often’ ethos.”

Which is bad enough. What’s worse is the idea that expensive is better just because it’s expensive.

Frankly, I thought I had taken care this in the blog’s early days, and especially when The Other Wine Guy and I did our wine talks at the State Fair of Texas a decade ago. If a drunken crowd of beer drinkers (mostly from Oklahoma on certain weekends in October) can understand that expensive doesn’t equal better, then why is it so difficult for the wine business? I would ask the audience if a $100 wine was always 10 times better than a $10 wine, and their answer was always a resounding no.

Maybe, once, wine prices were an accurate guide to quality. And some still are – this wine is infinitely better than this wine. But those are the exceptions. Post-modern wine marketing and winemaking have turned that inside out. A quality $10 or $15 wine, like the ones I’ve been writing about for almost 30 years, is not going to be that much different from a $25 supermarket wine. The latter may have a fancier label, cuter name, and heavier bottle, but what’s inside is going to be about the same.

I see this all the time with too many of the samples that I get. Most recently, it happened with a $45 Italian white that had one of the most marketing-driven names and labels I’ve ever seen, as well as wax on top of the closure and a 27-ounce bottle. In all of this, it screamed quality.

Which was a good thing, since the wine – though well made – was dull and not especially interesting. It tasted like an Italian version of white Burgundy, chardonnay from France. This begs two questions: Why would an Italian want to knock off a French wine, and why would I pay $45 for an Italian version when I can get the real thing for the same price?

But, if you believe the flim flam, when we buy that wine, we’re drinking better.

The kicker to this story? The next wine I tasted was a $9 Italian red I bought at Jimmy’s, the blog’s official Italian wine retailer. It was about as ordinary as Italian reds get – tart, a little rustic, maybe not quite ripe enough, and not necessarily something I would buy again. But it was an honest wine that paired with what I was eating, and I enjoyed it much more than the $45 white.

So I guess I’m not drinking better. I’m just having more fun.