Category:Wine rants

The final scores rant

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

wine scores album cover
How could I not use a picture that combined scores with the Sex Pistols’ classic debut album?

Scores were useless when the blog started, and they’re even more useless now

The Wine Curmudgeon drank a couple of $20-plus wines recently that I’m going to use on the blog in the next couple of weeks. These are terrific wines and well worth the cost. But you couldn’t tell that by their scores on CellarTracker, the blog’s unofficial wine inventory app.

Each scored 87, which is about the same score that a crummy supermarket $15 pinot noir gets. Not surprisingly, neither were red wines.

And, to add insult to injury, a forthcoming wine of the week — an enjoyable but hardly spectacular French red — also scored 87 points on CellarTracker. In other words, a wine made for everyday drinking was rated as highly as a special occasion wine that was presumably made with higher quality grapes, better winemaking techniques, and more care and attention.

Which should tell you everything you need to know about how useless scores are, the disservice they do to to wine and wine drinkers, and why I have never, ever used them in more than 20 years of wine writing. Describe the wine, and let the reader decide if they want to drink it — just like a movie or book review.

I wrote my first scores rant in November 2007, shortly after the blog started, and very little has changed since. They’re still a crutch for lazy retailers, they still favor red wines from Napa, Bordeaux, and Burgundy, and they’re still dependent on the reviewer’s palate. So if the critic likes high alcohol wines, those will get 95 points and the stuff the rest of us enjoy drinking won’t.

But the worst thing about scores? They don’t let wine drinkers figure out what they like; instead they drink to scores, as I wrote in that 2007 post. And if you drink to scores and instead of what you enjoy, what’s the point of drinking wine?

Artwork: BlogYourWine.com

 

Once again, wine and chatbots

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Microsoft Copilot search page
Hey, Copilot, don’t forget the ads with your answer.

Because the wine business keeps telling us AI will save wine from itself

A recent news release heralding the arrival of a third-party chatbot to sell wine was about as breathless as something digital can get — emojis, even: “Are you ready to revolutionize the world of wine and accelerate your sales like never before? Look no further because [this company’s wine chatbot] is here to transform how consumers discover and appreciate your exceptional wines! 🍷🚀”

The WC has written about wine and artificial intelligence many times, most recently when I asked one how to market wine to young people. To which it replied: “Wine should focus on any savory flavors not normally associated with daily life consumption well outside of fruity alcohols for pitch similar ages.”

So this new bot, despite its pitch — even with the emojis — didn’t impress me. Nevertheless, because I go to great lengths to check this stuff out, I asked another AI if an AI could sell wine. In this case, it was the Microsoft Copilot chatbot; not my first choice, but the only one I could find that would answer the questions. Several froze when I asked.

Not surprisingly, Copilot was, well, useless — though, to be fair, not as useless as the first chatbot.

I asked, “Can a chatbot successfully recommend wine?” Its answer (edited for length): “Yes, chatbots can recommend wine based on a customer’s preferences and provide them with information about wine and wineries. The rise of AI and chatbots like ChatGPT is transforming the direct-to-consumer (DTC) wine industry by providing a new level of convenience, accuracy, and personalization.”

Why am I not surprised that a Microsoft product found a way to talk about how wonderful it was?

Then I asked: “What’s a good $15 wine for the holidays?” and it recommended four bottles from the Wine Enthusiast, none of which were $15 or less. And it ended with “I hope this helps you find the perfect wine for your holiday celebrations! 🍷🎉.”

Yes, more emojis.

In other words, not much different from a traditional, typed-in Google search (because I figure Copilot, whatever its failings, is too smart to use Bing). And did I mention that its answer included ads for wine and wine products?

So no, chatbots still aren’t ready to replace people when it comes to selling wine. Only the wine business would think so, yes?

Restaurant wine, one last time

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

women drinking wine at lunch
“When did the restaurant start charging $50 a bottle for this junk?”

It may not have come back, and we know why — too high prices

A long-time blog reader sent the following:

“American restaurants are the worst offenders. Our very reasonably priced local Chinese raised its price for my favorite Pinot Grigio ($7.99 at Total Wine) from $9 to $15 — and now they also pour short.”

The Wine Curmudgeon has spent quite a bit of time over the past 16 years trying to help restaurants boost their wine sales, and, as this anecdote shows, to little avail. And it’s just not this story that shows how bad things are, but plenty of statistics:

• The number of fine dining establishments, wine’s restaurant backbone, fell by almost 4 percent last year.

• Restaurant wine lists are smaller than ever, as restaurants try to save money by cutting wine inventory.

• Pandemic recovery has been slow — if at all. Depending on whose numbers you consult, restaurant wine sales since the initial pandemic recovery have been flat to lower, and there’s even some doubt they’re back to 2019 levels.

And, to add a little doom to the gloom, one of the most important wine number crunchers reports that all U.S. wine sales declined 7.4 percent in volume between October 2022 and September 2023, and are down 8.4 percent through September of this year.

So what does the restaurant business do? Raise prices, of course.

One final time: Put quality cheap wine on your list that you can sell for $20 a bottle. It’s out there, and I would be happy to recommend some. You’ll sell more wine, turn inventory more quickly, make more money, and make your customers happy.

Isn’t that the idea?

Photo: “Ladies that lunch” by futureshape is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Once more, the three-tier system

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

lego man and lego woman
“I know I feel better because multi-billion dollar companies say they’re concerned about my health.”

No, Mr. Creighton, it’s not the savior of the booze business — just the opposite

The following is a rant about the three-tier system, and regular readers know what to expect. If you’re new here, know this isn’t the wine writing you’re used to.

Francis Creighton, the president and CEO of the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America, recently spoke to a trade gathering, lauding the three-tier system for making the world a better place.

The WC had just a couple of disagreements (yes, sarcasm) with what Creighton said:

• “Regulations ensure consumer confidence in product integrity.” Hardly. Tainted alcohol deaths are almost unheard of in France or the United Kingdom, where the three-tier system doesn’t exist.

• “Independent distributors prevent ‘tied houses’ where suppliers can force the on- or off-premise to stock products from only one company.” Which doesn’t quite explain the federal government’s frequent investigations into wholesalers who use cash and gifts to get sales and offer illegal quid pro quos – buy this product, which no one wants, and I’ll sell you this product, which everyone wants.

• “This market is a unique achievement, a profitable public-private partnership that serves the need of all stakeholders along the value chain.” Unique certainly, but hardly serving my needs or those of any other consumer who objects to oligopoly-imposed higher prices and less choice. To say nothing of the needs of small retailers, restaurants, and wineries, who are afterthoughts in the current system.

All of which was bad enough. What was really terrifying was that he probably believes all that stuff. Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

More about the absurdity of the three-tier system:
• More wackiness in the three-tier system
• Winecast 56: Tom Wark, three-tier reform, and buying wine on Amazon
• The sham and hypocrisy behind the three-tier system

 

Wine’s glass bottle dilemma

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

glass wine bottle and cork
No, the glass wine bottle — and cork — isn’t going away, if a consumer survey is to be believed.

What do you do when you’ve convinced consumers that “real” wine comes in heavy glass bottles?

Two recent news stories outlined wine’s glass bottle dilemma – if you’ll pardon the following – with crystal clear clarity.

In the first, a group of retailers, including Whole Foods and Naked Wines in the U.S., agreed to try to make the bottles they sell much lighter, given that glass bottle weight is wine’s biggest contribution to climate change.

But in the second, a survey found that consumers cared little about the bottle’s earth-killing carbon footprint. In fact, they saw heavy bottles as a sign of wine quality.

Talk about – sorry again – the glass being half full.

None of this is surprising to any of us who have been paying attention (or who reads the blog). The wine business has worked its way through any number of alternatives to glass over the past 25 years, where each as been declared the next big thing and then quietly faded away – be they boxes, TetraPaks, or cans.

My take, of course, is that the wine business could care less about getting rid of glass bottles, and that the survey is not so much a take on consumer sentiment as it is on the success the wine business has had in convincing us that wine has to come in a bottle – the heavier the better, and with a cork for good measure. Because only cranky ex-newspaper reporters want to drink cheap wine from a light bottle with a screwcap – or, Bacchus forbid, from a box.

So getting rid of heavy bottles is left to retailers.

Yes, some of that is because the retailers want to do the right thing. But lighter bottles will also save them millions of dollars in supply chain costs, and that figures in to their decision as much as anything. And, in one of those ironies that I love so much, the wine business might even benefit because someone else did the work that it didn’t want to do.

Come on, Lifehacker — enough with the Internet wine “clubs” already

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

woman at computer
“Seriously? Free shipping?”

There’s a difference between quality cheap wine and wine cheaply made

Lifehacker offers some of the best lifestyle-related advice on the Internet (as well as the priceless “Out of Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture” for those of us of a certain age). But it doesn’t always do wine well.

I’ve tried to fix that. Several years ago, its inestimable senior food editor, Claire Lower, asked me to offer some WC-style advice for Thanksgiving. “I really need someone who can make this easy to understand,” she emailed me.

But, then, sadly, the dreaded “Sorry. They’ve cut the freelance budget” email.

So I’ve tried, since then, to offer my unique perspective in the comments, lurking in the background when I see a particularity egregious wine post. There have been several of those recently, with pieces advocating buying wine from the kind of Internet wine “clubs” we’ve warned people about over the years.

Now, a couple of caveats. First, Lifehacker was recently sold, and its new owners seem hyped on cyber-commerce and selling discounted items through the website. So these posts may have nothing to do with quality wine; they’re just there because they’re cheap. Second, some of these wine “clubs” like to sue people. So my point here is about these clubs in general and not specifically directed at any of the sites that are recommended.

Hence. the WC’s guide for telling whether you’ll get quality wine from a site offering to sell you something that works out to less than $5 or $6 a bottle — and includes shipping. Because there’s a difference between cheap wine and wine that’s cheaply made.

• Have you heard of the wineries before? Typically, these kinds of wines are made to sell for these clubs, and the wineries may exist in name only. That’s a sign of wine cheaply made.

• Are the wines listed on wine-searcher? They probably aren’t, since they’re made just for the clubs.

• Are the vintages listed? And how old are the wines if they are listed? Wines sold through these clubs are often bulk wine that never sold, leftovers from other producers that may have been re-labled, or who knows what else. In this case, a 10-year-old bottle is a sign of wine cheaply made.

• Are there other purchasing requirements – the dreaded mail-order record club scam? Back then, you got tapes (or vinyl, even) for pennies, the catch being something called negative option billing. This made you liable even if you didn’t order the music after the first shipment, when the music and shipping cost more.

So, Lifehacker, I hope this helps. And if the freelance budget gets beefed up, I know some terrific $10 wine for Thanksgiving this year.

Photo: “Aerial view of a woman using computer laptop on wooden table” by Rawpixel Ltd is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The final wine availability post

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Frustrated computer user
“No… not more about wine availability!”

Because it’s not going to get any better, so we just have to accept it the way it is

I got an email the other day from a wine marketer who wanted to send me a sample that was only available from the small winery that made it. No thanks, I said. If I ran a review of a wine that no one could buy save directly from a small winery, my readers would – to put it politely – offer a complaint or two.

In other words, nothing much has changed in wine availability since I wrote the blog’s first post almost 16 years ago. It’s as much of a pain today as it was then. There are only a handful of national brands available in much of the country, and most of those aren’t worth writing about on the blog.

Hence, my attempt at what I call “generally available” – that an independent retailer in a decent sized city can order it from a wholesaler if the retailer doesn’t carry it. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s not great, but it’s better than all of the others.

The irony here is that almost everyone, including me, expected availability to get better in those 16 years – the Internet and all of that. But it never did, for reasons we’ve covered before on the blog. And, unfortunately, it looks like availability isn’t going to get any better, no matter how much we want it to,

So consider this the final availability post, for the following reasons:

• Consolidation among wholesalers. The top two control about half the market and the top 10 control about two-thirds (the last time I looked – it might be more now). That means wines from small producers have less of a chance of getting distribution, and without a distributor they can’t be sold in the U.S. And the term “smaller producers” increasingly means a company that makes less than 300,000 cases. Which could well be about 90 percent of the wineries in the world.

• Retailers are less willing to take chances. This was one of the biggest surprises I found when I wrote the grape glut story. Retailers, for a variety of reasons, are more hesitant about stocking wine that doesn’t come with a best-seller pedigree. Which could also be about 90 percent of the wines in the world.

• No help from the courts. Many of us thought the three-tier system would die a well-deserved death sometime in the past 20 years, thanks to the various lawsuits filed against it. But the system has endured; almost every federal court decision has supported it. My friends who work to end three-tier may disagree with me, but I don;’t see that changing.