Category:Wine rants

“Premiumization is elitist”

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

woman drinking coffee
“How bougie — $15 hard seltzers.”

Of course it is, but that hasn’t stopped the wine business from embracing it – to its detriment

Two recent news items show just how little the wine business understands the dilemma that it’s facing. In the first, one of the Gallo family decries premiumization and the harm it has done to wine. In the second, an Italian producer boasts about its $15 wine spritzers – which, by any measurement, is premiumization run amok.

Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

The premiumization quote comes from Stephanie Gallo, the chief marketing officer for E&J Gallo, whose family runs the largest wine company in the world. Speaking to the North Bay Business Journal’s Women in the Wine Business Conference, she said: “I hate the word ‘premiumization’ — hate it. I think it’s elitist.” Instead, she said, wines should be priced so they’re affordable for consumers of every income level and circumstance.

Which, of course, is what the Wine Curmudgeon has been saying for years. Who knew I had such powerful forces on my side?

And, for the most part, Gallo does just that. Three of its most important brands — Barefoot, Apothic, and the Italian sparkler La Marca – not only dominate their categories, but Barefoot alone would be the third biggest producer in the U.S. by itself.

We can argue about quality, but Gallo does know how to sell cheap wine – and is one of the few producers who still wants to do it.

Because the Italian company obviously doesn’t. The marketing materials it sent me hit every current wine talking point as if they were written by a chatbot culling the Internet: Cocktail-like! Low alcohol! Lighter! And its name sounds just like this!

And all for just $15 a bottle.

Sigh. Apparently, no one in Italy has heard about canned spritzers, hard seltzers and the like, which cost about half as much and have dominated the market – but seem to be losing favor with consumers. Or, even, this pink wine, also half the price.

Which, of course, is a distinctly wine thing to do. Let’s release a product after it has already run its course and consumers have moved on to something else. And, when it fails, we can say we tried and pat ourselves on the back for making the effort but not being appreciated.

Photo: “stocks-7559” by Artem Beliaikin is marked with CC0 1.0.

Smoking, wine, and the Neo-Prohibitionists

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

per capita cigarette consumption in U.S.How equating drinking with cigarettes will save us from alcohol

The chart at the top of this post says everything we need to know about the Neo-Prohibitionist plan to end drinking in the U.S.

It details what happened to U.S. per capita cigarette consumption though 1998. Note the peak just before the 1963 Surgeon General’s report linking cigarette use to cancer. A second chart, here, shows the percentage of U.S. men and women who smoked though 1998.

The trend in both charts? Down, down, down, of course. (And, if that’s not enough, U.S. cancer deaths have fallen 30 percent since 1991.)

Their plan is to do for alcohol and wine what the anti-smoking groups did for cigarettes – use science to show that drinking will kill you. Hence, the avalanche of studies over the past couple of years showing that any amount of booze, just like any number of cigarettes, is deadly.

Which, of course, isn’t necessarily true – as even some in the scientific community have said.

Nevertheless, that’s where we are.

This is where I always mention that none of this is written to denigrate the serious problems caused by alcohol abuse. It’s something that I’ve been writing about for decades, and something that I have seen first hand. I should also add that I have never smoked, and that I completely understand the link between smoking and death – and can be quite annoying about it.

But to claim that a glass of wine with dinner is alcoholism is both foolish and fruitless. It’s not going to stop anyone from drinking, and it’s certainly not true.

One of the most fascinating parts of the Neo assault on drinking is that no one has explicitly shown that moderate wine drinking doesn’t have health benefits, the so-called French Paradox. Instead, the flood of studies just keeps piling up “evidence” that all drinking is fatal.

The other thing that’s rarely discussed? There was a direct link between smoking and lung cancer; if you smoked enough, a spot showed up on your lung. That direct link still doesn’t exist for alcohol, because it has been difficult to filter out other lifestyle factors that might cause death. Obesity or a poor diet (or both) can cause heart disease, even without drinking. So if I have a couple of beers or a glass of wine each night, but don’t exercise, weigh too much, and eat bacon the way a vegan scarfs down tofu, it’s almost certainly not the beer that will kill me.

Which, in looking at many of the Neo anti-drinking studies, is something that they have to dance around. “Well, if he hasn’t had those beers or wine, he might not have had high blood pressure or weighed too much.” Maybe. But it would be nice to see scientific evidence supporting that, instead of more dancing.

I want to live as long as possible. Don’t I deserve the best evidence of how to do that?

 

Is it time to panic over chatbot wine reviews?

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Frustrated computer user
“No. no, no.. petite sirah is not the same as sirah. Or even syrah.””

Hardly. How can it rant about wine the way the WC can?

Artificial intelligence and wine writing are nothing new on the blog. I’ve posted about it nine times since 2015 — before most of the media, wine or otherwise, even knew what it was.

So excuse me if I haven’t panicked about the latest chatbot developments.

Because lots of others have, whether the AI is penning poetry, developing software code, or creating term papers. A piece in the New York Times said AI writing could be used “to generate and spread untruths” (as if humanity hasn’t been doing that for as long as there has been humanity). Even the Linux community, which is usually too cool to be bothered with stuff like this, was more than a little concerned when a coding site called GitHub unveiled an AI called Copilot to “help” write code.

Yes, chatbots can help students cheat – as if they need any help. Yes, AI can be used to write news stories – if the news organization is willing to spend a lot of time editing out mistakes. And I wouldn’t be surprised if someone started using them to write the junk that’s on the back labels of wine bottles.

What AI writing can’t do is think. It can gather information and organize it, and sometimes even do a terrific job. But it can’t taste wine and write a review, and it certainly can’t decide whether a $12 wine is varietally correct or offers value. This blog post, where a tech guy described how he designed an AI to write tasting notes, was notable for two things: First, how “tasting note” they sounded, even though the information came from gathering and organizing. But that may say as much about tasting notes as they do the AI’s skills. Second, that the site mentioned in the post stopped working shortly after I wrote about it, unable to keep up with what it needed to do.

But, perhaps the most important caveat: An AI can’t decide what to write about, the way I can. Yes, it can be given an assignment, but who is going to decide what’s important enough for it to “write” about — and then decide if it can complete the assignment correctly? And it certainly can’t look at the wine business and decide what’s going on the blog for the next week.

Until that happens, we still need cranky ex-newspaper reporters.

More about AI wine writing:
• Are machine-written wine reviews closer than ever?
• Artificial intelligence and wine recommendations
• Winecast 30: Arty, the first artificial intelligence wine writer

 

The other problem with boxed and canned wine?

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

woman in black and white dress with wine glass
“Would that I had a box of $6 a bottle Argentine malbec. Who knows? I might even give up cocktails.”

It’s our old pal availability – of course

Last month’s post detailing the problems with drinking box and canned wine for dinner – and that weren’t about quality – didn’t include one other handicap.

It’s not easy to find either on store shelves, save for a handful of national brands. It’s an especial problem for boxed wine; periodically, I’ll get a release about a new and exciting box, but it will only be for sale at three stores, two on one coast and one on the other.

In other words, our old pal availability.

This came to me when I was looking through my tasting notes for something to do as a wine of the week, and I realized that one of the wines that I marked to use came in a box (though not one that I had used for the dinner post).

Ha! I thought. This would be a perfect followup to the dinner post – and it is, but for the wrong reason. It’s almost impossible to buy the wine in the U.S. There’s one retailer on Wine-Searcher, none on Pix, and only three on the first page of a Google search.

Which is a damned shame, since this is just the kind of wine to keep around the house. It’s the 2021 Trampa Malbec, which I got as a sample. The suggested retail price is $24 for a 3-liter box, which works out to $6 a bottle.

And I liked it — and this comes from someone who doesn’t much care for Argentine malbec. From my notes: “Simple and straightforward — juicy, bright berry fruit, not much in the way of tannins, and something oakish that isn’t too oakish. Outstanding value at $6 a bottle.”

In this, it’s exactly the kind of cheap, quality wine – in a non-traditional package, as well – that the wine business claims it needs and wants so it can attract younger consumers. So is it easy to buy? Of course not. And we know why that is, don’t we, three-tier system?

Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

Photo: Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Cheap wine is irrelevant, part IV

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Sun computer found in a junk pile
Old computers? $10 wine? Junk ’em!

Expert claims most wines that cost less than $30 are junk

How does one respond to a major news site running a wine story headlined: “If you want quality, don’t spend under $30 on a bottle”

Shake your head, go to the keyboard, and once again defend the wine that most of us can afford to drink. Because if the wine business keeps insisting on marketing campaigns like this, wine truly is doomded – no matter how hard I try to save it.

The piece ran last week on the CNBC website, which is big and important enough so that I would assume the editors would know better. I contacted the writer, but never heard back. I didn’t contact the person featured in the story; we’ll just assume he was misquoted and it’s a coincidence that he works for a high-end online wine retailer.

Otherwise, that’s one of the most foolish things I’ve heard in my career in wine. Price, as I like to think I have amply demonstrated over the years, is not the barrier to quality the wine business would have us believe. It’s a guide, certainly, but it’s hardly an ironclad guarantee. I would be hard pressed to find a $30 rose that is four times better than this $7 pink, and I’m willing to bet that most wine types, including the fellow in the story, would find it just as difficult.

In fact, anyone who claims that a $100 wine — let alone a $50 wine — is always fabulous is either narrow minded, misguided, or elitist. Which, unfortunately, describes much of the wine business. What’s even more depressing is that the fellow in the story writes off some terrific $15 and $20 wine in his haste to denigrate “cheap.” Which means he tosses away gems like this Spanish cava, this cru Beaujolais, and that really weird Basque white that I love.

Much of the rest of the story was the usual wine geek stuff about appellations and mass produced wine, buttressed by a bit of winespeak here and there. The more wine changes. … yes?

Finally, the fellow’s qualifications for the $30 pronouncement? That he has tasted some 15,000 wines. We’ll ignore that I have tasted 45,000 in my 20-plus years doing this, which is more or less what many of my colleagues have tasted. What does matter is that any discerning wine drinker – and I can think of dozens of blog readers who fit that description – have also tasted more than that. Which, if you think about it, means they think just the opposite of the story’s expert, don’t they?

Maybe wine isn’t doomded after all.

Photo: “Sun computer found in a junk pile” by bandarji is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

More cheap wine irrelevant:
• It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant, part III
• It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant, part II
• It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant

What the wine business can learn from the Super Bowl

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Yellow Tail roo Super Bowl ad
The 2017 Yellow Tail Super Bowl ad — it was no Rihanna, was it?

Marketing matters, as the Super Bowl entertainment demonstrates

The NFL is one of the most traditional institutions in the world. The demographics of its owners haven’t changed all that much since George Halas and Decatur Staleys in the 1920s. It has a rule to force teams to interview non-white candidates for coaching jobs — and which is routinely ignored. And one of the bits of excitement in yesterday’s game was that each team started an African-American quarterback, which seems positively Kafkaesque given that we had a black president 15 years before that happened.

But the NFL, for all of that, isn’t as hidebound as the wine business when it comes to marketing. Consider that many of the owners probably didn’t know who Rihanna was, and couldn’t name any of Chris Stapleton’s hits. Yet there they were, doing the halftime show and the national anthem for Sunday’s game.

That’s because the NFL understands how to make money – so much so, in fact, that there’s an argument that some teams care more about profits than winning. Right, Dallas Cowboys fans? The turning point was Michael Jackson’s halftime show in 1993, which showed what could be done when the league took marketing seriously. Before that, halftime shows were Disney characters, a group called Up With People (and be glad if you don’t know who they were), and, believe it or not, Mickey Rooney.

Compare this to the wine business, which seems to think marketing is something other businesses to do. Because, wine, after all, is better than that. It’s not a coincidence there weren’t any wine names in a recent survey of the most popular Super Bowl ad brands, Or that perhaps the most expensive Super Bowl wine effort ever was (to put it politely) stupid.

Even more depressing: If the wine business had to plan the halftime show, would it have a chosen a Beatles cover band? “The drummer looks just like Ringo!” Or selected one of the Elvis impersonators from “Honeymoon in Vegas” to do the national anthem?

I really do have reasons to worry about the wine business, don’t I?

Follow-up: Big Wine 2023

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

woman in coffee shop
“$15 for a bottle of wine? What a waste.”

Wine’s crisis is about money – wine costs too much, so consumers are looking elsewhere

We can dance around the Maypole as much as we want, but in the end, wine’s crisis is about money – wine costs too much, so consumers are buying something else.

It took me a long time to write that sentence. But the numbers in the 19th annual Wine Business News industry survey, which I wrote about yesterday, convinced me that it was time to write it. The survey numbers were just that bad, confirming what the SVB wine report found last month. Wine has lost consumers younger than 60, and there’s no reason to expect them to ever come back.

I hesitated because I didn’t want to sound like a crazy old coot ranting that wine was better in the old days when it was cheaper, and that I knew this because I walked uphill to school in the snow both ways. But who better to write about wine pricing than the Wine Curmudgeon? Who tastes more wine costing less than $15? Who knows how crappy most of it is?

In this, wine has tried everything but quality cheap wine to arrest its slide. Nothing has worked: Not making cheap wine just to be cheap; not making more sweet wine, despite the proliferation of sweet wines and the success of brands like 19 Crimes; and not alternative packaging like cans and boxes, despite all the media hype for each.

So what else can wine’s problem be but price?

The typical wine consumer can buy a crappy bottle of $8 wine or a not quite as crappy bottle of $15 wine. The idea of a quality $10 bottle of wine is as old-fashioned as Myspace or Ask Jeeves. So why is it so surprising that consumers aren’t buying those wines, but opting for craft beer and spirits — each of which offers more value and may even cost less?

It’s only surprising to the people who make wine. Talk to younger consumers, as I do, and they have said the same things for years: Cocktails are more fun. Spirits are a better value. Corkscrews suck. Wine is confusing.

In fact, it’s not a coincidence that wine’s only success over the past decade has been rose, which has increased in sales volume by some 1500 percent since 2010. And why not? Rose was cheap, well-made, fun, and used screwcaps. Those of us of a certain age can make as much fun as we want of Instagram influencers posing with rose bottles, but we can’t argue with rose’s success among younger consumers.

So what did wine do? Premiumize rose and insist that we should buy the $20 stuff for no other reason than we should: “Don’t you want to drink better?”

Sigh. Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

And, sadly, now I have even more reason to worry.

Photo: “Young woman in coffee shop” by Aaron Stidwell is licensed under CC BY 2.0.