Category:Wine rants

Follow-up: Gallup alcohol survey 2022

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Mad magazine's A;fred E. Neuman
Alfred E. Neuman, the poster boy for the post-modern wine business

Another study that cries gloom and doom? Who cares?

Last year, when the Gallup survey about U.S. alcohol consumption showed that no one who wasn’t an older, college educated woman much cared about wine, the wine business was in an uproar. I even sold two freelance pieces about the reaction to the survey.

But what happened this year, when the survey showed mostly the same thing — as well the even more worrisome continuation of the drinking less trend?

The reaction was the opposite: What, me worry?

In other words, the wine business has made peace with declining sales, less alcohol use, and its generation gap. It is banking on premiumization, even though there are signs that that premiumization is wearing itself out, and what the blog’s official wine marketer calls “consolidation to grab market share;” that is, when sales decline, just buy another company to paper over the problem.

Obviously, this is not a long-term solution. But as wine has demonstrated over the past decade, long-term solutions are for suckers. The mantra these days is short-term profits, and the rest will work itself out.

Hardly a sound business plan, but what do you expect from a business that still acts like it’s 1995?

The other intriguing bit about the survey? There didn’t seem to be any difference in alcohol preferences based on politics. That’s a change from previous studies, including one I noted when I wrote the alcohol piece for the late American Demographics magazine. That showed a relationship between wine and more conservative voters; that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

No, Vogue, boxed wine hasn’t finally become cool

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Once again, the WC must help the Mainstream Media figure out this wine thing

Vogue magazine cover
Somehow, I can’t see this woman opening a Bota Box rose.

Dear Vogue:

Let’s get this out of the way first – the Wine Curmudgeon is not a Vogue kind of person. I’m not rich enough, I’m not young or pretty enough, and I don’t dress well enough (hats notwithstanding). Still, I do know about wine, so I thought I would point out that you could have done a better job with your recent boxed wine piece.

Because, no, boxed wine is not becoming cool.

I don’t write this to be snarky or cranky, but to fulfill my role as an advocate for quality journalism, and especially about wine. And the reporting in this story could be much, much better.

You write: Boxed wine “has a bad reputation. Perhaps that’s due to its prevalence on college campuses, or a lack of prevalence beyond: American adults, so many of us are conditioned to think, drink wine from bottles, not boxes.”

That’s not true. The box demographic is Baby Boomer – and the more expensive the box, the older the consumer is. The difference is that we leave the bag in the box when we drink it.

How bougie is that of us?

Second, the story has almost no statistics. Yes, I’m quite happy to see an upscale sommelier at a hip Manhattan bar and retailer say we shouldn’t be so snotty about boxed wine, but it would be nice if the story pointed out that boxed wine sales have been steadily increasing for years – and why they haven’t become more popular (because much of the wine is wretched, actually).

Third, one discussion of a box wine – and one that is almost impossible to buy – and two more wines thrown in at the end do not a story make.

And trust me, no one wants to read about the glass bottle’s heinous carbon footprint more than I do. But you sort of stuck it in because an editor said to, and not because you thought it was important.

So constructive criticism. Because the day we can wave goodbye to the glass bottle and cork – as your sommelier notes – can’t come too soon.

Your pal in better journalism,
The Wine Curmudgeon

 

Annie Green Springs and why nothing is ever new in the wine business

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

This 1970s brand foreshadowed wine coolers and hard seltzers – complete with crummy advertising

One of the things about the wine business that makes me crazy is that there is nothing new – just the same stuff repackaged in a prettier label.

Case in point: This 1974 radio ad for a brand called Annie Green Springs, which was apparently a cross between Boone’s Farm and Thunderbird — aimed at both college students and urban audiences, neither of whom wanted to drink “real” wine. So fizzy, slightly sweet, and marketing-style fruity. How do Apricot Splash, Berry Frost, and Plum Hollow sound?

In other words, hard seltzer.

The ad, save for a few pictures that offer a sort of nostalgic pleasure for anyone who remembers those times (“Groovy!”), is terrible – corny and very dated, and the jingle is so awkward that Churro, the blog’s associate editor, could probably have written a better one.

Annie Green Springs, despite an attempt to revive the brand a couple of years ago, apparently no longer exists. Small favors, anyway.

Video: What’s the Story via YouTube

More about wine advertising:
• TV wine ads: Black Box targets younger consumers – but still doesn’t get it right
• The history of wine advertising and reaching younger consumers
• Radio wine ad: Stiller & Meara for Blue Nun

How did a once enjoyable cheap Spanish red turn into a wine Popsicle?

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Plastic toy bulls
“Don’t blame us. We’re just a marketing gimmick, too.”

Blame it on wine filtered through focus groups, because wine drinkers are idiots and we need to be told what to like

One of the Wine Curmudgeon’s regular rants is about focus group wine; that is, wine tested with consumers to make sure it is as inoffensive as possible. Because, of course, wine drinkers are idiots and we need to be told what to like.

The latest example of this kind of wine? Sangre de Toro, from Spain’s Miguel Torres.

Once, this was a terrific $7 supermarket red wine, and it even came with a little plastic bull attached to the neck of the bottle. It tasted Spanish – some cherry fruit, a little rough but not unpleasantly so, and just the thing for a weeknight dinner. It was, in those long ago days before premiumization and consolidation, quite common – simple but drinkable, the kind of wine that offered beginning wine drinkers a chance to see what Spanish red wine was like.

I drank hundreds of bottles over the years, and even had a pile of the bulls stuffed in a drawer somewhere.

And then the wise guys got hold of the wine. I bought a bottle the other day and was stunned. It tasted like a wine Popsicle – sweet, high in alcohol, smoooooth, and bereft of any Spanish character or varietal quality. It could have come from anywhere wine is made, and I have no doubt that the producer intended just that. I was actually angry — not so much because it was wretched, which it was, but because I had been naive enough to think that it would still taste like Spanish wine after all these years.

Why would anyone do this? Because, of course, wine drinkers are idiots and we need to be told what to like.

But there are several other reasons, none of which bode well for the future of wine:

• Copying success. The popularity of sweet red blends like Apothic and Menage a Trois means everyone figures they need to knock off those styles to sell wine. Which may work in the short term, but rarely does for any longer than that. When’s the last time anyone bought a bottle of Blue Nun?

• The almost god-like power of wholesalers in the three-tier system (and which, thanks to consolidation, is becoming even more god-like). The wholesaler tells the producer: “We need an Apothic knockoff to sell to supermarkets,” and even big producers like Torres have to do what they’re told.

• Wine’s continuing evolution into something no different from ketchup or laundry detergent — just another item on a grocery shelf. This is not about making money; everyone is entitled to do that. Rather, it’s the idea that wine is made to be something other than what it should be. If that’s the case, no wonder people buy hard kombucha. At least that tastes like what it is.

All those bulls stuffed in a drawer disappeared years ago, and I was always upset that I had lost them. Until now – good riddance. Who needs to be reminded of plonk like this?

Wine drinkers to supermarkets: We want better, more affordable wine

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Wione bottles on store shelf
“What? No Winking Owl?”

New study shows we’re not happy with supermarket private label wine

This is the first of two parts looking at trends for wine sold in supermarkets and convenience stores, since not all wine is sold at Costco, Total Wine, and your local retailer. Today, part I: Supermarket private label wine. Friday, part II: Convenience store wine sales.

A friend emailed me recently, with a link to all the wonderful cheap wines Aldi sells in some of its European stores. “Have you seen any of these wines in your local Aldi?,” he wrote, and most unhappily.

Nope, I told him, and we commiserated about the poor choices for supermarket private label wine in the U.S. (Winking Owl!).

But, it turns out, we’re not alone in our disappointment with supermarket private labels — the wines that can only be bought at specific retailers, like Kirkland at Costco and Two-buck Chuck at Trader Joe’s.

A recent study looking at private label supermarket products found that shoppers were mostly satisfied with the quality and prices of store-brand toilet paper, ketchup, and the like. One of the few things that didn’t do well?

Private label wine and alcohol.

In the Food Marketing Institute report, almost half of frequent private brand shoppers preferred to buy national brand alcohol; in fact, they were more likely to buy store pet food and vitamins than they were store brand wine. And why was that? Because, as one shopper said, “Stock up on alcoholic beverages.” In other words, a couple of cases of Winking Owl (or its equivalent) stacked at the end of the aisle is not enough.

This was not supposed to happen. A couple of years before the pandemic, the Private Label Manufacturer’s Association launched a campaign to improve the quality and pricing of those wines (in which I played a tiny, tiny part). But the pandemic and the death of the PLMA president Brian Sharoff put an end to that.

So what are we stuck with? Something like this $4 wine from Aldi, which really isn’t even worth $4.

Photo:”lotta wine” by rick is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

 

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

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

George C. Scott, Michael Sarrazin playing cards
“You can watch the cards all you want. But I’m still going to get your money.”

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.

Wine’s sustainability problem

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

man with head in hold
“I know sustainability is down here somewhere.”

There’s more to being green than growing grapes, but the wine business still hasn’t figured that out

Sustainable wine – that is, wine made to be eco-friendly – has been dominating wine business discussions lately. And why not? Climate change is already kicking wine in the head, and it’s only going to get worse, say the experts.

Hence this very impressive green conference last month, which genuinely seemed to try to make a difference. And many producers, whether in New Zealand or California, like Tablas Creek and Spotswoode, have made impressive strides.

But those seem to be the exceptions. Wine too often misses the point about sustainability, and that doesn’t even take into account that no one quite knows how to define the term. Rather, that’s because wine sustainability is mostly concerned with farming and not the rest of what makes wine wine – packaging, quality, and price. (And no, this isn’t going to be another rant about glass bottles, so you can take your fingers off the cancel button.)

Note four recent sustainability moments that, for better or worse, show how far wine still has to go:

• Benjamin Neyman, the production and procurement manager for California producer Shannon Family, offered impressive insights during a recent Zoom sustainability seminar. He said the winery can do everything possible to make grape growing more green, and it has. But “how do we overcome getting glass from China or diesel trucks that get 4 mpg delivering our wine?” And, added Neyman, there is still a sense among consumers that glass bottles are the only packaging that matters.

• Pricing came up frequently during the sustainability seminar, with the idea that $20 was the cost of an entry level wine. In this, I kept getting the sense that the wine business wants to use sustainability to raise prices and accelerate premiumization. Which, of course, won’t do much for the planet.

• A couple of samples arrived recently from California wineries that pride themselves on their green credentials; one of them is famous for it. So how were the samples packed? One used foam peanuts and the other used polystyrene foam. And the famous winery’s bottle weighed 18 ounces, almost four times the weight of a plastic bottle. That’s hardly acting green, is it?

• Finally, quality, which various winemakers have told me continues to lag for green packaging like cans. I can attest to this: One recent can sample, a rose, smelled like rotten eggs and sulfur; the red was bitter and thin. Neither tasted like the wines the company ships in bottles, which are pretty damned good. That won’t get consumers to switch packaging, will it?