Category:Wine trends

TV wine ads: When in doubt, use sex

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Maybe sex is the answer to wine’s demographic problem

Regular readers here know the abysmal state of wine advertising, which has been documented on the blog many times. Having said that, the Wine Curmudgeon wonders if this almost 40-year-old ad wouldn’t solve many of wine’s marketing problems.

In a word, sex.

This ad, for a long-gone French white of middling quality called Valbon, isn’t subtle. Which, if nothing else, is a relief given the rest of the wine ads we’ve looked at over the years. Drink this, says the woman, and your sex life will improve tremendously: “Now, I play grown-up games.”

How’s that for a message for the viewer to take away?

Also note the woman’s age – the demographic that isn’t much interested in wine any more. Seriously – change her hairstyle, make the dress a littler more current, and do we have something here to work with?

Five nights drinking wine from something besides a bottle

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

man drinking from box wine
“Dinner? Who drinks boxed wine at dinner?”

The results were uneven, and helps explain why the glass bottle still dominates packaging

We’ve discussed alternative packaging on the blog for years, so what better way to see where wine is with something other than glass bottles than to drink wine packaged in something else?

That’s what the Wine Curmudgeon did last week – five nights drinking wine at dinner from a variety of “premium” 3-liter boxes (so no Franzia) and 250-ml cans. Why dinner? Because that remains the occasion where most wine is consumed.

Sadly, the results were uneven, and reminded me why the glass bottle – despite all its flaws – still dominates wine packaging.

My thoughts after five nights with something other than glass bottles:

• Convenience. Boxes and cans don’t do well at dinner. How do you keep track of how much wine you’ve had when it comes from a box? In addition, wrestling the spout into its holder remains a challenge, as does pouring the wine into a glass. And where do you put the box when you’re eating dinner? It needs to sit on a counter, to make pouring easier, so you have to get up every time you want another glass. And finding space in a normal-sized refrigerator for chilling the box? Good luck. Cans aren’t as awkward, but opening another can after the first is empty – and disposing of the empties – remains an inconvenience.

• Quality. Uneven, which was really depressing. Most of the canned wine tasted like it should, though some had a noxious, sour aroma when first opened (which I’m told isn’t unusual). The box quality, sadly, was all over the place. One rose was undrinkable, tannic and bitter. One red blend was OK, but nothing more. In this, boxed wine consistency hasn’t improved much over the years – decent one year, not so decent the next.

• Price. Again, uneven. The point of 3-liter boxes is price, and most figure out to $6 to $8 a bottle. Hence, the theory is we’ll put up with crappier wine since it costs less. But, as my experience with the rose proved, that’s not always the case. Just the opposite is true with cans – prices are higher because we’re paying for the convenience. For dinner, though, that means a $10 bottle of wine costs $15. And what’s the point of that?

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.

Big Wine 2023

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Wine Business Mnnthly magazine cover Feb 2023Big Wine has done the seemingly impossible: Make less product, but still control 90 percent of the market

The most telling statistic in the 19th annual Wine Business Monthly’s survey, which ranks the 50 biggest producers in the U.S.? That the market share controlled by the 100 biggest companies has not changed all that much – even though many of them are actually producing less wine.

Which pretty much sums up the crisis facing the U.S. wine business as sales decline, its core customers age, and the rest of the country drinks something else.

The pie is getting smaller, but the biggest companies still slice off the same size piece. That’s certainly not good for the other 11,000 wineries, and it’s not even particularly good for Big Wine. Success is about growth, not maintaining market share.

In other words, as one industry analyst noted earlier this year, “This is obviously a place where none of us want to be. If a rising tide floats all boats, then a shrinking tide is the opposite. In that case, we’re in a Darwinian model, where the only way to get business is by taking it from someone else. And that’s obviously a place where we don’t want to go.”

Frankly, I was stunned when I finished parsing the numbers. Case in point: the study says E&J Gallo, the biggest producer in the world, hasn’t increased its sales in the U.S. in several years. But Gallo still accounts for almost one out of every three bottles made in this country.

Even more revealing: The 10 biggest producers have lost a stunning amount of market share, from controlling about 4 out of 5 bottles in 2016 to three-quarters in 2022 — even though the top 100 still control 90 percent. This is a business school example of cannibalization: Those in the next 40 are stealing market share from those in the top 10, and no one is necessarily better off.

Here are some notes of interest from the study (for those of you who haven’t already started drinking in despair):

• There are 11,691 wineries in the U.S., a three percent increase from last year.

• Eight of 10 wineries in the U.S. make fewer than 1,000 cases while a third make fewer than 5,000 cases. There are 281 medium-sized wineries making 50,000 to 499,999 cases—counting both bonded and virtual wineries. There are 79 large wineries in the U.S. making 500,000 cases or more.

• Some historic and important wine names have seen production slump over the last year. They include Bronco, makers of Two-buck Chuck, which suffered an 11 percent decline, and supermarket stalwart Ste. Michelle Estates, down 15 percent.

• The three biggest producers have seen their share of the market fall by one-sixth since 2017 – even though Gallo bought a sizable chunk of then No. 2 producer Constellation Brands a couple of years ago.

More about Big Wine:
• Big Wine 2022
• Big Wine 2021
• Big Wine 2020

Decades and decades of wine books

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Great Wine Values book cover
Yes, the Wine Spectator once knew what a wine value was.

The Internet Archive offers a look at more than a century of books about wine

Ever wonder what the various Windows of the World wine books have been like during their almost 40 year history? Or – believe it or not – that there was once a book from the Wine Spectator called “Great Wine Values,” focusing on 1,000 wines costing $10 or less? Or that yes, there was wine news was published in the U.S. during Prohibition?

Now you can find out about all of those, as well as thousands of other wine books and articles thanks to something called the Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, and websites dating back dozens of decades.

The site says it tracks some 41 million books and texts; books published before 1927 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of others can be accessed through the site’s Open Library.

In this, it’s one of the things about the Internet that almost makes up for the rest of the cyber junk that we’ve been force fed over the past 20 years.

So it’s possible to find out that Alexis Bespaloff wrote “The Signet Book of Wine” in 1971 and to access the first handful of pages and the table of contents. How about sections on Russian and Algerian wine? Or that, in the early 1970s, the author noted: “America is not a wine drinking nation.”

Or to learn, in a book called “The Epicurean,” that the wine service for Delmonico’s restaurant in New York in the second half of the 19th century differentiated between American diners (thy were served Haut Sauterne and Perrier-Jouet Brut, among several others); French diners (the wines included Graves and Yellow Cliquot), and German diners (“no wines or mineral waters in the reception rooms”).

The website’s search process is not necessarily intuitive, but once you fiddle with it for a bit, you should be able to figure out how to look for books by title, subject, author, and even date. And yes, I spent way more time on the site than I needed to to write this post.

And, believe it or not, there are almost 100 pages of $10 U.S. wine in the Spectator book.

Wine trends 2023

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Toy robots standing up
“Are we the future? Maybe the WC knows.”

Look for wine in the new year that is dumber, sweeter, and less interesting — because demographics

This is the second of two parts looking at wine prices and wine trends in 2022. Today, Part II: Wine trends 2023. Friday, Part I: Wine prices 2023.

The Wine Curmudgeon has a cyber-folder called “Gloom and Despair, ” which is full of e-mails and links forecasting the horrors that are in store for the wine business in 2023. Just one example: “Wine business needs to reach out to new consumers as core drinkers’ ranks dwindle, expert says:

Which, of course, we know the wine business has no intention of doing.

Which also makes it difficult for me to write the 2023 trends post without sounding like a character in Albert Camus’ “The Plague,” the blog’s official existential novel. So, with that in mind, here are my thoughts about what we’ll see in wine this year.

• The dumbing down of wine continues, as medium-sized producers follow the lead of Big Wine and make wine that doesn’t taste like wine. Rather, the goal will be to meet some sort of perceived demographic demand. This means sweet varietal red wine, like the two sweet cabernet sauvignons that made me gag in the dump bucket, as well as smoooth whites like chardonnay. One recent sample was all about extensive winemaking that had taken out most of the chardonnay character and replaced it with some sort of bland, soft, sort of fruity anti-flavor.

• A continuing decline in alcohol consumption, as more consumers drink less. I think last year’s term – “mindful drinking” – still fits; it’s not so much that people will stop drinking, but more of us will drink less when we do drink, and there will be fewer of what the analysts call “drinking occasions.”

• Fewer drinking occasions means more bad news for restaurant wine, which has still not recovered from the pandemic. Many of the items in the “Gloom and Despair” file are about restaurants – more closings, depressed business, and reduced operating hours because it doesn’t pay to stay open longer. Ironically, restaurant wine prices will increase, a process that has already started (“Gloom and Despair” file). No, I don’t know why, either.

• More neo-Prohibitionist foolishness, aided and abetted by the mainstream news media and faux scientific studies. We’ll see more tell-alls from “Mommy drunks,” as well as cherry-picked statistics that claim more of us than ever are falling down drunk each night. Which — and how many times do I have to repeat this — isn’t possible when consumption is decreasing. The saddest part about the Neos? Alcoholism remains a serious problem, but none of this – aimed at moderate drinkers – will do anything to help solve that problem.

Photo: “21st century robots. Seen from the future, they will just look cute.” by www.ralfsteinberger.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Wine prices 2023

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Woman lecturing
“Wine prices? How am I supposed to know about wine prices?”

Even the experts may finally have figured out that no one knows what’s going on

This is the first of two parts looking at wine prices and wine trends in 2021. Part I: Wine prices 2023. Part II: Wine trends 2023.

We’re anticipating that the drinks industry in 2023 will be operating in an unstable environment, making it challenging to accurately forecast.”
— Breakthu Beverage’s Kevin Roberts

The Wine Curmudgeon has been trying to parse wine prices for 15 years, and the one consistent during that time has been that the experts always know what’s going to happen. They may not agree, but they’re absolutely, positively sure what prices are going to do. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the world – recession, pandemic, inflation, premiumization, supply chain woes. They know.

Until now.

The quote above, from a top executive at one of the biggest distributors in the world, is an acknowledgment that we’re in a place we’ve never been before. Frankly, that took some guts, since the rest of the people quoted in the linked story are absolutely, positively sure about what’s going to happen.

Hence, my take on 2023, after a couple of weeks of interviews, Internet sleuthing, and report reading: Prices will go up, unless they don’t. And they might even go down.

Yes, a bit of WC sarcasm. But we have lots of wine in the supply chain as well as lots of grapes that have not yet been turned into wine. Plus, demand remains weak (if not declining) and consumers – according to one report – are already trading down in the face of higher prices.

On the other hand, we have increased costs for glass and other raw materials that aren’t grapes, lingering supply chain snafus, and producers who are raising prices to maintain margins.

In other words, a wine pricing conundrum that’s fizzing and sputtering, getting closer and closer to an explosion. As one really smart analyst told me, “The law of supply and demand works, even for wine. It just may take longer to work itself out.”

So, in 2023, wine prices remain high. Wine sits on store shelves. Back vintages pile up. And, at some point, either later this year or early next, the fizzing and sputtering turns into an explosion and prices finally start to obey the law of supply and demand.

Unless they don’t.

Photo: “Lecture on energy security at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS)” by US Embassy Canada is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.