Tag Archives: $10 wine

Wine of the week: Campo Viejo Brut Reserva NV

Campo Viejo brut reservaThe Wine Curmudgeon is always ready to recommend sparkling wine, and even more ready to recommend it given the United States’ 238th birthday this week. So why not mark July 4 with Campo Viejo Brut Reserva NV ($10, purchased, 11.5%), a Spanish cava that combines quality, value, and a history lesson?

That’s because Spain played an important role in the U.S. victory in the War of Independence, declaring war on Great Britain and providing money and supplies for George Washington’s army. Campo Viejo, meanwhile, is a well-known Spanish producer in Rioja, whose wines offer an introduction to Spanish tempranillo at a fair price. The cava, though not what the producer is best known for, is a solid offering somewhere between Cristalino and Segura Viudas.

That means the Camp Viejo has more sweetness than the Cristalino, but not so much as to be sweet. It’s not as polished as the Seguras, but still provides lots of apple fruit and maybe even some peach, as well as some very impressive bubbles. The best way to know this is a wine worth drinking? It will be gone before you know it, and you’ll have to open a second bottle when you watch the July Fourth fireworks.

Barefoot wine revie 2015

Barefoot wine review 2014

barefoot wineThis year’s verdict for the best-selling wine brand in the U.S., with some 11 million cases? Much, much better than I expected, and perhaps the two best I’ve tasted since I started doing annual Barefoot wine reviews in 2009.

The Barefoot Bubbly Brut Cuvee NV ($10, purchased, 11.5%) won a platinum medal at the Critics Challenge, and that’s a tough audience. I don’t know about platinum, which is one medal above gold, but this is a quality sparkling wine that tastes exactly like it is supposed to taste — crisp apple fruit and a little creaminess. It was wine, and not like something put together by the marketing department to appeal to consumers who assume sparkling wine should be sweet and gooey. The bubbles weren’t quite as tight and long-lasting as I like, but given that the wine is made using the charmat method (common for less expensive sparklers and which results in less impressive bubbles), they weren’t bad. I’d buy it again, and serve it blind to get a few giggles.

The only problem? Price, ironically, which may be the only time in wine writing history that price will be mentioned as a problem with a Barefoot product. Much cava, made with the more expensive methode champenoise, costs less than the Barefoot, and is at least the same quality. And other California bubblies, like Korbel, are methode champenoise and about the same price. But Barefoot, knowing its audience likely doesn’t know the difference between charmat and methode champenoise (or much care), probably isn’t overly concerned.

The Barefoot Zinfandel NV ($6, purchased, 13.5%), meanwhile, is exactly the kind of wine that helped make the brand such a success. It’s dry, but loaded with the kind of fake oak that lends a chocolately finish, giving it the flavor profile that Barefoot reds are famous for. Having said that, the oak isn’t offensive — just obvious. In fact, minus the oak, the wine reminded me of the inexpensive, brambly, dark berry, and low alcohol zinfandels I drank in the old days and hoped would become the next big thing in cheap wine but didn’t.

Is the zinfandel a value the way Aldi’s $5 Vina Decana tempranillo is? Probably not, but the Decana is a $10 Hall of Fame wine. But it’s certainly a value compared to most of the $10 red wines, with their cute labels and sweet fruit, that overwhelm grocery store shoppers. That’s not a bad thing for a $6 wine, is it?

More Barefoot wine reviews:
? Barefoot wine reviews 2013
? Barefoot wine review 2012
 ? Barefoot wines (again): Value or just cheap?

Wine sales, price, and what doesn’t get enough attention

wine sales priceRegular visitors here know that cheap wine outsells expensive wine in the U.S., and that the Winestream Media spends most of its time genuflecting about wine that most of us don’t buy. And when I say most of us, I really, really mean most of us, thanks to these two charts totaling U.S. retail wine sales — expensive and overall — from wine industry trade magazine Wines & Vines. Here are the charts — overall and and expensive.

Several caveats: The charts don’t match on dates; expensive wine covers the 52 weeks ending June 2014, while the other chart is June 2012 to June 2013. This probably helps pricey wine, since its business picked up substantially over the last year. Also, since these are retail-only numbers, expensive wines that focus on restaurants are almost certainly under-counted. Finally, since the number of cases sold for the less expensive wines isn’t on the chart, I used third-party sources in the discussion below where necessary.

Still, the numbers are stunning:

? The best-selling expensive wine (more than $20 a bottle) was Santa Margherita, with 147,925 cases and $36.5 million in sales. The best-selling wine overall was Barefoot, with $323 million and some 11 million cases. How big is that disparity? In grocery stores, it’s the difference between Kroger, a national chain, and Save Mart, a company only people in certain parts of California have heard of.

? The 15th- through 20th-ranked expensive producers all had $4 million or less in annual retail sales. It’s not so much that those totals are two-thirds of what Barefoot sells each week, but that I have a friend who owns a Dallas magazine company whose annual sales are $2 million. You’d think high-end, well-known pricey brands would be doing exponentially better than someone with a one-city media company.

? Menage a Trois, 16th on the overall list, doubled the dollar sales for Santa Margherita, and every producer on the overall list sold at least one-third more than Santa Margherita.

? Only two brands on the overall list, which tracks retail wine sales, cost more than $10 a bottle, and one of them, Kendall-Jackson, was at $12.

Hence anyone who doesn’t believe that only five percent of U.S. wine drinkers buy wine that costs $20 or more hasn’t been paying attention.

Are we facing a cheap wine crisis?

cheap wine crisis
“What happened to all that great $10 wine I used to drink?”

What if most cheap wine tasted mostly the same — the reds with sweet fruit and almost no tannins, and the whites a jumble of fruit and sugar, and maybe (or maybe not) a little crispness?

That prospect — terrifying as it is to those of us who care about quality wine we can afford to buy — is not as impossible as it sounds. The quality of too many of the cheap wines I’ve tasted this year, combined with a number of interviews with wine business executives, suggests the possibility of a $10 wine world dominated by just that kind of wine.

In 2013, reports Nielsen, wine priced $10 to $15 more than doubled the sales growth of wine from $6 to $10, and the average price of a bottle increased to $8. Contrast that with sales during the recession, when just the opposite happened. As Rob McMillan of Silicon Valley Bank told me, “I see this as reflective of the economy. There are improving sales conditions compared to last year… [Wineries see] improved opportunity in future years as consumers trade up again. I know the last part won’t make you happy, but the worst segment today is right below $10.”

We’re not there yet, but here are three reasons why we could eventually face a cheap wine crisis:

? Cheap wine production is dominated by the handful of biggest wine companies, whose reason for being all but guarantees that kind of technically correct but simple wine. Just three brands — Barefoot, Two-buck Chuck, and Yellow Tail — account for 8 1/2 percent of all the wine sold in the U.S. each year. Trinchero Family Estates, whose labels include Menage a’ Trois and Sutter Home, has five percent of the U.S market, according to the 2014 Wine Business Monthly top 30 wine companies ranking. How many of us have even heard of Trinchero?

? The biggest companies, thanks to economies of scale and sales volume, can be profitable selling an $8 bottle where smaller companies can’t. Constellation Brands, after all, is a $4.9 billion company. So the smaller producers, who often make the most interesting cheap wine, have to find a more profitable price niche. Increasingly, as McMillan noted, that’s $15 and up.

? Increasing consolidation among distributors. This means fewer and bigger distributors, who prefer to work with the biggest producers. So even if a smaller company can make money with cheap wine, it may not be able to find a distributor to sell its wines to retailers. And, if it can’t find a distributor, it can’t sell its wines through retailers and restaurants because of the restrictions imposed by the three-tier system that governs U.S. wine sales.

Not encouraging news, certainly. But many people were predicting the end of quality $10 wine in 2007, and we know what happened then — the beginning of the golden age of cheap wine.

Image courtesy of The Economist’s More Intelligent Life blog, using a Creative Commons license

Cheap wine matters, says VinePair web power index

VinePairThe Wine Curmudgeon has made the VinePair wine web power index again, which measures the most influential wine sites on the Internet. This is always good to see, because it means my message is getting across: Wine is fun, it doesn’t have to be complicated, and anyone can enjoy it.

The irony about all this? That Google started taking an intense dislike to the blog about 15 months ago, and it only got worse when I changed platforms last fall. How this happened is a mystery, since I’m doing the same thing I’ve done for the past seven years. But Google, for whatever reason, rates the Wine Curmudgeon as less trustworthy than it did in April 2013 and is less likely to recommend the site when someone searches for cheap wine news, reviews, and the like.

Which means the site has an influence beyond Google, and I have everyone who visits here to thank for that. We’re going to get this cheap wine thing done, regardless of the obstacles in our way, whether the Winestream Media or a $50 billion company that controls two-thirds of the search activity in the U.S.

Wine of the week: Bogle Sauvignon Blanc 2012

Bogle Sauvignon BlancThe Wine Curmudgeon has finally found something wrong with the Bogle sauvignon blanc ($10, purchased, 13.5%). It doesn’t have a screwcap, and it comes in an old-fashioned, heavy bottle. Otherwise, it’s pretty much what a great $10 wine should be:

? More quality than its $10 price. Classic California sauvignon blanc — grassiness, crisp, and with an almost tropical finish.

? Widely available. My biggest frustration, when I find great cheap wine, is that it’s not for sale in enough places so I can write about it. That’s rarely the case with Bogle, which makes more than 1 million cases annually. It’s in grocery stores (I bought this at Whole Foods, believe it or not), independents, and chain retailers.

? It doesn’t try to be something that it isn’t. This is a problem with wine regardless of price, in which consumers think they’re buying one thing and often get something else, fooled by back label nonsense or a too-cute front label. It’s telling that the three comments I found on CellarTracker (the blog’s unofficial wine inventory web app) for this vintage all said the same thing, even though each comment had a different score with it. Which, again, tells us what we need to know about scores.

Serve this chilled, with or without food, and know that wherever you are in the U.S., you’ll be able to buy a bottle of wine that won’t make you wish you had bought something else.

Winebits 335: Cheap wine, wine terms, and lots of wineries

Winebits 335: Cheap wine, wine terms, and lots of wineries ? Head to Target: The Wine Curmudgeon is always encouraged when the non-wine media does a cheap wine story, since that’s another step in the right direction — helping Americans figure out wine. If the Los Angeles Times’ recent story recommending wine to buy at Target included too much boring Big Wine (Clos du Bois chardonnay, really?), the story’s heart was in the right place. How can I be unhappy with anything that recommends Beaujolais? Though, and I mention this as a cranky ex-newspaperman who wants to help someone who apparently doesn’t do a lot of wine writing, mentioning Robert Parker in the blurb for Sterling cabernet sauvignon was counterproductive. Anyone who cares about Parker scores probably isn’t going to buy $10 cabernet at Target.

? Stoned wine: Beppi Crosariol at the Toronto Globe & Mail answers a reader question about the wine term stony, complete with bad jokes. It’s actually a decent explanation, and includes a good description of minerality: “Flint, wet stone, chalk, limestone, slate, graphite ? various rocky words get trotted out with increasing frequency today…” and he notes recent scientific findings that the grapes probably didn’t pick up these qualities from the soil.

? How many wineries? The state of Texas, with 266,874 square miles, has about 300 wineries. Napa County, with 748 square miles, recently celebrated its 500th winery. This is a mind-boggling figure — there are more wineries in Napa than in all but two or three states (depending on whose figures you use). Is it any wonder that it’s the center of the U.S. wine universe, even for people who don’t know much about wine? Will we start hearing phrases like “carrying grapes to Napa?”