Tag Archives: bulk wine

Can a wine glut boost the wine business?

People tasting wine
“$10? Really? That’s damn fine wine.”

Of course – if the wine business wants to turn out quality $10 wine

Dear Wine Business:

Once again, the Wine Curmudgeon takes keyboard in hand to offer some help in your current crisis. Which, if possible, just got worse. Turrentine Brokerage, one of the most respected companies in all of wine, reports that bulk wine levels – dare I say? — are past a crisis (complete with fancy colored charts):

“Total California statewide gallons actively for sale are now up to 22.4 million. This volume of wine has only been available on the market four times before, and each time was after a record or near-record sized harvest. In contrast, the 2022 harvest was the lightest in a decade. The elevated volume of bulk wine actively for sale shows the concern of wineries over slowing consumer sales.”

In other words, wineries are making less wine because they finally figured out consumers are buying less wine. That means the wine they don’t use goes to the bulk market, where it waits for someone else to buy it – and waits and waits and waits. Because “current inventory can feel more like a liability than an asset, so don’t get left behind because you are hoping for a higher price.”

Since there won’t be one.

Fortunately, the WC has a solution to this problem: Cheap wine.

I can’t take credit for all of this. Much of it must go to the blog’s official European correspondent, who told me: “This should surely be a moment for someone to create a good value $10 brand.”

To which I said, “Eureka,” and wrote this post.

In fact, there is nothing unusual about this. “Wineries” make wine all the time without actually growing any grapes; instead, they buy grapes and wine on the bulk market, invent a name for the wine, bottle it, and sell it. These days, it’s mostly done with higher-priced wine because of premiumization, but I’ve been doing this long enough to remember terrific $10 brands like Line 39 and Yellow + Blue that did the same thing.

So why not do it again? The quality wine is available, and at more than fair prices, says Turrentine. Besides, what do you have to lose by trying? It’s not like the wine is going anywhere, and there’s more than an even chance that consumers might buy quality $10 wine. And then buy some more.

Or at least that’s what they tell me.

Your pal,
The Wine Curmudgeon

Winebits 571: Ed Lowe, three-tier foolishness, wine prices

ed loweThis week’s wine news: Ed Lowe, whose Dallas restaurant served Texas wine when hardly anyone knew what it was, has died. Plus, New York state three-tier foolishness and cheaper bulk wine prices

• Ed Lowe: How important was Ed Lowe to the U.S. regional wine movement? He served Texas wine for 30 years at his Celebration restaurant in Dallas, and when he started doing that Texas wine was chancy at best. Lowe, 69, died before Thanksgiving during a canoe trip in the state’s Big Bend region. I knew Lowe a little, and we talked several times about local wine, his half-price Thursday night wine promotion, and quality local food. Celebration was farm-to-table long before the term was invented by some East Coast hype guru, and Lowe (who could still be seen busing tables) truly believed in the concept. The world will be a poorer place without him.

• Take that, Wegman’s: The East Coast grocery store chain has been fined more than $1 million for illegally managing liquor stores by the New York state booze cops. That’s because grocery stores aren’t allowed to sell alcohol in New York, save in one location. The state liquor authority claimed Wegman’s violated any number of laws and regulations, including “illegally trafficking in wine.” That’s a delightful 21st century crime, yes? The infractions are arcane to anyone who doesn’t follow three-tier, and Wegman’s may actually have violated the law. The larger question, though, is why these laws still exist.

• “Awash with wine:” More bad news for premiumization – wine prices in the bulk market are dropping, “and in some cases, significantly,” reports a British wine trade magazine. The world is flush with wine after bountiful 2018 harvests around the world, and those interviewed in the story say prices could keep falling. Why do bulk prices matter? Because, save for the most expensive wines in the world, bulk prices influence the price of grapes everywhere. Cheaper bulk prices usually mean cheaper grape prices, and that usually means cheaper wine prices.

Illustration courtesy of Tampa Tribune using a Creative Commons license