Tag Archives: Hot Brands

Winebits 743: Local wine, best-selling wine, technology

tash 80
It was difficult enough writing a football game story on this; can’t imagine what tasting notes would have been like.

This week’s wine news: A study finds local wine may not be all that local, plus supermarket wine dominates a best-seller list and the Trash-80, which helped the WC get to where he is today

• Not so local: Canadian researchers have found that wine drinkers define local wine differently than they do local food. The study, from Brock University, said a majority of wine drinkers consider a wine local if it comes from anywhere in North America and Canada. This is in marked contrast to local food, where a majority of those surveyed said local was with 100 km (62 miles) of their home. This is not surprising, given what we learned during Drink Local. It was always difficult to get food writers and bloggers interested in the project; they seemed to think that wine wasn’t local the way that food was. It was one thing to actually see the pig that would be turned into that night’s pork shoulder roast and another to understand that wine could be local when grapes were just grapes. It’s worth noting, as Becca Yeamans does in her analysis of the study, that this is not necessarily a representative sample of all wine drinkers. Still, it does take a step in figuring out what’s going on with the perception of local wine.

• Hot brands: A host of supermarket wine brands heads this year’s Hot Brands, compiled by the company that owns the Wine Spectator. Among the wines are Josh Cellars, Bota Box Nighthawk, Barefoot Fruitscato, Bread & Butter, Stella Rosa, La Marca, 19 Crimes, Kim Crawford, and Santa Margherita. The formula to identify a Hot Brand is complicated, but the gist is that these wines showed tremendous growth at a time when wine itself did not. And what do they have in common, save for their lower prices? Almost all are supermarket brands, which shows again how much the wine business is changing.

• High-tech: John Roach, the man who helped make the personal computer ubiquitous — and who sent the WC down the rabbit hole with the portable TRS-80 100 — died last week. I mention it here because much of what the post-modern world has evolved into, including the blog, depends on Roach’s vision. The Trash-80, as we called it, was not the first personal computer, but the portable version was the first I used. Originally, it had acoustic couplers, so I had to find a pay phone to file a story. The upgraded version had a phone jack, so at least that part was easy. The rest was never easy, and that includes reading what I typed on that impossibly small screen.

Winebits 273: $10 wine, Whole Foods, $500,000 theft

? Consumers still want $10 wine: Most of the wines that made this year ?s IMPACT ?s Hot Brands list, which identifies the top growing labels in U.S. stores, cost $10 to $12. Said the report: ?The results clearly indicate that consumers continue to gravitate to the $10-$15 area at retail. ? These wines all sold at least 250,000 cases, and the criteria for making the list depend on how long the label has been around, but emphasize growth from year to year. The names of the brands are behind a paywall, but it almost doesn ?t matter what they are ? price is what counts here, and consumers have apparently found their happy place and aren ?t leaving.

? How Whole Foods buys wine: W. Blake Gray interviews the specialty grocer ?s Northern California wine boss, Joseph Kaulbach, which is a coup itself: Whole Foods doesn ?t often agree to those things. But the piece is also worth noting for Kaulbach ?s emphasis that Whole Foods, in its approach to wine, is a grocery store first and foremost; that Three Wishes, its version of Two-buck Chuck, exists because Two-buck Chuck exists; and that the northern California market is unique, and especially when it comes to defining local.

? The great wine robbery: As if the Australian wine business didn ?t have enough problems, how about the theft of almost 4,700 cases of wine, worth A$500,000 (US$517,000)? The thieves had their own trucks and forklifts to move the wine, and their own warehouse to store it, say police, who seemed impressed by the effort. Hence, consumers should be wary if they ?re approached by someone on the street who offers to sell them discounted Aussie wine with a wink and a nod, or looks and sounds like Michael Palin.