Tag Archives: local wine

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.

Is Gallo about to change the idea of winery tasting rooms forever?

Tasting rooms
Will wine drinkers soon be toasting each other with Gallo wine in company-branded tasting rooms?

Winery tasting rooms have traditionally been about Drink Local; Gallo’s plan could turn them into the wine equivalent of Disney stores

June 16 update: Bring on the Barefoot! The world’s biggest wine producer successfully negotiated the hurdles detailed in the first post and will build its warehouse, cannery, and bottling plant in rural South Carolina.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster says the plan will hire almost 500 people over the next eight years, an impressive achievement for a county with around 1,000 residents.

The final agreement will allow Gallo to open three tasting rooms, but the company has not said where they will be.

Continue reading →

studio microphone

Winecast 53: Doug Caskey and Drink Local during the pandemic

doug caskey
Doug Caskey and his spiffy Colorado wine Zoom background.

“The situation isn’t good, but it’s difficult to make a monolithic assessment. The situation depends on where you are, and it can be all across the board.”

Colorado’s Doug Caskey has been one of the leaders in the local wine movement for almost as long as there has been one. He has been the executive director of the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board since 2000, and has served in a variety of roles with the Wine America trade group. As such, he is well-placed to discuss how the pandemic is clobbering regional wine.

Perhaps the biggest problem, Doug said, is that state laws classify wineries as bars. This means they suffer from the same restrictions as places people go to pick up girls and boys and to get drunk. Which, of course, is hardly the case with a winery tasting room. In addition, local wineries depend on events like weddings and concerts to stay in business, which are also limited by pandemic bar restrictions.

Among the topics we discussed:

• The recent spike in coronavirus cases doesn’t bode well for Drink Local, since wineries that have been able to re-open their tasting rooms may not be able to keep them open.

• The pandemic hasn’t been a boon for Drink Local at retail, despite all the glowing sales numbers. Consumers seem to be buying the best known brands instead of trying lesser known regional labels.

• The Trump wine tariff, advertised as a help to Drink Local, has actually been a tremendous hindrance. It has wreaked havoc on the wine supply chain, making it more difficult for local wines to get on store shelves.

• Yurts, as a solution to outdoor winter dining. Yes, yurts.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 13 minutes long and takes up almost 9 megabytes. Quality is mostly excellent. And yes, I was able to post Doug’s Zoom background.

studio microphone

Winecast 52: Jessica Dupuy, The Wines of Southwest USA

Jessica Dupuy
Jessica Dupuy

Her new book, “The Wines of Southwest USA,” is a candid look at wine in Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico

Jessica Dupuy, through her work with media outlets like Texas Monthly, has been fighting the good fight for Drink Local for more than a decade. Her latest effort: “The Wines of Southwest USA” ($40, Infinite Ideas). It’s a candid assessment of regional wine in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. We’ll give a copy of the book away during the blog’s 13th annual Birthday Week, beginning Nov. 16.

Overall, she says, wine quality is much improved — but that is still much room for improvement. “We’re still not at the point where people see local wine the same way they see local spinach from the farm down the road, or peaches or whatever. So in that respect, we still have a lot of work to do.”

Among the topics we discussed:

• Arizona may offer the highest upside among the states in the book, thanks to a core of impressive young producers.

• Colorado remains one of the most fascinating states in the country, since so much of its grapes are grown at altitude.

• The pandemic has hit regional wine hard, and there remains doubt about how well it survive when things return to normal.

• And finishing a book during a pandemic, with home schooling, is not the easiest thing in the world.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 16 minutes long and takes up about 11 megabytes. Quality is mostly excellent.

Winebits 610: Local wine, wine writing, wine taxes

local wineThis week’s wine news: Local wine and the chambourcin grape get a video shout out from the Winestream Media. Plus, tips about sounding less snotty when you write and wine taxes in Ireland – which aren’t pretty.

• Bring on the chambourcin: Madeline Puckette at Wine Folly offers a refreshing perspective on hybird grapes like chambourcin, complete with video: “So, instead of poo-pooing that so-called ‘foxy’ bottle of Marquette or Chambourcin, maybe give it a whirl. It might actually be good!” The point, of course, is not whether the grapes are good or bad, according to some critic’s perspective, but whether the winemaker can turn the grapes into a quality bottle of wine. Which, as I have tasted many times over the years, can be done. And it’s worth noting that I’ve had crummy bottles of wine made with so-called real grapes like cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay.

• Better wine writing: One of the Wine Curmudgeon’s crusades over the blog’s history is making wine writing easier to understand – less winespeak and more English, if nothing else. This post from Lifehacker’s Meghan Moravcik Walbert isn’t about wine writing specifically, but her suggestions apply: “[F]ancy words that make you sound like an ass are all around you. And it’s time you know so you can stop using them.” Written as only a cranky ex-newspaper employee would write, and oh so true. Her list of banned words includes “curate,” which makes me cringe, and “synergy,” which she reminds us “isn’t a real thing.”

• Very high taxes: The Irish pay some of the highest taxes on wine in the world – 54 percent of a standard €9 bottle of wine is tax. That works out to about US$3.50 a bottle on a $6 bottle of wine, a staggering sum – and one the neo-Prohibitionists would no doubt gladly agree to. Interestingly, despite the tax burden, the Irish drink about twice as much per capita as we do in the states. And our tax burden is just one-quarter to one-third of the Irish, depending on where you live,

Photo: “drinking wine” by “Boots McKenzie” is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

New study: We’ll happily pay a premium for wine when it comes to Drink Local

drink localHigher prices imply better quality for consumers who drink Drink Local

Don’t worry that local and regional wine tends to cost more than comparable national brands, which is something that has been hurting Drink Local’s growth. That’s because a 2019 study has found that consumers are happy to pay more for local wine, beer, and the like.

“We have not studied whether local wine and beer is now on a par with local food in terms of consumer acceptance,” says Ashok Lalwani, PhD, one of the report’s co-authors and an associate professor of marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. “But, based on our results, I would speculate that consumers would be more likely to infer higher quality from higher priced wine and beer that is locally produced, but not as much for wine and beer that is positioned globally or not locally produced.”

This is huge news for Drink Local. First, it has always lagged behind local food in acceptance, the idea that it’s worth buying just because it’s local. Second, that consumers perceive a quality difference between local wine and Big Wine may be even more important, since Drink Local has been fighting the quality battle for as long as it has been around.

In fact, says Lalwani, the study results hint that consumers are less likely to associate price with quality for national brands, and are more likely to buy cheaper products since they all seem the same regardless of price. But the reverse seems to be true for local wine; that is, consumers equate higher price with better quality.

Again, an amazing development given all that Drink Local has had to overcome in the past couple of decades. It’s also not clear what’s driving this change in attitude. Lalwani says the study didn’t look at age or other demographics, but my guess is that the explanation lies in younger consumers and their distrust of multi-national brands and their preference for local.

Finally, the study quotes several multi-national marketing executives, none in the alcohol business, who sort of see this local thing, but are baffled by it: The “executives considered local or global communities in their pricing decisions, [but] none knew when such strategies were effective or why.”

Who knew those of us who believe in Drink Local knew more than lots of people with MBAs?

Photo courtesy of skeeze via Pixabay using a Creative Commons license

Winebits 609: Winery values, rose, Indiana wine

winery valuesThis week’s wine news: Have winery values, once seemingly exempt from the laws economics, started to decline? Plus, rose as a lifestyle and Indiana’s Oliver winery.

• Declining values? Have California winery values, which seemed to be exempt from the laws of economics, started to decline? Silicon Valley Bank’s Rob McMillan thinks so, citing the changing economics around the wine business. “The short answer to the headline question for today is there are still plenty of buyers but overall they are being a little more selective, and your winery and vineyard are probably not worth more than they were last year,” he writes. “Without going into details on a long topic, we are presently oversupplied on grapes and bulk wine from most regions, and the upside to higher sales is for today more limited than the past. …” If McMillan is correct, and he usually is, then the situation is markedly different from almost anything in the past three decades. Napa Valley land prices, for example, didn’t lose value during the recession, even though the rest of the country saw land prices drop by double digits. There’s a lot of math and financial-speak in the post, but the sense is that we’re in a world no one expected to see.

• Rose as a way of life: Who knew that rose instilled a wine culture in the U.S.? That’s the gist of this Forbes blog post, which otherwise seems like a plug for rose from the French region of Provence. Which is not surprising, since the Provence rose trade group has one of wine world’s best marketing programs. It’s a also a plug for high-end rose, including one that costs $190 a bottle. Its producer describes it as “gastronomic rose” — no doubt to differentiate it from the $10 plonk the rest of us drink.

• Only in Indiana: Regional wine scores another victory with the Mainstream Media in this feature about Indiana’s Oliver Winery, “the largest winery in the Midwest, it’s perhaps the largest winery east of the Mississippi – or, at least one of the largest – and it’s the 44th largest winery in the United States.” The Wine Curmudgeon is always happy to see regional wine in the news, showing once again how far ahead of the curve we were with Drink Local Wine.

Photo: “vineyards” by mal.entropy is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0