Tag Archives: U.S. wine sales

Winebits 446: Cheap wine, retailer foolery, U.S. wine sales

cheap wine
You need to take the bag out of the box if you’re going to slap it.

This week’s wine news: College students take to cheap wine, retailers fudge with scores, and U.S. wine sales will remain flat.

• Don’t slap the bag: The Wine Curmudgeon was greatly heartened to see a food website at the University of Florida offer solid advice about buying cheap wine and insisting that cheap doesn’t mean bad wine (and that it linked to my site just hows smart the author, Abigail Miller, is). Writes Miller: “The cuter the label, the simpler the wine,” something I have been preaching for years and that producers assume we’re too stupid to understand. Plus, I brushed up on current slang – “bougie,” a derivative of bourgeois, as in “drinking wine is so bougie,” and slapping the bag, a drinking game that uses the bag inside boxed wine.

• Scores and retailers: A Massachusetts TV station discovered that the scores used to sell wine on shelf talkers at liquor stores in its area were playing fast and loose with vintage – that is, the wine that got a 90 was not the vintage for sale. It was something that the TV report found in eight of 10 stores. Said one retailer: “I guess it would be good to know that the winery has won medals, but I think that the consumer needs to look at the year, because the year will make a huge difference.” Sadly, despite the retailer’s observations, I’m told this is a common practice throughout the country.

• Not much growth: The U.S. wine boom has ended, and the market will grow at just about one percent through 2020. This compares to growth of 3.3 percent before the recession, a fact the short story mentions but doesn’t try to explain. Has wine become what marketers call a mature category, where we’ve seen all the growth we’re going to have? Or is there something else going on that no one can explain? My guess, given that so few Americans drink wine compared to other countries, is the latter.

Winebits 417: U.S. wine sales, cold beer, Big Wine

wine sales ? Barely any growth: U.S. wine sales continued to plateau in 2015, reports Impact Databank — up just .02 percent for the year based on the number of cases, following a 1 percent gain in 2014. The rest of the news is even worse, says the report: The “estimated volume increase represents the smallest rise in [22 years]. And after steadily increasing from 1994-2011, per-capita wine consumption is projected to decline for the fourth consecutive year, as Americans bypass wine in favor of spirits, RTDs and cider.” RTD is an industry term for ready to drink, like flavored beers and spirits. The Wine Curmudgeon, noting the wine industry’s obsession with raising prices and trading up over the past couple of years, isn’t surprised. What’s the most basic rule of economics? If prices increase, demand decreases. But which, obviously, seems to be OK with the wine business.

? No cold beer in Indiana: An early candidate for the 2016 three-tier Curmudgie is the federal appeals court that ruled that Indiana is allowed to forbid grocery and convenience stores from selling cold beer while allowing liquor stores to do so. The Indianapolis Star said that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said there were legitimate differences between selling beer in a liquor store and selling it in a grocery and convenience stores, a point of law which I’m sure I would understand if I were a lawyer. As a wine writer, it’s baffling, and only points to the foolishness of three-tier.

? Big Wine winespeak: The Wine Curmudgeon enjoys noting the public utterances of those in the wine business, particularly when they demonstrate how little so many of them seem to care about wine quality. Because what does quality have to do with profit? The most recent comes from the woman who runs Treasury Wine Estates’ operations in the Americas, in which she used “masstige” twice, said that a marketing deal with the Texas Rangers baseball team would help sell New Zealand sauvignon blanc, and explained why young men will buy wine if it has a convict on the label. Is it any wonder I get so cranky so easily?