Wine prices haven’t increased overall in two decades, so why does it take $30 to buy a bottle of nice wine?
Expensive wine – the kind you buy to drink with a nice dinner – used to cost $20 and came from all over the world. Today, those kinds of wine cost $30, and even then you’re not going to be quite sure about quality from some regions.
Once, you could buy California wine like the Newton Claret for about $20 and know you were getting something worth $20. Today, even if those wines are more or less the same price, the quality isn’t. Gone, too, are $20 red Burgundies and red Bordeauxs that are even remotely values, as well as Champagne and high-end Italian wines.
How did this happen? When did the value go out of $20 wine? I’ve spent the past six weeks asking retailers, winemakers, distributors, and my colleagues why spending $20 doesn’t guarantee a top-flight bottle of wine anymore. Because it should – as has been noted on the blog many times, 95 percent of us will never buy a wine that costs more than $20. In addition, wine prices overall have barely changed over the past two decades; a $10 wine 20 years ago is still mostly a $10 wine.
The answer, unfortunately, isn’t complicated. It has much to do with the bifurcation of the wine market, which I’ve written about before. Wine today is increasingly made for two audiences – those who will spend more than $20 and the rest of us, and never the twain shall meet. But within that premise, there are other important points — after the jump: Continue reading