Tag Archives: wine business

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Winecast 68: Clara Klein and restaurant wine after the pandemic

Clara Klein
Clara Klein, Sunday Vinyl: We have challenges, but we’re dealing with them.

Clara Klein: “The restaurant wine business is good.”

Know all that bad news we’ve heard about restaurant wine prices? Clara Klein, the lead sommelier at Sunday Vinyl in Denver, says it’s not necessarily so.

Klein, the blog’s official restaurant wine expert, returned to discuss what she is seeing as the restaurant wine business works its way out of the pandemic. She is seeing some significant changes in restaurant wine, including better pricing and more choices. “It’s important not to dumb it down — we’re having too much fun,” says Klein.

Among the subjects we discussed:

• Rose season should proceed on schedule, with prices more or less the same and decent selection. Which, of course, is good news for the blog’s 15h annual rose extravaganza next week.

• She is working diligently to keep pricing fair and selection high. How about a quality bottle of restaurant wine for $35? Sunday Vinyl also has expanded its wine by the glass offerings and has added tasting flights for some of the most expensive bottles on its list. That way, says Klein, customers can get a chance to taste rare wines they would not otherwise be able to afford.

• Working conditions have improved as well — health insurance and 401K plans included. In this, she says, the restaurant has been able to attract more and better qualified employees.

Finally, you’ll notice what is perhaps the first discussion of Greek wine on the blog. Which, as I note, is almost surely the last discussion, given how difficult it is to find Greek wine in most of the country.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 19 minutes long and takes up 13 megabytes. The sound quality is very good to excellent.

Photo courtesy of 5280, using a Creative Commons license

Ask the WC 33: Wine consumption, bad wine, Earth Day

wine drinkers
“I didn’t know world wine production was decreasing — thanks, WC.”

This edition of Ask the WC: The decline in world wine consumption, plus how to tell when wine goes off and Earth Day

Because the customers always have questions, and the Wine Curmudgeon has answers in this irregular feature. You can Ask the Wine Curmudgeon a wine-related question by clicking here.

Dear Wine Curmudgeon:
Are there any actual statistics about the decline in wine consumption? Or are you just making that up?
A skeptic

Dear Skeptic:
How about The International Organisation of Vine and Wine, or OIV, which tracks world wine production? “In 2021 extremely low world wine production volume is expected, at a level similar to 2017. This would be the third consecutive year where the global production level is below average n 2021.” So less production means less consumption.
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Hi, WC:
I opened a wine the other day, and it smelled all funky and gross. Did it go bad? How can you tell?
Bad wine?

Dear Bad:
I get this question a lot, and most recently at a wine class I did a couple of weeks ago (emerging from the pandemic). Yes, wine can go bad — heat, light, and too much age can spoil it. The wine can taste like badly made brandy, taste like over-cooked tomato soup, or even not have much flavor at all. Ironically, about the time of the wine class, I wrote a piece for Pix.wine about this exact subject.
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Hey, Jeff:
You didn’t write anything about Earth Day and wine last week!
Green wine drinker

Dear Green:
I wrote an Earth Day piece a couple of years ago on the old blog, and no one read it. So I prefer to remind the wine business about its obligation to the planet the other 364 days a year — here and here, for example. And don’t worry — I’ll keep doing it.

Photo: Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

More Ask the WC:
• Ask the WC 32: Wine prices, wine and health, Ukraine
• Ask the WC 31: Pinot noir, minimum pricing, wine apocalypse
• Ask the WC 30: BYOB, wine for friends, California fires

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Winecast 67: Felicity Carter on what wine drinkers want

felcity carter
Felicity Carter: “There will be a lot wine on the shelves, but where it will come from is whatever buyers can get their hands on.”

Felicity Carter: We don’t know what’s going to happen next in wine — “all is in chaos.”

Felicity Carter is the former editor of Meininger’s Wine Business International, one of the industry’s leading trades, and is currently the executive editor of the The Drop, a consumer wine newsletter. Which means she probably knows more about the wine business than many of the so-called experts. (And, in the interest of transparency, I have written for her at both sites.)

One example of how Felicity sees things others don’t: Her take on consumer wine trends. Two decades ago, Yellow Tail’s slightly sweet red wines were all the rage. Today, the trendy wine style is the slightly sweet red blend. In other words, the same wine in different packaging.

We talked about a variety of consumer wine trends and even got in a shot at wine writers. The podcast, which is about 13 minutes long and takes up 9 megabytes — download or stream it here (and ignore what seems to be me shouting):

• Consumers seem to be split into two groups. Some of us are looking for more interesting wines, as well as sustainable and natural wines (which makes this the longest natural wine discussion in blog history). Others, meanwhile, still want cabernet sauvignon, rose, and sparkling wine. In addition, low alcohol and “healthy wine” seems to be gaining attention.

• Climate change is starting to affect wine production, so how and where we get the wines we want is becoming more difficult to figure out.

• Most foreign producers want to sell their wine in the U.S. which help fill shelves here. Why do they want that? Because we’re willing to pay higher prices than everyone else.

• Many of the wine trends we hear about come from wine writers trying to impress and aren’t necessarily actual trends. When’s the last time any of us had a blaufrankisch?

• And shiraz is pronounced, “sheer-azz” Down Under.

Ask the WC 32: Wine prices, wine and health, Ukraine

men drinking wine
“Only $4800 for wine for a year? We spend that much on a couple of cases.”

This edition of Ask the WC: How much trouble does the WC have finding cheap wine to review? Plus, the latest wine and health update and Ukraine wine.

Because the customers always have questions, and the Wine Curmudgeon has answers in this irregular feature. You can Ask the Wine Curmudgeon a wine-related question by clicking here.

Greetings, Cheap Wine Guru:
I saw the post about how you bought 11 bottles of wine for about $11 each. How is that possible, given inflation and premiumization and all the rest?
$10 wine

Dear $10:
The short answer is that I spend a lot of time looking for wine to review that meets the blog’s criteria. The long answer is that I shop at close to a dozen retailers, including national supermarket chains, and it takes up a fair amount of my working week. Ironically, given the way the wine business works, I review very few samples — most are either too expensive, too poorly made, or both. In 2021, I spent $4,800 looking for wine for the blog.
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Dear Wine Curmudgeon:
Are you going to write a definitive wine and health post? There is so much confusion out there about whether wine will kill someone.
Healthy wine drinker

Dear Healthy:
Drink wine in moderation. That pretty much covers it. The rest — allowing for my lack of medical credentials — is smoke, mostly from neo-Prohibitionists who want everyone to quit drinking everything because too much alcohol is dangerous. Which, of course, is absolutely true. But hot dogs may be even more deadly (nitrites!), and I haven’t seen any of the researchers who are doing junk like this conducting similar pseudo-studies about hot dogs.
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Hi, WC:
You haven’t written anything about Ukraine and what’s going on there. How come?
Surprised

Dear Surprised:
I started a Ukraine post a couple of times — there is wine in the country, believe it or not — but could never quite figure out what to say. I’ve mostly stayed away from politics on the blog and there really wasn’t a way to write about Ukraine without injecting politics into it. But know that my family left that part of Eastern Europe more than 100 years ago, and the reasons then are just as applicable now.

Photo: MART PRODUCTION from Pexels

More Ask the WC:
• Ask the WC 31: Pinot noir, minimum pricing, wine apocalypse
• Ask the WC 30: BYOB, wine for friends, California fires
• Ask the WC 29: Birthday gifts, larger bottles, and on-line

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Winecast 66: Tim McNally and the airline-ization of the wine business

Tim McNally
Tim McNally: Pricing wine for the wine industry’s benefit, but not for the consumer’s.

Tim McNally: Wine has copied the airline business — it’s not about selling the most seats, but raising prices and selling fewer seats to make more money

New Orleans’ Tim McNally is a radio host, a wine judge, and an award-winning author. As such, he has followed the wine business closely — and his analysis seems to be spot on. Wine, which once used to sell its product at all prices, is increasingly focused on selling its most expensive products to the detriment of everything else. In this, it has copied the airline business, which once tried to sell as many seats as possible at the lowest prices. Today, it sells fewer seats, but at higher prices and makes record profits when there isn’t a pandemic.

In other words, premiumization.

Tim and I have known each other for almost as long as I have been doing this, and I highly respect his opinion. We talked a lot about the airline comparison in the podcast, which is about 15 1/2 minutes long and takes up 12 megabytes — download or stream it here. Included in the discussion:

• The parallels between wine and the airlines are obvious, once you make the connection — both have focused on consolidation and cost cutting.

• The difference is that the airlines offer a more or less indispensable service. We can do without wine, and that seems to be the consumer reaction to premiumization

• Tim doesn’t see a solution to this, given the short-term profitability that premiumization offers.

• He is also pessimistic about finding a way to attract younger consumers to wine, noting that wine can be difficult to figure out and that the wine business, which has never much cared about educating its customers, isn’t much interested these days, either.

• And, of course, the first Mardi Gras in New Orleans in two years.

Big Wine 2022

wbn 2022E&J Gallo may have accounted for almost one of every three bottles of U.S.-made wine sold in this country last year

Big Wine didn’t necessarily become any more dominant in the United States in 2021, but the biggest of the big grabbed a near stranglehold on the market.

That’s one of the most revealing items from Wine Business Monthly’s 18th annual wine industry survey, which tracks the ups and downs of the U.S. wine business and ranks the 50 biggest producers in this country.

It’s not news that the top 50 producers accounted for 90 percent of domestic wine sales, even though there are some 11,000 wineries in the U.S. That’s been true for years. And it’s not news that the 10 biggest sold about three-quarters of wine made in the U.S., something else that has been true for years.

What is news is that E&J Gallo, the world’s biggest wine company, got even bigger – the study estimates that it sold 100 million cases in 2021, which works out to just a little less than one out of every three bottles of U.S.-made wine sold in 2021.

Which, frankly, is staggering. By comparison, General Motors and Toyota each control a bit less than 15 percent of the U.S. car market, while Amazon and Walmart are just less than 10 percent each of U.S. retail. So one company with close to 33 percent? Almost unprecedented.

How did Gallo get to this spot? It’s well-run, certainly; the company owns best-sellers Apothic and Barefoot. It benefited from others’ misfortune, as No. 6 Treasury Wine Estates lost 4 million cases and No. 7 Bronco dropped 1 million cases from last year

Most importantly, Gallo bought a good chunk of Constellation Brand’s wine portfolio a couple of years ago in a deal that was mostly approved by U.S. regulators despite the implications that Gallo would dominate U.S. wine. Which is, of course, what happened.

Among the report’s other highlights:

• It notes wine’s continuing sales woes, quoting one analyst: “This could indicate the entry on-ramp to wine is fading. If the trend continues, the industry could be in trouble at all price points except above $25, which is where wine is popular with Boomers with money.”

• It notes that many producers seem unconcerned with wine’s sales struggles, quoting several as saying the industry’s focus is on taking market share from competitors and not necessarily selling more wine.

• Two of the most interesting Top 50 companies are Josh Cellars with 5 million cases at No. 10 and Cooper’s Hawk at No. 25 with 1 million cases. Josh Cellars didn’t show up on the list until 2015, at 1 million cases, and Cooper’s Hawk is a restaurant chain.

• In addition, says Cyril Penn, the magazine’s editor, three wineries made the list, including first-timer First Leaf, that don’t really have traditional retail outlets. They sell almost exclusively directly to the consumer.

• In this, e-commerce is not just about buying directly from a favorite winery, which is how most of us still think of it. Rather, “major wineries have focused efforts on being part of online grocery purchasing, whether through traditional grocers, like Kroger and Safeway, or online-based shopping, including Instacart baskets.” This is something that the recent SVB report also found, showing that Big Wine is using the Internet to get bigger.

More about Big Wine:
• Big Wine 2021
• Big Wine 2020
• Big Wine 2019

Ask the WC 31: Pinot noir, minimum pricing, wine apocalypse

wine advice
“Mmmmm. … tannat. .,. yummmm.”

This edition of Ask the WC: When is pinot noir not pinot noir? Plus what’s minimum pricing and whether the wine apocalypse is coming

Because the customers always have questions, and the Wine Curmudgeon has answers in this irregular feature. You can Ask the Wine Curmudgeon a wine-related question by clicking here.

Hey, WC:
I liked the McManis pinot noir review, but some of it didn’t make sense. How can a wine be called pinot noir if there are other grapes in it?
Confused about pinot

Dear Pinot:
A varietal wine — a wine that has the name of the grape of the label — doesn’t have to be made only with that grape. Federal law allows varietal wine to have as much as 25 percent of something else, and most pinot noir that costs less than $30 often has 25 percent of something else. I wrote a trade story about this a decade ago, when inexpensive pinot became popular. One winemaker told me that his company used tannat, grenache, syrah, zinfandel, petite sirah, refosco, and dornfelder in pinot noir. The goal was to make the wine darker in color and fruitier, since traditional pinot is neither. So, when I write — as I did in the McManis review — that most inexpensive pinot tastes like a red blend, that’s because it was made to taste that way.
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Oh Curmudgeonly One:
What’s this minimum pricing I keep hearing about, where the government sets alcohol prices? That doesn’t sound very free enterprise. We don’t do it in the U.S., do we?
Free markets rule

Dear Markets:
Yes, we have minimum pricing in the U.S. Most notably, it’s in Connecticut and Michigan; the state decides the minimum a retailer can charge, though it may exist in other forms elsewhere given the tangle that is U.S. liquor regulation. The rationale is that if liquor costs too little, we’ll buy too much and all be drunk — the infamous “public health and safety” standard that allows states to regulate alcohol in their own way. So no, no free market in the U.S. in booze.
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Dear Wine Curmudgeon:
I’m getting a little tired of you talking about the wine apocalypse all the time, and how wine is going away. It’s a $100 billion business. isn’t it? How can that disappear?
Irritated and annoyed

Dear Irritated:
Wine sales in the U.S. are about $70 billion annually, so yes, not going away tomorrow. But that’s hardly good news. Wine sales have been flat for years (and may actually have decreased, depending on who did the study), per capita consumption has decreased, and younger people aren’t interested in wine. Hence the concern among those of us who love wine but refuse to be blinded by the industry’s obsession with prices and scores. And do you think I like writing about this stuff? Hardly. But someone has to do it.

Photo: Joey Nicotra on Unsplash

More Ask the WC:
• Ask the WC 30: BYOB, wine for friends, California fires
• Ask the WC 29: Birthday gifts, larger bottles, and on-line
• Ask the WC 28: Wine Curmudgeon ethics, sweet red wine, and wine spending