Tag Archives: wine prices

Wine prices 2024

three men laughing while looking in the laptop inside room
“Can it be? Finally? Lower wine prices?”

Did the WC get it right last year?

This is the first of two parts looking at wine prices and wine trends in 2024. Part I: Wine prices 2024. Part II: Wine trends 2024.

So, in 2023, wine prices remain high. Wine sits on store shelves. Back vintages pile up. And, at some point, either later this year or early next, the fizzing and sputtering turns into an explosion and prices finally start to obey the law of supply and demand.

I wrote that a year ago, in the 2023 wine prices post. And you know what? I may have been correct. Prices did pretty much stay high — or go higher — for most of last year. And yes, wine sat on store shelves, waiting for buyers, while back vintages piled up (as almost every sales report confirmed).

And then, around the holidays, I saw some almost unprecedented discounting. Wine.com offered free shipping for almost a month, something it almost never does. My local Kroger offered not a 10 percent discount on a case during that period, but a 25 percent discount on six wines (and yes, I bought quite a bit of $8 vinho verde for $6).  Discounting elsewhere in town wasn’t quite that steep, but even retailers that don’t usually do much price cutting found a way to cut prices in the run-up to Christmas. How does $2 off a $15 wine for buying a mixed case sound?

Now, the caveats. Dallas may not be representative of the rest of the country. Wine.com’s free shipping may have been more about Wine.com than the wine business in general; I didn’t notice the same sort of discounting (though there was some) at other on-line retailers. But the Kroger discounting, to my mind, speaks volumes. That it sold the wine so cheaply means it paid less for it, which means its wholesalers had wine stacked up in warehouses that they needed to sell. So they made Kroger an offer it didn’t refuse, and I got lots of $6 wine. And it’s worth noting that it was sold out of the La Vieille Ferme rose, which was $6.75 a bottle with the discount. So, yes, wine was selling at lower prices.

Does this mean we’ll see “the fizzing and sputtering” from late last year turn into a price-cutting explosion sooner rather than later in 2024? As I have written many times, predicting wine pricing is not for the faint of heart. But maybe, just maybe, we’ll see that explosion this year.

Photo: Priscilla Du Preez, three men laughing while looking in the laptop inside room via Unsplash

 

Restaurant wine, one last time

women drinking wine at lunch
“When did the restaurant start charging $50 a bottle for this junk?”

It may not have come back, and we know why — too high prices

A long-time blog reader sent the following:

“American restaurants are the worst offenders. Our very reasonably priced local Chinese raised its price for my favorite Pinot Grigio ($7.99 at Total Wine) from $9 to $15 — and now they also pour short.”

The Wine Curmudgeon has spent quite a bit of time over the past 16 years trying to help restaurants boost their wine sales, and, as this anecdote shows, to little avail. And it’s just not this story that shows how bad things are, but plenty of statistics:

• The number of fine dining establishments, wine’s restaurant backbone, fell by almost 4 percent last year.

• Restaurant wine lists are smaller than ever, as restaurants try to save money by cutting wine inventory.

• Pandemic recovery has been slow — if at all. Depending on whose numbers you consult, restaurant wine sales since the initial pandemic recovery have been flat to lower, and there’s even some doubt they’re back to 2019 levels.

And, to add a little doom to the gloom, one of the most important wine number crunchers reports that all U.S. wine sales declined 7.4 percent in volume between October 2022 and September 2023, and are down 8.4 percent through September of this year.

So what does the restaurant business do? Raise prices, of course.

One final time: Put quality cheap wine on your list that you can sell for $20 a bottle. It’s out there, and I would be happy to recommend some. You’ll sell more wine, turn inventory more quickly, make more money, and make your customers happy.

Isn’t that the idea?

Photo: “Ladies that lunch” by futureshape is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Drink wine? Then you must own a yacht

Yacht broker ad
Who knew wine and yachts go together like red beans and rice?

How else to explain the ads that show up on the WC’s Internet pages?

Imagine my surprise when I saw the ad at the top of the page as I was running through my morning Internet routine the other day. Yes, believe it or not, a yacht broker.

How is that possible, given that I am the world’s foremost authority on cheap wine? That’s hardly very yachty,

The only answer I could come up with is wine. Internet ads, thanks to our overlords at Google and their co-conspirators at companies like Meta, harvest our searches and then sell the information to advertisers. That’s why, when I’m pursuing my computer geekiness, I see ads for software services and server hardware. Or sometimes see ads for dog food and the like when I am doing a search for Churro, the blog’s associate editor.

But yachts? I don’t search for boat moorings, high-end cars, luxury apartments, or $5,000 refrigerators – all things that would seem to indicate a socio-economic penchant for yachts. And, given that Google and the like sell data they glean (a polite way of saying steal) from our personal information, they should know I don’t live near an ocean, don’t own anything save for the Honda Fit, don’t live in a uber-fancy ZIP code, and that I use coupons (digital, of course) when I go to the supermarket.

Again, hardly very yachty.

But I do search for wine, and when I did the reporting for the Gallo post after the company bought Rombauer and Massican, I was looking for information about two pricey Napa producers. And I regularly search retailer and winery sites, as well as Wine-searcher, to write the blog and to do my freelance work.

So what other conclusion could the Internet bots come to? I must have a yacht to sell if I’m checking Wine-searcher for $100 Napa cabs. And, as Gallup pointed out in its most recent annual survey, wine drinkers are about as close to the 1 percent as it gets when it comes to alcohol.

So thank you, premiumization. Who knew anyone would ever think the WC owned a yacht, if not for you?

13 bottles of wine for $158 (and that includes a $30 white Burgundy)

Mexican bandit
“Premiumization? We don’t need no stinkin’ premiumization!”

Despite wine’s worst intentions, it’s still possible to buy quality cheap wine – and lots of it

For all the hand-wringing about the evils of premiumization (here and elsewhere), and the idea that no one makes or cares about quality cheap wine anymore, it’s still out there. Which is what this recent shopping trip demonstrated.

The average price here, including the retailer’s various discounts but not sales tax, was $12.15 a bottle for the baker’s dozen. Throw out the $30 white Burgundy, and it was just $10.67 a bottle — more or less what it has always been in the almost 16 years I’ve written the blog.

And, of course, none of the wine was crappy.

Rather, it’s about buying smart and following the guidelines that have served all of us well who want quality wine but who refuse to pay jumped up prices for it. That means staying away from California, looking for grapes and regions that aren’t as common, and to be wiling to try something different. This time, given the emerging grape glut, I was also able to find some marked down previous vintages.

My shopping cart included:

• Four bottles of vinho verde, which I would have bought even if the last eight weeks here had not seemed to average 105 degrees a day.

• One French and one Spanish white blend, staying away from the premium charged for chardonnay – even cheap chardonnay from France.

• La Vieille Ferme – three roses and one red. I didn’t buy any white because the store was sold out.

• A couple of previous vintage roses, including the one-liter Cote Mas Aurore.

More about buying cheap wine:
• Inflation? What inflation? 10 bottles of wine for $114
• Suck on this, premiumization: 14 bottles of wine for $148
• Premiumization be damned: $139.36 for 14 ½ bottles of cheap wine

Update: Wine prices 2023, part 3

Yes, it looks like some wine prices are falling

Lindeman's ad Total Wine
Yellow Tail ad Total wine
Finally, after years of waiting, it looks like wine prices are starting to go down. The not so good news is that it’s in lower priced, supermarket-style wines that cost less than $10. Wines in the $10 to $15 range still – stubbornly – seem to be holding their prices.

The pictures at the top of the top of the post, from Total Wine in Dallas, tell the story. What Total is charging, and even allowing for Total’s lower than most margins, doesn’t cover the cost of making the wines – maybe the glass for the bottles, but not the grapes, labor, or shipping to the U.S.

And why is that? Because warehouses are full of these kinds of wines, the less than $10 brands that have been especially pummeled by the slump in wine demand. So sell them as cheap as necessary to move them, since all they’re doing otherwise is taking up expensive warehouse space.

I’ve spent the past week talking to grape brokers, wine analysts, retailers, and the like for a freelance piece about all of the grapes, bulk wine, and bottled wine around the world – and, yes, in the U.S. — languishing unsold. The irony? I’ve been told that some expensive wines, including those $100 and up, aren’t selling, Which, of course, isn’t supposed to happen any more.

Demand is so flat, one high-end producer told me, that he isn’t going to raise prices this year – and might even cut a price or two. Not only didn’t his cost of grapes increase, but his other costs, like bottles, seems to have stabilized.

So when will prices for those $10 to $15 wines that we focus on the on the blog start to fall? Hopefully, sooner than we realize.

Why it’s so hard to figure out what wine prices are doing

blindfolded woman
“Let’s help the WC figure out where wine prices are going.”

That’s because there are prices, and then there are prices

A friend had asked me about the price of a wine he liked, so I started searching. It was the Riva Ranch chardonnay from Wente, a fine California producer, and one my friend has bought for years. But what I found surprised even me:

• $16.99 at my Kroger, marked down from $23.99.

• $19.99 at Wine.com, marked down from $22.

• $15.76 at Spec’s, the biggest independent retailer in Texas.

• $19.99 at Monticello, a small retailer near my house.

• $14.99 at Total Wine, but $13.49 if bought as part of Total’s Pick Six program.

In other words, four different prices at five retailers, as well as two sale prices and one store discount price. And, if that’s not confusing enough, a nearby Whole Foods charges $15.99 for Wente’s entry-level chardonnay, a step down from the Riva Ranch.

Is it any wonder it’s so difficult to figure out what wine prices are doing?

Traditionally, prices were based on the retailer’s cost and how much margin he or she wanted to take, as well as local liquor taxes and what the competition charged. That’s why bigger retailers usually offered better prices. But that Wine.com charges the same price as Monticello speaks to how pricing has changed.

These days, it’s as much about the retailer’s customer mix as anything. Wine.com knows its audience doesn’t mind paying more, so it charges more. I’ve seen this with many of its wines; the La Vieille Ferme rose costs $10.99 at Wine.com, compared to $6 to $8 elsewhere in Dallas.

All of which leaves me in a bind when I undertake one of my regular price parsing efforts. Given all this confusion, how can I tell which way prices are going?

With great difficulty. Hence, I shop at lots and lots of places, including supermarkets, and keep a database of my purchases, as well as extensive notes about prices at places where I didn’t buy the wine. That way, I can tell how much I paid for the same wine at different times, as well as what it cost at other retailers. So yes, I know that Domaine Tariquet cost me $10 at Central Market, a specialty grocer, in 2016.

The other thing to keep in mind? How many past vintages are being sold. Again, traditionally, a retailer sold off one vintage and moved on to the next. But given wine’s demand problems, there are a lot of past vintages on shelves and in warehouses. Again, using Wine.com, six of the first 10 roses listed under most popular for Texas are past vintages (and three are marked down). And that’s most popular. So imagine how much wine is stacking up somewhere that isn’t popular that needs to be sold.

All of which is why I’m cautiously optimistic that wine prices will head lower as the year progresses. The biggest retailers seem to be heading that way, and those past vintages show little sign of going away.

But, given how pricing works, that’s no guarantee.

Photo: “PAS4679” by the underlord is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Update: Wine prices 2023

woman and child at supermarket checkout
“Did those wine prices seem lower this time?”

Are we nearing the point where prices have peaked?

I was talking to a wine importer the other day, and asked how business was: “Not bad,” he said, “considering no one is buying wine.”

Which may be a sign that wine prices – and even premiumization? — have reached a peak, and we’re about to head down.

I base this on more than one conversation with one importer (even though he is really smart and doesn’t gild any wine lilies). There have been any number of signs this spring that waning demand may finally be doing what the law of supply and demand says it should do:

• Two recent studies, by the IWSR consultancy and the International Organisation of Vine and Wine trade group found that consumers are buying less alcohol and that overall consumption is down. Premiumization remains important in the U.S. and – though slowing – is still seen as a key to the U.S. market.

• The blog’s official wine numbers guru told me recent U.S. sales figures are “glum,” but still contain a lot of confusion from the pandemic. However, “it is clear that the second wine boom, circa 1995-2015, is over.”

• Older vintages – lots and lots – are showing on store shelves. I mentioned this in the rose post last week, and just keep seeing more and more as I scour the Internet. In fact, I got an email from Wine.com saying that a 2020 rose – two vintages past – was back in stock. How much must there be still to sell?

• Treasury Wine Estates will cut costs (perhaps even layoffs) because it’s selling less wine, including and especially its 19 Crimes supermarket brand. How did wine get to the point that 19 Crimes and Snoop Dog – one of the great successes of the past couple of years – is in trouble?

In other words, people are buying and drinking less wine. One of the most interesting bits in the IWSR report noted that we’re drinking less to save money, and not necessarily to save our health from the evils of drink. Who would have thought that?

Having said that, this is far from an exact science, as my several goofs about pricing over the years demonstrate. There is no doubt that the supply chain and inflation issues that pounded wine during the pandemic were real and caused legitimate price hikes.

But I’m still getting samples of wines with silly suggested retail prices, like $13 for a French red blend with a marketing-driven name but where the grapes probably cost $2 or $3. And there have been reports that some consumer goods producers and retailers, seeing a chance to take price increases, are taking them just because.

So I could be completely wrong. But let’s hope not.