Tag Archives: wine rants

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?

Retailer wine recommendations: More of the same

two women eating brushcetta
“The WC was spot on with this. No need to pay $30.”

If my buying history is $10 wine, why do they think I will pay $30?

Those of us who buy wine get offers and come-ons from retailers all the time — and we get even more if we forget to un-check the box that lets retailers flood our email with all those “30% off– act now” offers.

But, as noted on the blog before, most retailers don’t do a very good job of it. One would think, with all of the current hubbub about artificial intelligence, that their offers would have improved – but a couple of recent emails show just the opposite.

Wine.com recently suggested that because I bought a $10 French white blend that I should try a Portuguese white blend at twice the price; an Alsatian white blend at almost twice the price (and which is a touch sweet); and a French white blend, also almost twice the price and that is two vintages old.

We’ll ignore the pricing bit for a minute to try and figure out why the site’s algorithm would recommend wines that aren’t much like the one I bought. The Portuguese is the closest, but it’s a little heavier and less fresh. The others aren’t even close.

So maybe it is about the price.

Because more or less the same thing happened with a recent email from Saratoga Wine. “We provide our subscribers with curated offers and selections based on purchase history, interests and new items we have available to order,” said the email. So what were the recommendations? One wine less than $12, and most of the rest were $30 or more (and many were more than a couple of vintages old, too). Which hardly sounds like my purchase history, does it?

My guess is that these retailers are caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy – we’re supposed to be buying less and paying more for the wine we do drink, so that’s what they’re trying to sell me.

Which seems like a waste of time, doesn’t it?

Photo: Adrienn from Pexels

One year later, and nothing has changed

Man hugging woman
“You can do it — I’ll help you with PSL withdrawal.”

The WC warned the health watchdogs about Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte, but they did nothing

Starbucks has again released its infamous Pumpkin Spice Latte, crammed with fat, sugar, calories and caffeine — and, again, the country’s various health officials have remained stunningly silent.

Frankly, the Wine Curmudgeon does not know how this is possible. Didn’t I warn them at this time last year?

No doubt this has been an oversight on your part, and that we can soon expect studies that say drinking one Pumpkin Spice Latte is the equivalent of smoking a couple of cigarettes, or that two lattes a day is the equivalent of binge drinking. Perhaps you can even coin a term like latte use disorder, based on the wonderfully terrifying “alcohol use disorder.”

So, once more, know that the ingredients in a Pumpkin Spice Latte – made with 2 percent milk, no less – make my 2 1/2 glasses of wine with dinner look like a health tonic:

• One serving contains 390 calories, about three times as much as a glass of wine. Or, almost one-fifth the recommended daily calorie intake for a young, moderately active woman.

• One serving has almost half of the recommended daily allowance of saturated fat, and twice as much fat as two slices of bacon. And how much deadlier does food get than bacon?

• One serving has about one-fifth of the cholesterol and carbohydrates, 1/10th of the sodium, and more than a third of a day’s safe intake of caffeine. That’s twice the caffeine in a serving of Red Bull, which exists for caffeine.

And, to quote the Associated Press, Starbucks has sold “hundreds of millions since its launch in 2003.” But not to the WC; knowing the health risks, I am an abstainer.

So, once again, the WC pleads with the nation’s medical authorities: How have you ignored this threat to our health for so long?

Wine shipping, because it’s just that aggravating, part I

Man delivering wine
“Not in my state, you don’t.”

You know all that wine that you thought you bought legally? Maybe you didn’t

This is the first of two parts looking at wine shipping and how far we still have to go until we can legally buy what we want. Today, Part I: Bring on the lawsuits. Part II: One man’s travails with FedEx

The Tennessee attorney general has a message for those of us who buy wine over the Internet in his state – don’t. You’re breaking the law.

Last month, the attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, sued six out-of-state retailers who were selling alcohol to Tennessee residents. The lawsuit claimed the retailers weren’t licensed in the state, didn’t pay state taxes, and had ignored cease and desist orders.

The point here is not whether Internet wine sales are good or bad (regular readers know how I feel about that) or that every retailer who does out-of-state sales is breaking the law. Rather, it’s that enough do, and that this is the third state attorney general in the past couple of years to sue retailers for illegally selling alcohol in their jurisdictions.

And there are likely to be more, as pressure builds from our friends in the wholesale business to clamp down on Internet sales. Because, of course, these kinds of Internet sales mostly skip the three-tier system and the wholesalers don’t get their constitutionally protected piece of the pie.

How can that be, you ask? Why would anyone sell wine illegally?

Because, of course, they can – until they’re caught.

The blog’s official booze lawyer explained this to me years ago. It’s called “the title scam.” Look on the site where you buy wine, and in the small print you’ll probably find something like this: “Title to all alcoholic beverages purchased on this Site pass to you in the State of California when the goods are picked up by the common carrier.”

This is a legal fiction, in which your purchase of the wine from an out-of-state retailer is supposedly no different from buying it at the corner shop. That’s the “passes to you” bit; you take ownership of the wine from the Internet retailer as if the retailer was down the street.

Which, as the blog’s attorney said with a loud laugh, is very fictitious.

In fact, it has no legal standing at all, which is also true for other bits in website fine print, like “the customer is solely responsible for the shipment of alcohol and must abide by their local and state laws.” That’s why retailers can be sued – as has happened in Tennessee as well as Michigan and Ohio.

So far, no one has gone after the customers, though that has happened. Several years ago, Texas cracked down on illegal interstate shipments, focusing on the purchasers. I had to wend my way through the state liquor cop bureaucracy to ensure that I wouldn’t be arrested for getting samples.

So who knows what comes next?

Photo: “Man delivering online alcohol delivery order” by The Bag N Box Man LTD is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

No, Vintner Project, $30 wine will not bring Bud Light drinkers to wine

a woman sitting at a table with the hands on the face
“Oh no. I can’t find the $40 sparkling nebbiolo. How am I going to give up Bud Light?”

Why doesn’t anyone in wine – even those with the best of intentions – understand that price matters?

I am sure The Vintner Project is a fine organization with the best of intentions; I know several people listed on its members’ page, and they’re top-notch.

But how in the world did anyone there think this story has any relationship with reality? We’re going to convert Bud Light drinkers to wine by suggesting they buy a $40 Nebiollo sparkling? Which, by the way, has one listing in Wine-Searcher.

Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

But there it is, a 2,000-word story with 15 wine suggestions to help beer drinkers discover wine, and yes, the mystical term “gateway wine” appears. But know that none of the wines cost less than $10, only five cost less than $20, and one goes for $90. And no, the “budget” wine club suggestions don’t count. How many people are going to send away for wine, sight unseen – especially when they aren’t wine drinkers?

And, lest we forget, a 12-pack of Bud Light – which is the equivalent of two-plus bottles of wine – costs $14.

This story, despite its best intentions, is everything that’s wrong with the wine business. It’s myopic, self-important, borders on patronizing, and is totally lacking in any idea about how most of us buy wine – and especially people who don’t drink wine regularly.

No, they don’t search the Internet for suggestions about wine to drink instead of 100-calorie beer. They go to the supermarket and stand in front of the The Great Wall of Wine, look for something cheap that has the word smooth on the label, and hope for the best. Even one of the beer drinkers quoted in the story admitted as much: “I’m happy to try a bottle of wine I know nothing about at home for a reasonable price.”

How does the writer not see that a $32 white blend that no one but she and her friends know about is not a reasonable price?

What else doesn’t the writer understand about the way the wine business works?

• The list is almost all “artisan” wines, no doubt because of the current assumption that anything else is evil. This is just wrong-headed; there are thousands of producers who aren’t Big Wine who make quality, affordable bottles. Charles Bieler’s Provencal rose, which costs $12 to $15, is just one of them. And Charles is hardly evil.

• When wine isn’t about price, it’s about availability. It doesn’t matter how super cool a wine is if no one can buy it. This is a lesson that the blog’s readers have hammered home to me almost every day for the past 17 years. Wine drinkers – and especially inexperienced wine drinkers – don’t want to go to some winery website to buy one bottle of something they’ve never heard of – and pay a shipping charge and wait a week for it to show up.

• Geekiness is not a selling point. I love the wines from the Txakoli region in Spain’s Basque country, and one is on the list. But they’re expensive, difficult to find, and not for all tastes. It’s the car analogy again – do we learn to drive on a Ferrari or the family SUV?

Finally, one more word about price. I love wine, write about wine, and have been drinking wine almost all my adult life. But I almost never buy wines that cost as much as the most expensive wines in the article. And if I don’t do that, and I know what I’m doing, how can anyone expect a beer drinker to do so?

Photo: kristinhardwick via Morguefile

Yes, “birthday sex” wine

The dog Churro on a blanket
Churro, the blog’s associate editor, agrees about Birthday Sex wine. But he says I’m too hard on the “Barbie” movie.

Is it any wonder I continue to worry about the future of the wine business?

The Wine Curmudgeon is old enough to remember when the easiest way to “score with a chick” was to get her drunk. So you can imagine my consternation when an alert reader sent this story to me.

Sigh. What’s next, leisure suits and Nehru jackets?

To wit: “R&B artist Jeremih has teamed up with Napa Valley winemaker Russell Bevan and music company LiveOne to launch a Chardonnay brand named Birthday Sex.”

The wine, says the story, “is one of the new brands that LiveOne is launching under LiveOne Brands, a new division featuring celebrity-backed and branded products.” And to think that I stopped updating the dumbest celebrity and pop culture wines post because I thought the fad had passed.

Sigh.

It’s also worth noting that the album of the week on the LiveOne website is the “Barbie” soundtrack. Somewhere, Joey Ramone is spinning and spinning and spinning some more.

The WC has nothing against sex, birthdays, or any combination thereof. But doesn’t the wine business have enough problems without something like this? We may disagree whether the wine’s name and concept is offensive (though I think it’s offensive in oh so many ways), but one thing we can agree on: It’s dumb.

Birthday Sex wine and its tagline — “We believe that a little teasing can improve the experience” — sounds like something from a National Lampoon parody, circa 1973. Which means we’ve circled back to leisure suits and Nehru jackets. And who wants to go through that again?

Finally, perhaps the most annoying thing about all of this: Nowhere, not in the story in the link or on the Birthday Sex wine website, does it say how much the damned thing costs. That should tell us everything we need to know about the wine, yes?

How to make the blog even more fabulously successful?

old-time newspaper newsroom
“You’re all going to be replaced by free, outsourced content. Because this is all about what is best for me.”

Be like the NYT, and outsource its content

The Wine Curmudgeon, courtesy of the New York Times, has discovered a way to make the blog even more fabulously successful than it already is – I can outsource the content to someone who works more cheaply than I do.

That’s what the Times – my once beloved New York Times – did when it said it would close its sports department in favor of running stories from a website called The Athletic. How and why this happened is still a bit of a muddle; it apparently has something to do with the paper’s long-running union troubles as well as its not too brainy $550 million purchase of the money-losing Athletic in 2022.

Full disclosure: I was an employee of a Times subsidiary when I was the sports editor of the daily in Houma, La. Even then, the company’s management style was brusque. I was told that if I did a good job, I could move to the paper in Florence, Ala., or Lakeland, Fla. Which, not to denigrate the quality of those cities, didn’t have much appeal to a young, ambitious, newspaperman.

Still, if I overlook how despicable outsourcing the sports department is – it’s something that a sleazy leveraged buyout company would do – this might work. I can probably find a variety of young writers who will work for free for the exposure and the experience, and then I can use their copy under my banner. How 21st century, Elon Musk and Jeff Zuckerberg-style capitalism is that? They do the work, and I reap the benefits.

Now, will the blog be as well-written or as informative or as much fun as before? Of course not. But that’s not the point. The point is that I am making more money for myself, and the rest – the employees, the readers, the service that I am performing – be damned. Because, of course, 21st century, Elon Musk and Jeff Zuckerberg-style capitalism.

The catch is that I can’t overlook how despicable the Times’ action was. It’s supposed to be one of the bastions of American journalism, and not this company or this company (whose failings I know all too well). So I won’t outsource the blog. I will cancel my subscription to the Times, though. and hope its bosses eventually see the error of their ways.

Because one of us has to do the right thing.