Tag Archives: wine rants

A wine accessory that costs as much as a decent case of wine

How did we get to the point where marketers think they can flog this stuff at us?

The Wine Curmudgeon gets the occasional e-mail from readers telling me to calm down, that things in wine aren’t as bad as they seem.

To which I offer this commercial, which showed up as “sponsored” when I did one of my regular searches on YouTube for wine-related videos.

It’s not so much that the ad resembles that of a luxury car, which is disconcerting enough. I want to drink wine, not buy a Lexus. And what does it say about the demographics of people who search for wine on YouTube that I got this?

But what really gets me is that the product – which no one really needs and which is never really described – costs $200. Hell, even I could buy a nice bottle of wine for $200, and we know how much I don’t want to do that.

The most depressing part of this? That this may be how the rest of the world sees wine drinkers — that we’ll drop $200 for no particular reason other than that we have the money to do so.

Video courtesy of etowine via YouTube

Thank you, La Vieille Ferme, for some good news about cheap wine

La Vieille Ferme rose 3-liter box
Would that I could buy the 3-liter box of the La Vieille Ferme rose in Dallas

The experts tell us no one cares about cheap wine, but La Vieille just keeps growing

The blog’s 16th annual rose extravaganza — featuring lots and lots of pink wine that most of us can afford to buy – is just about a month away. So why not some good news featuring one of the blog’s favorite roses, which is especially welcome given the doom and gloom in the rest of the wine business?

The second-largest French table wine brand in the U.S. is not some premiumized plonk, a snooty wine snob brand, or a 94-point label that is only available in three stores (none of which are near where anyone lives).

It’s our old pal La Vieille Ferme, all $7 a bottle of it. Or, as my mom calls it, “the rooster wine.”

La Vieille sold almost 630,000 cases in the U.S. last year, which would rank it among the 30 or so biggest U.S. producers. Most importantly, its growth – up about one-third over the past five years – was led by its rose. And regular visitors here know just how much the WC appreciates the La Vieille rose – wine of the week more often than I can count, a long-time member of the Hall of Fame, and a finalist for the Turner award a couple of times.

And why not? It tastes like rose – dry, fruity, crisp, and refreshing, and neither sweet nor smoooth. It has maintained its quality over the past decade when so many others have not, giving in to cost cutting or marketing foolishness.

And, perhaps most importantly, La Vieille thrived during the Trump wine tariff. The man who runs its U.S. importer told me that he didn’t raise prices because he didn’t want to lose market share; which not only worked, but also got La Vieille new business from retailers who were impressed by the brand’s long-term determination to stay relevant. When’s the last time you heard that about a wine brand?

So drink a toast to the La Vieille – whether from the 750-ml bottle, the 1.5-liter bottle, or the 3-liter box. Because quality can win out, even when it doesn’t cost very much.

Five days drinking $20 wine

woman holding wine glass
“Boy, the WC got this one right. I’m never buying a $35 rose again.”

Yes, the wine was better – but twice as better? Hardly — and I was surprised

The Wine Curmudgeon, who always tries to keep an open mind, spent one working week last month drinking only wine with dinner that cost $18 or $20 (or more). The goal? To see if the wines were truly twice as good as the $10 and $12 wines I usually drink.

And you know what? They weren’t. Which actually kind of surprised me.

This is not to say that most of the wines weren’t well made and interesting. They were. But compared to the quality $10 wines I usually drink, they didn’t especially stand out. For example, I spent $18 for a Spanish rose and $30 for a white Bordeaux, and both were enjoyable wines. But the rose was not $18 worth of nice, and as was terrific as the white Bordeaux was, it wasn’t $30 worth of terrific.

How is this possible, given the regular drumbeat from producers and the Winestream Media that we’re spending more money and drinking better?

A variety of reasons:

• Higher prices for the more expensive wines, thanks to the Trump tariff, pandemic supply chain woes, the war in Europe, and inflation. That means a wine that might have been a value at $18 but now costs $23 isn’t a value any more. This hasn’t necessarily been the case with my cheap wines, where producers have been more reluctant to hike prices.

• Marketing, marketing, and more marketing. It’s just not about the wines I noted last week; rather, it’s about shelves of wines that have been created to cost $20 or more because premiumization. When’s the last time anyone spent $I8 on a Chilean chardonnay or a $35 California rose? Yet that’s what I got as samples recently.

• Most importantly, the $10 and $12 wines that I drink – and recommend on the blog (subscribe now!) – are not supermarket plonk. It’s easy to “drink better” by spending more money if the cheap wine you’re drinking tastes cheap. But what if you’re drinking this? Or this? Or this? It’s much more difficult.

Photo: “drink more wine” by wrapped4good is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

“Premiumization is elitist”

woman drinking coffee
“How bougie — $15 hard seltzers.”

Of course it is, but that hasn’t stopped the wine business from embracing it – to its detriment

Two recent news items show just how little the wine business understands the dilemma that it’s facing. In the first, one of the Gallo family decries premiumization and the harm it has done to wine. In the second, an Italian producer boasts about its $15 wine spritzers – which, by any measurement, is premiumization run amok.

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

The premiumization quote comes from Stephanie Gallo, the chief marketing officer for E&J Gallo, whose family runs the largest wine company in the world. Speaking to the North Bay Business Journal’s Women in the Wine Business Conference, she said: “I hate the word ‘premiumization’ — hate it. I think it’s elitist.” Instead, she said, wines should be priced so they’re affordable for consumers of every income level and circumstance.

Which, of course, is what the Wine Curmudgeon has been saying for years. Who knew I had such powerful forces on my side?

And, for the most part, Gallo does just that. Three of its most important brands — Barefoot, Apothic, and the Italian sparkler La Marca – not only dominate their categories, but Barefoot alone would be the third biggest producer in the U.S. by itself.

We can argue about quality, but Gallo does know how to sell cheap wine – and is one of the few producers who still wants to do it.

Because the Italian company obviously doesn’t. The marketing materials it sent me hit every current wine talking point as if they were written by a chatbot culling the Internet: Cocktail-like! Low alcohol! Lighter! And its name sounds just like this!

And all for just $15 a bottle.

Sigh. Apparently, no one in Italy has heard about canned spritzers, hard seltzers and the like, which cost about half as much and have dominated the market – but seem to be losing favor with consumers. Or, even, this pink wine, also half the price.

Which, of course, is a distinctly wine thing to do. Let’s release a product after it has already run its course and consumers have moved on to something else. And, when it fails, we can say we tried and pat ourselves on the back for making the effort but not being appreciated.

Photo: “stocks-7559” by Artem Beliaikin is marked with CC0 1.0.

Smoking, wine, and the Neo-Prohibitionists

per capita cigarette consumption in U.S.How equating drinking with cigarettes will save us from alcohol

The chart at the top of this post says everything we need to know about the Neo-Prohibitionist plan to end drinking in the U.S.

It details what happened to U.S. per capita cigarette consumption though 1998. Note the peak just before the 1963 Surgeon General’s report linking cigarette use to cancer. A second chart, here, shows the percentage of U.S. men and women who smoked though 1998.

The trend in both charts? Down, down, down, of course. (And, if that’s not enough, U.S. cancer deaths have fallen 30 percent since 1991.)

Their plan is to do for alcohol and wine what the anti-smoking groups did for cigarettes – use science to show that drinking will kill you. Hence, the avalanche of studies over the past couple of years showing that any amount of booze, just like any number of cigarettes, is deadly.

Which, of course, isn’t necessarily true – as even some in the scientific community have said.

Nevertheless, that’s where we are.

This is where I always mention that none of this is written to denigrate the serious problems caused by alcohol abuse. It’s something that I’ve been writing about for decades, and something that I have seen first hand. I should also add that I have never smoked, and that I completely understand the link between smoking and death – and can be quite annoying about it.

But to claim that a glass of wine with dinner is alcoholism is both foolish and fruitless. It’s not going to stop anyone from drinking, and it’s certainly not true.

One of the most fascinating parts of the Neo assault on drinking is that no one has explicitly shown that moderate wine drinking doesn’t have health benefits, the so-called French Paradox. Instead, the flood of studies just keeps piling up “evidence” that all drinking is fatal.

The other thing that’s rarely discussed? There was a direct link between smoking and lung cancer; if you smoked enough, a spot showed up on your lung. That direct link still doesn’t exist for alcohol, because it has been difficult to filter out other lifestyle factors that might cause death. Obesity or a poor diet (or both) can cause heart disease, even without drinking. So if I have a couple of beers or a glass of wine each night, but don’t exercise, weigh too much, and eat bacon the way a vegan scarfs down tofu, it’s almost certainly not the beer that will kill me.

Which, in looking at many of the Neo anti-drinking studies, is something that they have to dance around. “Well, if he hasn’t had those beers or wine, he might not have had high blood pressure or weighed too much.” Maybe. But it would be nice to see scientific evidence supporting that, instead of more dancing.

I want to live as long as possible. Don’t I deserve the best evidence of how to do that?

 

Is it time to panic over chatbot wine reviews?

Frustrated computer user
“No. no, no.. petite sirah is not the same as sirah. Or even syrah.””

Hardly. How can it rant about wine the way the WC can?

Artificial intelligence and wine writing are nothing new on the blog. I’ve posted about it nine times since 2015 — before most of the media, wine or otherwise, even knew what it was.

So excuse me if I haven’t panicked about the latest chatbot developments.

Because lots of others have, whether the AI is penning poetry, developing software code, or creating term papers. A piece in the New York Times said AI writing could be used “to generate and spread untruths” (as if humanity hasn’t been doing that for as long as there has been humanity). Even the Linux community, which is usually too cool to be bothered with stuff like this, was more than a little concerned when a coding site called GitHub unveiled an AI called Copilot to “help” write code.

Yes, chatbots can help students cheat – as if they need any help. Yes, AI can be used to write news stories – if the news organization is willing to spend a lot of time editing out mistakes. And I wouldn’t be surprised if someone started using them to write the junk that’s on the back labels of wine bottles.

What AI writing can’t do is think. It can gather information and organize it, and sometimes even do a terrific job. But it can’t taste wine and write a review, and it certainly can’t decide whether a $12 wine is varietally correct or offers value. This blog post, where a tech guy described how he designed an AI to write tasting notes, was notable for two things: First, how “tasting note” they sounded, even though the information came from gathering and organizing. But that may say as much about tasting notes as they do the AI’s skills. Second, that the site mentioned in the post stopped working shortly after I wrote about it, unable to keep up with what it needed to do.

But, perhaps the most important caveat: An AI can’t decide what to write about, the way I can. Yes, it can be given an assignment, but who is going to decide what’s important enough for it to “write” about — and then decide if it can complete the assignment correctly? And it certainly can’t look at the wine business and decide what’s going on the blog for the next week.

Until that happens, we still need cranky ex-newspaper reporters.

More about AI wine writing:
• Are machine-written wine reviews closer than ever?
• Artificial intelligence and wine recommendations
• Winecast 30: Arty, the first artificial intelligence wine writer

 

The other problem with boxed and canned wine?

woman in black and white dress with wine glass
“Would that I had a box of $6 a bottle Argentine malbec. Who knows? I might even give up cocktails.”

It’s our old pal availability – of course

Last month’s post detailing the problems with drinking box and canned wine for dinner – and that weren’t about quality – didn’t include one other handicap.

It’s not easy to find either on store shelves, save for a handful of national brands. It’s an especial problem for boxed wine; periodically, I’ll get a release about a new and exciting box, but it will only be for sale at three stores, two on one coast and one on the other.

In other words, our old pal availability.

This came to me when I was looking through my tasting notes for something to do as a wine of the week, and I realized that one of the wines that I marked to use came in a box (though not one that I had used for the dinner post).

Ha! I thought. This would be a perfect followup to the dinner post – and it is, but for the wrong reason. It’s almost impossible to buy the wine in the U.S. There’s one retailer on Wine-Searcher, none on Pix, and only three on the first page of a Google search.

Which is a damned shame, since this is just the kind of wine to keep around the house. It’s the 2021 Trampa Malbec, which I got as a sample. The suggested retail price is $24 for a 3-liter box, which works out to $6 a bottle.

And I liked it — and this comes from someone who doesn’t much care for Argentine malbec. From my notes: “Simple and straightforward — juicy, bright berry fruit, not much in the way of tannins, and something oakish that isn’t too oakish. Outstanding value at $6 a bottle.”

In this, it’s exactly the kind of cheap, quality wine – in a non-traditional package, as well – that the wine business claims it needs and wants so it can attract younger consumers. So is it easy to buy? Of course not. And we know why that is, don’t we, three-tier system?

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

Photo: Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash