Tag Archives: wine rants

Cheap wine is irrelevant, part IV

Sun computer found in a junk pile
Old computers? $10 wine? Junk ’em!

Expert claims most wines that cost less than $30 are junk

How does one respond to a major news site running a wine story headlined: “If you want quality, don’t spend under $30 on a bottle”

Shake your head, go to the keyboard, and once again defend the wine that most of us can afford to drink. Because if the wine business keeps insisting on marketing campaigns like this, wine truly is doomded – no matter how hard I try to save it.

The piece ran last week on the CNBC website, which is big and important enough so that I would assume the editors would know better. I contacted the writer, but never heard back. I didn’t contact the person featured in the story; we’ll just assume he was misquoted and it’s a coincidence that he works for a high-end online wine retailer.

Otherwise, that’s one of the most foolish things I’ve heard in my career in wine. Price, as I like to think I have amply demonstrated over the years, is not the barrier to quality the wine business would have us believe. It’s a guide, certainly, but it’s hardly an ironclad guarantee. I would be hard pressed to find a $30 rose that is four times better than this $7 pink, and I’m willing to bet that most wine types, including the fellow in the story, would find it just as difficult.

In fact, anyone who claims that a $100 wine — let alone a $50 wine — is always fabulous is either narrow minded, misguided, or elitist. Which, unfortunately, describes much of the wine business. What’s even more depressing is that the fellow in the story writes off some terrific $15 and $20 wine in his haste to denigrate “cheap.” Which means he tosses away gems like this Spanish cava, this cru Beaujolais, and that really weird Basque white that I love.

Much of the rest of the story was the usual wine geek stuff about appellations and mass produced wine, buttressed by a bit of winespeak here and there. The more wine changes. … yes?

Finally, the fellow’s qualifications for the $30 pronouncement? That he has tasted some 15,000 wines. We’ll ignore that I have tasted 45,000 in my 20-plus years doing this, which is more or less what many of my colleagues have tasted. What does matter is that any discerning wine drinker – and I can think of dozens of blog readers who fit that description – have also tasted more than that. Which, if you think about it, means they think just the opposite of the story’s expert, don’t they?

Maybe wine isn’t doomded after all.

Photo: “Sun computer found in a junk pile” by bandarji is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

More cheap wine irrelevant:
• It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant, part III
• It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant, part II
• It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant

What the wine business can learn from the Super Bowl

Yellow Tail roo Super Bowl ad
The 2017 Yellow Tail Super Bowl ad — it was no Rihanna, was it?

Marketing matters, as the Super Bowl entertainment demonstrates

The NFL is one of the most traditional institutions in the world. The demographics of its owners haven’t changed all that much since George Halas and Decatur Staleys in the 1920s. It has a rule to force teams to interview non-white candidates for coaching jobs — and which is routinely ignored. And one of the bits of excitement in yesterday’s game was that each team started an African-American quarterback, which seems positively Kafkaesque given that we had a black president 15 years before that happened.

But the NFL, for all of that, isn’t as hidebound as the wine business when it comes to marketing. Consider that many of the owners probably didn’t know who Rihanna was, and couldn’t name any of Chris Stapleton’s hits. Yet there they were, doing the halftime show and the national anthem for Sunday’s game.

That’s because the NFL understands how to make money – so much so, in fact, that there’s an argument that some teams care more about profits than winning. Right, Dallas Cowboys fans? The turning point was Michael Jackson’s halftime show in 1993, which showed what could be done when the league took marketing seriously. Before that, halftime shows were Disney characters, a group called Up With People (and be glad if you don’t know who they were), and, believe it or not, Mickey Rooney.

Compare this to the wine business, which seems to think marketing is something other businesses to do. Because, wine, after all, is better than that. It’s not a coincidence there weren’t any wine names in a recent survey of the most popular Super Bowl ad brands, Or that perhaps the most expensive Super Bowl wine effort ever was (to put it politely) stupid.

Even more depressing: If the wine business had to plan the halftime show, would it have a chosen a Beatles cover band? “The drummer looks just like Ringo!” Or selected one of the Elvis impersonators from “Honeymoon in Vegas” to do the national anthem?

I really do have reasons to worry about the wine business, don’t I?

Follow-up: Big Wine 2023

woman in coffee shop
“$15 for a bottle of wine? What a waste.”

Wine’s crisis is about money – wine costs too much, so consumers are looking elsewhere

We can dance around the Maypole as much as we want, but in the end, wine’s crisis is about money – wine costs too much, so consumers are buying something else.

It took me a long time to write that sentence. But the numbers in the 19th annual Wine Business News industry survey, which I wrote about yesterday, convinced me that it was time to write it. The survey numbers were just that bad, confirming what the SVB wine report found last month. Wine has lost consumers younger than 60, and there’s no reason to expect them to ever come back.

I hesitated because I didn’t want to sound like a crazy old coot ranting that wine was better in the old days when it was cheaper, and that I knew this because I walked uphill to school in the snow both ways. But who better to write about wine pricing than the Wine Curmudgeon? Who tastes more wine costing less than $15? Who knows how crappy most of it is?

In this, wine has tried everything but quality cheap wine to arrest its slide. Nothing has worked: Not making cheap wine just to be cheap; not making more sweet wine, despite the proliferation of sweet wines and the success of brands like 19 Crimes; and not alternative packaging like cans and boxes, despite all the media hype for each.

So what else can wine’s problem be but price?

The typical wine consumer can buy a crappy bottle of $8 wine or a not quite as crappy bottle of $15 wine. The idea of a quality $10 bottle of wine is as old-fashioned as Myspace or Ask Jeeves. So why is it so surprising that consumers aren’t buying those wines, but opting for craft beer and spirits — each of which offers more value and may even cost less?

It’s only surprising to the people who make wine. Talk to younger consumers, as I do, and they have said the same things for years: Cocktails are more fun. Spirits are a better value. Corkscrews suck. Wine is confusing.

In fact, it’s not a coincidence that wine’s only success over the past decade has been rose, which has increased in sales volume by some 1500 percent since 2010. And why not? Rose was cheap, well-made, fun, and used screwcaps. Those of us of a certain age can make as much fun as we want of Instagram influencers posing with rose bottles, but we can’t argue with rose’s success among younger consumers.

So what did wine do? Premiumize rose and insist that we should buy the $20 stuff for no other reason than we should: “Don’t you want to drink better?”

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

And, sadly, now I have even more reason to worry.

Photo: “Young woman in coffee shop” by Aaron Stidwell is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Follow-up: SVB wine report 2023

 

wine people bring to a party chart

The wine business’s house is on fire. Why doesn’t anyone in the wine business notice?

This year’s 22nd annual Silicon Valley Bank state of the wine industry report reminded me (with many apologies to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) of the story about the neighbor’s house catching fire. Study author Rob McMillan wants to lend the neighbor his garden hose, in the form of a wine industry marketing campaign. It might not be enough to put the fire out, but it’s better than what the wine business wants to do – wait for the fire to put itself out, assuming there even is a fire.

Because wine’s house is on fire — people younger than 60 have pretty much given up on wine, according to the report.

“I don’t know what the wine business is doing to drive growth among younger consumers,” McMillan told the report’s webinar audience. “But they’d better stop, since it isn’t working.”

Two charts from the report demonstrate this. The first, at the top of the post, shows the booze people bring to a party, based on their age. And the only people much interested in bringing wine are ready for Social Security. Click here to see a larger version. The second, which is here, shows that people who don’t start drinking wine when they’re young don’t magically start drinking it as they get older.

Talk about a fire.

McMillan’s proposed WineRamp marketing plan, which was similar to the California Raisins and “Beef: It’s what for dinner” campaigns, was shelved last year after considerable resistance from the wine industry. Serious division remains about whether it was needed, let alone whether it would work. But anyone who questions the need for more and better wine marketing is living in 1990 and waiting for “60 Minutes” to air its French paradox story. Which, of course, isn’t going to happen.

And I can’t speak to whether something like the Raisins would work; several wine marketers I respect insist it would be a huge and costly failure. But I can see the house next door is burning down, and if my garden hose is the only thing handy to put it out, then I will use my garden hose. Because I know the fire isn’t going to put itself out.

The wine list that doesn’t include the names of the wines

man holing menu
“Not to worry — you don’t need to know the wine’s name.”

Stupid? Of course. But maybe not for the reasons most people think

How about a restaurant wine list, with descriptions of the wines, but without naming the wines? This is a bit much, even for the restaurant business, which treats wine with a greed that keeps on gouging.

But it happened recently in Britain — how about a “juicy Chilean merlot?” for £6.50 (about US$7) for 175 ml, two glasses or so?

Which, reported by thedrinksbusiness, led to a social media conflagration. The restaurant was either doing diners a great favor by not confusing them, or it was committing a great disservice by not identifying the wines. Tweeted one: “What happens when the unsuspecting consumer is met with an over-extracted Negroamaro. …. Words need to mean something and these appear to mean nothing.”

Ah, the wine business. Either wine drinkers are too stupid to care what they’re drinking, or we get strangled by jargon.

Yes, this is a crappy idea; we should know what we’re buying. But the experts missed the point. The restaurant almost certainly didn’t do this to make diners’ choices easier, but to manage its inventory more effectively. If it doesn’t put the name of the wine on the list, then it can sell any wine that more or less matches the description (to say nothing of saving the cost of reprinting the list if the wines change).

And what’s happening these days in post-pandemic and Brexit-staggered Britain? A supply chain crisis of major proportions, in which getting the same item consistently has been past difficult – and especially for restaurants. So not using names makes managing the wine list that much easier; just sub out the original if it’s not available, and who’s the wiser? In addition, if the restaurant can pick up a cheaper “juicy Chilean merlot,” it can sell it for the higher price – and more margin!

Finally, the WC would not be the WC if he didn’t mention one other thing that not using names does: Diners can’t check the wine’s retail price on their phone to see how much they’re being marked up.

Pretty clever, yes?

Birthday week essay 2022: There’s practical, and then there’s the wine business

Angry man shouting
“I don’t care if cheap wine is practical — get rid of it!”

$10 wine is practical; so why is there such a backlash against those of us who embrace it?

A really sharp guy once asked me if it bothered me that I probably knew more about cheap wine than almost anyone in the wine business — but that no one in the wine business cared.

Not especially, I told him. I don’t do this to impress anyone in the wine business. I do this because there’s a need for someone to write about the wine that almost all of of us can afford to buy. And the Winestream Media has the other stuff covered – and covered and covered and covered. Besides, if I like doing it, and I do, why should I care what anyone else thinks?

Which, if you look at wine writing and the wine business as we celebrate the blog’s 15th anniversary this week, is a unique approach. I say this not to pat myself on the back, but to point out that one of the reasons – one of the many reasons – that wine finds itself becoming irrelevant to so many people who aren’t old and white is that it lacks the sort of objective, robust criticism that cars, restaurants, movies, books, and even video games have. Video game reviews are so important, in fact, they game companies have actually recalled games with crummy reviews to fix the,

Instead, wine has scores and winespeak – the former of which means almost nothing, since almost every wine gets a fine score, and the latter of which means even less, since no one can figure out what the reviews mean. Who can possibly think anyone would know what the adjective “lovage,” used to describe an herbal quality, means in a wine review? I didn’t, and I have been doing this for a long time. So how could an ordinary consumer? Yet there it was, in a review I found earlier this year from one of the big wine magazines.

This is not to say that there aren’t top-notch critics in wine; of course there are. Eric Asimov of the New York Times, Dave McIntyre of the Washington Post, Joe Roberts of One Wine Dude, for those who want a short list. Rather, it’s to note that – as one prominent wine critic wrote a couple of years ago – that not enough of those who review wine are interested in objective criticism. And he included himself in that group.

I interviewed that critic, Richard Hemming, a master of wine, for a podcast for the blog, and he didn’t back down. “Why should consumers trust us? They shouldn’t necessarily,” he told me.

Can you imagine a prominent movie critic saying that? Of course not – film, in fact, has traditionally been just the opposite. Roger Ebert was close friends with the filmmaker Martin Scorsese, but that didn’t stop him from panning Scorsese’s “Color of Money” – the movie was boring, Ebert wrote, and well beneath a filmmaker as talented as Scorsese.

Not surprisingly, Hemming gave up wine criticism not long after writing all of that. What did he do? He became a consultant.

Not even my cynicism has extended that far. What’s the point of being a critic if you’re not going to be critical, in all meanings of the word – good, bad, and indifferent? Otherwise, everything is toasty and oaky and gets 92 points. And what’s the point of that, other than to soothe a winemaker’s ego?

And it’s just not wine writers who feel this way. I did a webcast in the blog’s early years with a group of wine marketers, who wanted to know why I didn’t like expensive wine. I thought the question was silly — why are cheap wine and expensive wine mutually exclusive? I drive a Honda, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a classic Thunderbird or that I wouldn’t want to own one. It’s not a preference; it’s a question of what’s practical. And practical is the Honda’s mileage and the nifty hatchback, where wine boxes fit perfectly.

And I would not be the Wine Curmudgeon if I didn’t point out that wine is about the least practical thing that is sold in supermarkets. It’s not like we see a lot of $100 laundry detergent or $75 ketchup.

Which us back to the beginning of this piece. No, I’m not bothered if those in wine see what I do as impractical and irrelevant. Why should it matter that I like a $10 bottle of wine with my dinner – or that I write about it? If the wine business doesn’t understand that it has bigger problems than a cranky ex-sportswriter who drinks Domaine Tariquet, then wine truly is doomed.

Photo: Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

More Birthday Week perspective on the wine business:
• The WC’s plan to save the wine business from itself?
• Wine as expensive shiny baubles instead of something to savor and enjoy
• How do you write about quality cheap wine when the system is rigged against it?

Five more things the Wine Curmudgeon learned in moving the blog from free to paid

Man at typewriter
“These free subscription buttons are making me crazy!”

And, again this year, most of them are welcome

The blog’s 15th annual birthday week starts today. So, once again, five things I’ve learned about wine writing, the Internet, and Substack in the almost two years that the blog hasn’t been free:

• Thank you, subscribers. The renewal rate is through the roof – like 95 percent. This, when I changed to Substack, was my biggest concern. Would I be able to avoid what’s called “churn,” where subscribers never increase because the new ones just replace the ones who canceled. And, to be honest, most of the cancellations were welcome – usually subscribers to the old blog who didn’t like the changes and wanted to complain about them.

• The new Substack chat feature. Yes, finally, after 15 years, the WC should be able to hold on-line chats. I’m still not sure how it works (and so far, it’s only for Apple products), but once I figure it out, we can do something that everyone else has been doing for decades. Ain’t technology grand?

• Substack’s free subscriptions. This is a good thing, and I had planned to offer one free post a week when I switched in 2021. The catch is that Substack says the best way to convert free to paid is to insert annoying paywalls and subscribe buttons in the body of the free posts. Which, as hard as I try to feel otherwise, irritates me no end. I want people to read the blog; I have no desire to nag them like a cranky old man sitting on his front port, waving hands and sputtering gibberish. So those of you who get this for free: just sign up. Please. You’ll make my life so much easier.

• The increasing gulf between between the wine business’ idea of reality and actual reality. This is not just about premiumization and rest of the stuff I rant about; it’s that the wine business sees itself as somehow separate from what goes on in the rest of the world. As such. what goes on – pandemic, war in Ukraine, and all the rest – doesn’t matter when it comes to wine. I heard one executive say that people would pay more for wine, regardless of anything else, because they would.

• I’m getting more non-wine news releases, marketing pleas, and PR missives than ever. And no, I don’t know why. What makes it more difficult to figure out is that I pruned my email lists this summer and changed my email to a service that doesn’t sell my information to advertisers. One possible explanation: I think PR people are a lot less fussy these days about who they contact, and if I write about wine and they want to push plant-based sausage (and a lot do), that’s close enough.

Photo: “03-10-1960_17119 Wim Sonneveld” by IISG is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0