Tag Archives: wine rants

Count ‘em: There’s almost one wine drinking “holiday” for every week of the year

man looking at calendar
“Let’s see. When can we fit in Cranky Wine Writer Wine Day?”

Be sure not to overlook National Mulled Wine Day – as well as almost 50 others

The Wine Curmudgeon has discovered why – despite the evidence – so many people think Americans get drunk on wine very night.

That’s because there are at least 49 days, weeks, and months designated as some sort of wine drinking occasion. I write “at least” because searching for them and counting them was a bit overwhelming. As near as I can tell, there is at least one wine “holiday” every week, more or less. There’s even a Google wine calendar, just like those for religious and national holidays..

That would include National Wine Day, Idaho wine month, and sparkling wine week. Most common varietals, as well as those almost no one has ever heard of, have their day. That includes furmint and marselan.

Most of these occasions, obviously, are marketing gimmicks. They’re cheap and easy to do, don’t require purchasing expensive ads, and usually need nothing more than emailing a news release. I must have gotten a dozen or so for “National Red Wine Day” last month.

And why not? Get an influencer to post a picture to Instagram — #LanguedocDay, baby! — and you can boast to the client that their campaign was a big hit.

Full disclosure: We used this tactic for Drink Local Wine when we were getting the organization started in 2008. We “designated” the second week of October as “Drink Local Wine” week, and though the organization hasn’t been active in years, the week remains on the Google calendar. So I guess it must have worked.

Do these other things work? Who knows? But given the way wine marketing doesn’t do much these days save irritate me, it’s probably not any worse than anything else. And I did write about Furmint Day on Feb. 1, didn’t I?

Update: Wine availability, and why it makes so many people angry

Man in wine store
“That bleeping wine writer. Why doesn’t she write about wine that I can buy in the store next to my house?”

Once again, the WC tries to parse this availability thing and restore calm to the wine drinking universe

The following is mostly a true story. The names were changed to protect the guilty (though I doubt they would even notice):

Big-time wine writer (not me): “So, you have a question about wine availability?”

Reader: “Yes, and I am furious. You never list any wine shops in my city. What’s wrong with you?”

Wine writer: “Well, there could be a lot of reasons for that. What city do you live in?”

Reader: “I live in City A. Are you being paid not to list any shops in my city?”

Wine writer: “Of course not. No one in City A carried the most recent wine. But there are shops listed in City B. That’s right next to City A, isn’t it?”

Reader: “Why should I have to drive there? This is all your fault.”

Ain’t wine availability grand?

I’ve been grappling with this subject since I did my first wine story in the 1990s. It almost wrecked a friendship with one editor, who refused to believe that every store didn’t carry every wine – because that’s how it worked for everything else. And I did lose a wine writing gig because another editor never understood that, and just assumed I was lazy.

So if I had trouble explaining the concept to editors, the above-detailed story should come as no surprise. I’m a wine drinker. I go to a wine shop. So where the hell is the damned wine?

Would that it were that easy.

The most important thing to understand about wine availability? Just because a wine is in one shop in one city in one state doesn’t mean it will be anywhere else in the world. There are a variety of reasons for that – three-tier, the whims of shop owners, how much of each wine is made each year, and the politics and foolishness that are inherent in wine. But regardless of the reason, it’s about the only absolute in wine availability.

My job as a wine writer is to find and write about wines that are – all together now – generally available. Otherwise, what’s the point? Many of my colleagues write about wine that almost no one can buy. This might make them feel special, but they’re doing a disservice to their readers.

And – all together now – generally available means that a decent independent wine shop in a medium-sized city should be able to find the wine. I won’t write about a wine unless I get the sense that’s the case.

Because, as much as I would like to, I can’t guarantee the wine will be in a shop in City A. No one can. Given the flaws in the system, be glad if you can drive to City B to buy it.

More about wine availability:
• The dilemma of wine availability, why you’re so angry about it, and why it just won’t go away
• Ask the WC 14: The wine availability edition
• Eric Asimov and wine availability

Walmart: An example for the wine business

Walmart store front
Walmart’s formula: Increased volume, lower prices, more profit

Retailer holds the line on prices, focuses on less expensive items, and makes more money

What does one of the world’s most successful companies do when faced with inflation, declining sales, and all the rest that is going on today?

Find a way to make more money, of course – without raising prices.

Are you paying attention, wine business?

The company is Walmart, and for all of its many failings as a corporate citizen, it knows how to boost the bottom line – over and over and over. The rest of U.S. retailing may be running around in a panic, but not Walmart. To quote one news report: “Walmart topped analysts’ expectations for earnings and revenue in the fiscal second quarter, even as consumers pulled back in discretionary categories like apparel.”

The company did it by holding the line on prices – even cutting some and taking smaller margins — and focusing on less expensive items. Its reward was not only more profit, but a 5 percent jump in its stock price.

In other words, it did exactly the opposite of what the wine business is doing.

Now, before some of you start saying this isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison, that’s true. But there are enough similarities to make the comparison worthwhile:

• Walmart has noticed many customers, even high-end ones, “trading down” — buying less expensive products as inflation bites. This, of course, is anathema to the wine business, which insists we buy more and more expensive products because it wants us to.

• Demand at Walmart has remained steady, if not a little higher. It is seeing an increase in wealthier customers looking for bargains. The wine business, as we know all too well, hasn’t seen an increase in demand in years.

• Wine is a discretionary product; we don’t need to buy it. Walmart found a way to make more money despite a decline in the sales of discretionary products. What does that say about wine’s near-term health?

I don’t write these things to be spiteful or vindictive, and I wish I didn’t have to to write them at all. But someone needs to remind the wine business that it’s not 1995 anymore – and hasn’t been for a long time.

Follow-up: Gallup alcohol survey 2022

Mad magazine's A;fred E. Neuman
Alfred E. Neuman, the poster boy for the post-modern wine business

Another study that cries gloom and doom? Who cares?

Last year, when the Gallup survey about U.S. alcohol consumption showed that no one who wasn’t an older, college educated woman much cared about wine, the wine business was in an uproar. I even sold two freelance pieces about the reaction to the survey.

But what happened this year, when the survey showed mostly the same thing — as well the even more worrisome continuation of the drinking less trend?

The reaction was the opposite: What, me worry?

In other words, the wine business has made peace with declining sales, less alcohol use, and its generation gap. It is banking on premiumization, even though there are signs that that premiumization is wearing itself out, and what the blog’s official wine marketer calls “consolidation to grab market share;” that is, when sales decline, just buy another company to paper over the problem.

Obviously, this is not a long-term solution. But as wine has demonstrated over the past decade, long-term solutions are for suckers. The mantra these days is short-term profits, and the rest will work itself out.

Hardly a sound business plan, but what do you expect from a business that still acts like it’s 1995?

The other intriguing bit about the survey? There didn’t seem to be any difference in alcohol preferences based on politics. That’s a change from previous studies, including one I noted when I wrote the alcohol piece for the late American Demographics magazine. That showed a relationship between wine and more conservative voters; that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

No, Vogue, boxed wine hasn’t finally become cool

Once again, the WC must help the Mainstream Media figure out this wine thing

Vogue magazine cover
Somehow, I can’t see this woman opening a Bota Box rose.

Dear Vogue:

Let’s get this out of the way first – the Wine Curmudgeon is not a Vogue kind of person. I’m not rich enough, I’m not young or pretty enough, and I don’t dress well enough (hats notwithstanding). Still, I do know about wine, so I thought I would point out that you could have done a better job with your recent boxed wine piece.

Because, no, boxed wine is not becoming cool.

I don’t write this to be snarky or cranky, but to fulfill my role as an advocate for quality journalism, and especially about wine. And the reporting in this story could be much, much better.

You write: Boxed wine “has a bad reputation. Perhaps that’s due to its prevalence on college campuses, or a lack of prevalence beyond: American adults, so many of us are conditioned to think, drink wine from bottles, not boxes.”

That’s not true. The box demographic is Baby Boomer – and the more expensive the box, the older the consumer is. The difference is that we leave the bag in the box when we drink it.

How bougie is that of us?

Second, the story has almost no statistics. Yes, I’m quite happy to see an upscale sommelier at a hip Manhattan bar and retailer say we shouldn’t be so snotty about boxed wine, but it would be nice if the story pointed out that boxed wine sales have been steadily increasing for years – and why they haven’t become more popular (because much of the wine is wretched, actually).

Third, one discussion of a box wine – and one that is almost impossible to buy – and two more wines thrown in at the end do not a story make.

And trust me, no one wants to read about the glass bottle’s heinous carbon footprint more than I do. But you sort of stuck it in because an editor said to, and not because you thought it was important.

So constructive criticism. Because the day we can wave goodbye to the glass bottle and cork – as your sommelier notes – can’t come too soon.

Your pal in better journalism,
The Wine Curmudgeon

 

Annie Green Springs and why nothing is ever new in the wine business

This 1970s brand foreshadowed wine coolers and hard seltzers – complete with crummy advertising

One of the things about the wine business that makes me crazy is that there is nothing new – just the same stuff repackaged in a prettier label.

Case in point: This 1974 radio ad for a brand called Annie Green Springs, which was apparently a cross between Boone’s Farm and Thunderbird — aimed at both college students and urban audiences, neither of whom wanted to drink “real” wine. So fizzy, slightly sweet, and marketing-style fruity. How do Apricot Splash, Berry Frost, and Plum Hollow sound?

In other words, hard seltzer.

The ad, save for a few pictures that offer a sort of nostalgic pleasure for anyone who remembers those times (“Groovy!”), is terrible – corny and very dated, and the jingle is so awkward that Churro, the blog’s associate editor, could probably have written a better one.

Annie Green Springs, despite an attempt to revive the brand a couple of years ago, apparently no longer exists. Small favors, anyway.

Video: What’s the Story via YouTube

More about wine advertising:
• TV wine ads: Black Box targets younger consumers – but still doesn’t get it right
• The history of wine advertising and reaching younger consumers
• Radio wine ad: Stiller & Meara for Blue Nun

How did a once enjoyable cheap Spanish red turn into a wine Popsicle?

Plastic toy bulls
“Don’t blame us. We’re just a marketing gimmick, too.”

Blame it on wine filtered through focus groups, because wine drinkers are idiots and we need to be told what to like

One of the Wine Curmudgeon’s regular rants is about focus group wine; that is, wine tested with consumers to make sure it is as inoffensive as possible. Because, of course, wine drinkers are idiots and we need to be told what to like.

The latest example of this kind of wine? Sangre de Toro, from Spain’s Miguel Torres.

Once, this was a terrific $7 supermarket red wine, and it even came with a little plastic bull attached to the neck of the bottle. It tasted Spanish – some cherry fruit, a little rough but not unpleasantly so, and just the thing for a weeknight dinner. It was, in those long ago days before premiumization and consolidation, quite common – simple but drinkable, the kind of wine that offered beginning wine drinkers a chance to see what Spanish red wine was like.

I drank hundreds of bottles over the years, and even had a pile of the bulls stuffed in a drawer somewhere.

And then the wise guys got hold of the wine. I bought a bottle the other day and was stunned. It tasted like a wine Popsicle – sweet, high in alcohol, smoooooth, and bereft of any Spanish character or varietal quality. It could have come from anywhere wine is made, and I have no doubt that the producer intended just that. I was actually angry — not so much because it was wretched, which it was, but because I had been naive enough to think that it would still taste like Spanish wine after all these years.

Why would anyone do this? Because, of course, wine drinkers are idiots and we need to be told what to like.

But there are several other reasons, none of which bode well for the future of wine:

• Copying success. The popularity of sweet red blends like Apothic and Menage a Trois means everyone figures they need to knock off those styles to sell wine. Which may work in the short term, but rarely does for any longer than that. When’s the last time anyone bought a bottle of Blue Nun?

• The almost god-like power of wholesalers in the three-tier system (and which, thanks to consolidation, is becoming even more god-like). The wholesaler tells the producer: “We need an Apothic knockoff to sell to supermarkets,” and even big producers like Torres have to do what they’re told.

• Wine’s continuing evolution into something no different from ketchup or laundry detergent — just another item on a grocery shelf. This is not about making money; everyone is entitled to do that. Rather, it’s the idea that wine is made to be something other than what it should be. If that’s the case, no wonder people buy hard kombucha. At least that tastes like what it is.

All those bulls stuffed in a drawer disappeared years ago, and I was always upset that I had lost them. Until now – good riddance. Who needs to be reminded of plonk like this?