This is one more South African label that points to the country’s wine resurgence
Essay is a South African wine brand (S.A. — get it?) from the same company that makes the top flight MAN Family wines. So buying this sight unseen was not a stretch.
That’s because the Essay red blend 2020 ($12, purchased, 13.5%) is all a great cheap wine should be – not stupid, much more than simple, varietally correct, and speaking to where the wine is from.
In this case, that means a red blend (a little more than half syrah, plus more or less equal amounts cinsault, grenache, and mouvedre) that is funky, dark, and rustic – and surprisingly satisfying. In other words, a very South African take on a classic French Rhone red.
The fruit is almost plummy, and there might be a bit of spice tucked in there somewhere. The tannins are soft, but they are there (as they should be). Perhaps most impressive: the acidity is in balance, which is not easy to do with this style of wine and especially at this price.
Highly recommended, and a candidate for the 2023 Hall of Fame. It’s light enough for summer drinking and is spot on for almost any red meat on the grill. The white, a chenin blanc blend, is also well worth drinking,
One note: The wine apparently has a variety of names, including Essay Shiraz and Essay Syrah.
New study shows we’re not happy with supermarket private label wine
This is the first of two parts looking at trends for wine sold in supermarkets and convenience stores, since not all wine is sold at Costco, Total Wine, and your local retailer. Today, part I: Supermarket private label wine. Friday, part II: Convenience store wine sales.
A friend emailed me recently, with a link to all the wonderful cheap wines Aldi sells in some of its European stores. “Have you seen any of these wines in your local Aldi?,” he wrote, and most unhappily.
Nope, I told him, and we commiserated about the poor choices for supermarket private label wine in the U.S. (Winking Owl!).
But, it turns out, we’re not alone in our disappointment with supermarket private labels — the wines that can only be bought at specific retailers, like Kirkland at Costco and Two-buck Chuck at Trader Joe’s.
A recent study looking at private label supermarket products found that shoppers were mostly satisfied with the quality and prices of store-brand toilet paper, ketchup, and the like. One of the few things that didn’t do well?
Private label wine and alcohol.
In the Food Marketing Institute report, almost half of frequent private brand shoppers preferred to buy national brand alcohol; in fact, they were more likely to buy store pet food and vitamins than they were store brand wine. And why was that? Because, as one shopper said, “Stock up on alcoholic beverages.” In other words, a couple of cases of Winking Owl (or its equivalent) stacked at the end of the aisle is not enough.
This was not supposed to happen. A couple of years before the pandemic, the Private Label Manufacturer’s Association launched a campaign to improve the quality and pricing of those wines (in which I played a tiny, tiny part). But the pandemic and the death of the PLMA president Brian Sharoff put an end to that.
“You can watch the cards all you want. But I’m still going to get your money.”
Premiumization’s battle cry is nothing more than another wine flim flam
The headlines show up every time the depressing numbers are released. Wine consumption in the U.S. continues to decline (and around the world, for that matter), but that’s OK:
“BECAUSE WE’RE DRINKING BETTER!”
How do we know we’re drinking better? Because we’re buying more expensive wine – and, as we hear every day from the Winestream Media, expensive wine is always better. Regardless.
Call this wine’s newest flim flam, so that it can pretend that everything is OK even though it’ not. As Paul Tincknell, the blog’s official wine marketer, explains: “The industry can welcome a massive contraction as consumption decreases due to the ‘drink better, not more often’ ethos.”
Which is bad enough. What’s worse is the idea that expensive is better just because it’s expensive.
Frankly, I thought I had taken care this in the blog’s early days, and especially when The Other Wine Guy and I did our wine talks at the State Fair of Texas a decade ago. If a drunken crowd of beer drinkers (mostly from Oklahoma on certain weekends in October) can understand that expensive doesn’t equal better, then why is it so difficult for the wine business? I would ask the audience if a $100 wine was always 10 times better than a $10 wine, and their answer was always a resounding no.
Maybe, once, wine prices were an accurate guide to quality. And some still are – this wine is infinitely better than this wine. But those are the exceptions. Post-modern wine marketing and winemaking have turned that inside out. A quality $10 or $15 wine, like the ones I’ve been writing about for almost 30 years, is not going to be that much different from a $25 supermarket wine. The latter may have a fancier label, cuter name, and heavier bottle, but what’s inside is going to be about the same.
I see this all the time with too many of the samples that I get. Most recently, it happened with a $45 Italian white that had one of the most marketing-driven names and labels I’ve ever seen, as well as wax on top of the closure and a 27-ounce bottle. In all of this, it screamed quality.
Which was a good thing, since the wine – though well made – was dull and not especially interesting. It tasted like an Italian version of white Burgundy, chardonnay from France. This begs two questions: Why would an Italian want to knock off a French wine, and why would I pay $45 for an Italian version when I can get the real thing for the same price?
But, if you believe the flim flam, when we buy that wine, we’re drinking better.
The kicker to this story? The next wine I tasted was a $9 Italian red I bought at Jimmy’s, the blog’s official Italian wine retailer. It was about as ordinary as Italian reds get – tart, a little rustic, maybe not quite ripe enough, and not necessarily something I would buy again. But it was an honest wine that paired with what I was eating, and I enjoyed it much more than the $45 white.
So I guess I’m not drinking better. I’m just having more fun.
California Claret? Why not, when you have a wine production monopoly?
The 19th century wine cartel controlled more than 80 percent of the state’s wine business
Those of us who worry about the future of the wine business wring our hands and cast our eyes upwards every February, when the new top 50 wineries list is released. Each year, it seems that wine gets more and more top heavy, with just a handful of companies controlling 90 percent of U.S. production.
But imagine how much hand wringing we would have done at the end of the 19th century, when a cartel called the California Wine Association controlled 84 percent of the California wine business.
I touched briefly on the CWA in the cheap wine book, noting the wine boom in California that saw production increase five-fold in the 30 years or so before Prohibition. The boom, though, came at a heavy cost to everyone but the cartel, which controlled prices up and down the wine supply chain. It low-balled growers, who had no market for their grapes if they didn’t sell to the CWA, and it gouged retailers across the country, who didn’t have any wine to sell if they didn’t pay the CWA’s prices.
Best yet, as the noted wine writer Paul Lukacs wrote, the CWA didn’t particularly care about wine. It just cared about profit. Its organizer, wrote Lukacs, was an Englishman named Percy Morgan, who “did not much care who drank the wines, or what kind of wines they drank. His goal above all else was profit, and he clearly realized it.”
Frankly, the parallels to today’s 21st century wine business are more than a bit spooky:
• The seven wine companies that formed the CWA knew what they were doing was probably illegal; the Sherman Anti-Trust Law has just been passed. But they did it anyway. According to one historian, the wine business was in such a mess after the economic turmoil caused by the Panic of 1893 that it seemed the only way to save it.
• The cartel apparently stabilized California’s wine business and led to the previously mentioned wine boom, But it wasn’t much of a boom. In 1910, the average American drank 10 times more beer than wine, and most of the wine they did drink was imported from Europe.
• Prohibition, not surprisingly, destroyed the CWA. In 1920, there were 2,500 commercial wineries in the U.S.; less than 100 made it through Prohibition. The CWA understood what Prohibition would do, and made some attempt to market non-alcoholic wine – but with little success. Cue the Twilight Zone music.
There’s more to being green than growing grapes, but the wine business still hasn’t figured that out
Sustainable wine – that is, wine made to be eco-friendly – has been dominating wine business discussions lately. And why not? Climate change is already kicking wine in the head, and it’s only going to get worse, say the experts.
Hence this very impressive green conference last month, which genuinely seemed to try to make a difference. And many producers, whether in New Zealand or California, like Tablas Creek and Spotswoode, have made impressive strides.
But those seem to be the exceptions. Wine too often misses the point about sustainability, and that doesn’t even take into account that no one quite knows how to define the term. Rather, that’s because wine sustainability is mostly concerned with farming and not the rest of what makes wine wine – packaging, quality, and price. (And no, this isn’t going to be another rant about glass bottles, so you can take your fingers off the cancel button.)
Note four recent sustainability moments that, for better or worse, show how far wine still has to go:
• Benjamin Neyman, the production and procurement manager for California producer Shannon Family, offered impressive insights during a recent Zoom sustainability seminar. He said the winery can do everything possible to make grape growing more green, and it has. But “how do we overcome getting glass from China or diesel trucks that get 4 mpg delivering our wine?” And, added Neyman, there is still a sense among consumers that glass bottles are the only packaging that matters.
• Pricing came up frequently during the sustainability seminar, with the idea that $20 was the cost of an entry level wine. In this, I kept getting the sense that the wine business wants to use sustainability to raise prices and accelerate premiumization. Which, of course, won’t do much for the planet.
• A couple of samples arrived recently from California wineries that pride themselves on their green credentials; one of them is famous for it. So how were the samples packed? One used foam peanuts and the other used polystyrene foam. And the famous winery’s bottle weighed 18 ounces, almost four times the weight of a plastic bottle. That’s hardly acting green, is it?
• Finally, quality, which various winemakers have told me continues to lag for green packaging like cans. I can attest to this: One recent can sample, a rose, smelled like rotten eggs and sulfur; the red was bitter and thin. Neither tasted like the wines the company ships in bottles, which are pretty damned good. That won’t get consumers to switch packaging, will it?
“How can I work the the marketer’s notes about affordable and smooth into this review for a $25 too tannic red wine?”
In the world of post-modern wine marketing, we’re all partners and we’re all part of the team – even if we’re not supposed to be
Some wine marketers, after sending a wine sample, will follow up with an email asking if I liked it. Or, as one email recently asked, “Would love to know your thoughts about the wine. …”
Yeah, right.
In fact, they didn’t actually want to know what I thought about the wine. They already knew, because it was decided in a meeting at the start of the marketing campaign. In the world of post-modern wine marketing, there’s no such thing as objectivity. Everyone, whether marketer, influencer, or cranky ex-newspaperman who reviews wine, is part of the team partnering with the client.
Yeah, right.
That this is a contradiction in terms doesn’t seem to bother anyone; in fact, it doesn’t even seem to occur to anyone. Which is bad enough. But why would the marketers assume that I’ll play along? Aren’t wine writers supposed to be objective? Oh, wait a minute. We’re not, are we?
In this case, I did share my thoughts about the wine – politely, but also honestly, explaining that it wasn’t anywhere near what the producer claimed it was. No doubt I’ll get a note thanking me for my objectivity.
Yeah, right.
Having said that, many of the PR people I deal with are top-notch. They know what I’m looking for, and will be honest with me about the wine they’re flogging. Some even know not to offer me something, because it’s too expensive or too focused group or too whatever. Needless to say, I cherish those marketers, which is the reason no names are being mentioned. The last thing I want to do is get them in trouble with the client for being really good at their job.
And I turn down a lot of samples, too, probably more than anyone in the wine writing business. What am I going to do with a $30 Italian sauvignon blanc, other than to sigh and write something about the sad future of the wine business?
I wonder: Did that possibility come up in the meeting? I doubt it.
If you thought the first two cheap wine is irrelevant posts showed how screwed up wine is, wait until you read this one
Just in time for the blog’s 15th annual rose extravaganza next week – 12 “must have” roses for this summer, from a group of leading “restaurant professionals.” And not one of them costs less than $46 on a restaurant wine list, and two cost $100 or more.
Obviously, retail pricing wouldn’t be nearly as ridiculous; those that list for about $50 would cost about $35 at your local wine shop. But it’s not like $35 isn’t ridiculous, either. How many of us are going to pay $35 for a bottle of rose?
In this, one more piece of evidence – after this and this — that the wine business doesn’t much care about those of us who aren’t the one percent. Consider: I can get a bottle of actual Champagne from a good producer at one of Dallas’ leading high-end restaurants for $90. I love rose, but if I’m going to spend that much money, I’ll buy the bubbly. Who wouldn’t?
So what’s going on here? Two things, I think:
First, restaurants are restaurants, and if the pandemic didn’t change restaurant wine pricing, nothing will. I’m supposed to talk to someone who did a study about the pandemic’s effect on restaurant wine this week, and I’ll be sure to ask about these prices. They seem counter-intuitive if you’re trying to lure diners back.
Second, snobbery. It pains me to write this, after all the years I’ve spent trying to de-snobify wine. But that seems to be where we are in the second decade of the 21st century. It’s hip and cool or whatever to put a $100 rose on a wine list, and those of who don’t understand that it’s hip and cool or whatever don’t matter.
