Tag Archives: wine rants

The ZIPZ failure and why it matters to wine drinkers

fetzer zipzNo, single-serve plastic glasses of wine did not “disrupt” wine

Remember ZIPZ? It was the next big thing in wine, an oversized plastic glass with one serving that was endorsed by the masters of the universe at Shark Tank about a decade ago.

Don’t remember it? Not to worry. Almost no one else does, either.

Mashed recounts ZIPZ’s sad, not unsurprising history, and it’s well worth reading for those of us who wonder – and lament – that wine has had such difficulty adapting to the 21st century. The ZIPZ glass, for all of its many failings, was a unique way to package wine – call it “disruptive,” if you must.

Yet it never had a chance, and that it didn’t speaks to how the wine business resists change, even when change is exactly what is needed.

Why not a chance?

• First, the wine was lousy. That it would be difficult to find quality wine to put in a plastic, single-serve glass apparently surprised ZIPZ’s creator, who probably had never seen anything quite like the bulk wine market.

• Second, the three-tier system. You just can’t make ZIPZ wine and sell it to Costco, which seemed to be the plan. Rather, it has to go through a wholesaler, and why would a wholesaler want to waste its time on something as funky as lousy single-serve wine in a plastic glass? And where the margins would be so tiny?

•Third, retailers. Most wine in the U.S. is sold in 750 ml bottles, which means store shelves are set up to stock 750 ml bottles. So where do you stack cases of single-serve plastic glasses? This nugget somehow escaped the moneyed geniuses at Shark Tank; call it a lesson in the supply chain they would eventually have to learn.

The irony of all this? That canned wine does all the things that ZIPZ was supposed to do, and does it more efficiently. And that canned wine, for all of its many failings, is the next big thing in wine. Wonder why none of the geniuses saw that?

It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant

cheap wine
“Cheap wine, baby! Let’s get hammered!”

To quote a leading wine website, “What the $10 bottle of wine will save you in dollars, it might cost you in anxiety”

The Wine Curmudgeon long ago accepted that many in the wine business think that what I do is a waste of time. Having said that, I still get irritated when the Winestream Media treats cheap wine as if it will poison anyone who drinks it,

The latest occurrence? This post from VinePair, a leading wine website (and especially for younger consumers), which takes cheap wine trashing to levels not even I thought possible.

As near as I can tell, cheap wine is only good for cooking, parties, and getting drunk. Now, maybe I’m missing something – the piece is poorly written, so perhaps the expert was misquoted or the writer was edited so heavily that the gist of the story vanished in a flurry of cutting and pasting. For instance, this bit makes no sense at all: “bottles that are lighter and more affordable tend to be more alcoholic and less flavorful.” I’m not sure what the lighter bottle business means, and the sentence ignores almost every quality $10 rose on the market, which are neither alcoholic nor less flavorful.

The advice is sort of OK, though why anyone would recommend Lebanese or Georgian wines – neither of which are readily available in most of the country – is beyond me. And it reinforces the myth that all wine companies with more than four employees are evil and can’t make quality cheap wine. Which ignores this wine and this wine.

So, once again, the WC offers his expertise to any writer – Winestream, mainstream, or lifestyle – who has to do a wine story and isn’t quite sure how to proceed. Because our job should be about helping consumers find something enjoyable to drink, and not trying to score style points with the wine business.

TV wine ads: Black Box targets younger consumers – but still doesn’t get it right

Adam Scott is funny, but why is he reinforcing the same old snotty wine stereotypes?

This new ad for Black Box, E&J Gallo’s best-selling boxed wine, does something that almost no wine ad does – targets consumers who aren’t old white guys.

For which it is to be commended. Unfortunately, that’s about the only thing different here. The rest of the ad is little more than the same tired, cliched stereotypes that have plagued wine advertising since Orson Welles. In this, the ad bears more resemblance to this sad, four-decade old effort than something created in the age of TikTok.

But that’s the wine business for you.

So, yes, Adam Scott is funny, and he is familiar to the younger consumers the wine business so desperately needs. But what he’s doing is more or less the same thing that John Gielgud did in the aforementioned Paul Masson ad – reinforcing wine’s snobbery.

This is boxed wine. Why do we need a paneled library? Why is Scott dressed like someone in a 1940s English movie? And why oh why oh why does an agency type use the word “savviest” in some marketing-speak statement describing the ad’s brilliance? Wine isn’t savvy – wine is fun, damn it.

Know what would have been funnier and more effective? Put Scott at a picnic bench (he starred in “Parks and Recreation” after all), corkscrew in hand, trying to open the box. Then, proceed from there.

Because, as the blog’s official wine marketer told me when we discussed the ad, “This doesn’t break any new ground, even falling back on the gold medal awards cliché. And that was done poorly — the snark of the ad implies the medals are a sham, too.”

And he isn’t alone in that. The Gielgud ad’s co-creator left a comment on the post saying, yes, it was a lousy ad, no matter how well-intentioned it seemed at the time. Would that the Scott ad agency had seen his comment.

Fortunately, they can see it now.

Video: Black Box Wines via YouTube

More about TV wine ads:
• TV wine ads: Bring on the Hallmark Channel wine! (Yes, that Hallmark Channel)?
• Wine business: Watch this beer spot to see how TV wine ads should be done
• What was James Mason doing making a Thunderbird TV commercial?

Wine history lesson 4: Those damned high prices

1970s Bordeaxu prices
Who knew that the 1970s wine prices that retailers complained about would seem almost too cheap today? Right click on the image for easier viewing.

Think the WC complains about high prices? Listen to retailers’ laments about skyrocketing prices 50 years ago

Consider this quote:

“There will at least be a leveling‐off in prices and perhaps a slight drop in the less expensive wines.”

Hard to believe, given what we know about how the wine business works these days. Prices don’t go down; the entire point of wine is for prices to go up. But this comes from a time when the law of supply and demand still applied.

The quote is from a November 1970 story discussing French wine prices for that vintage, which wouldn’t be released for a couple of years. It notes that prices for the past couple of vintages increased because of short supply, but now that supply was more in balance, “leading retailers in New York say there probably will be some adjustments. The cost of a premier cru Bordeaux should, at worst, be no higher than the ’69, while the lesser chateaux may fall further.”

And, if it’s possible to believe, those high prices are 10 to 20 times less than what they are today. Talk about The Twilight Zone.

How was that possible, 50 years ago?

• Much, much less demand for French wine in the U.S. — and, actually, wine in general. Most wine sold in this country until the 1980s was sweet and dessert wine; the market for table wine was limited to big cities like New York.

• In fact, a limited market for French wine outside of France and Great Britain. Wealthy Chinese and Russian consumers (then the Soviet Union), who have done so much to drive up wine prices, were hardly factors at all.

• No Robert Parker, and all that he did (as well as those who followed him) to send prices on their upward spiral. Parker’s first Wine Advocate, with its 100-point scale, appeared in 1978, but he didn’t make his mark until 1982, “the vintage famous for launching the career of the world’s most successful wine critic.” Parker, the first mass market wine critic (more or less), made Bordeaux – and all wines eventually – accessible to people who may not have known about them. Talk about increasing demand.

The other irony about all of this? One important retailer in the story  lamented the high price of Bordeaux, complaining that there had been dramatic increases since the mid-1960s.

Which has led us to where some retailers charge $20 for the red Chateau Bonnet; similar wines probably cost less than a $1 back then.

Photo: Sherry-Lehmann Wine & Spirits Co. May 1978: Old, Rare Bordeaux Letter

More wine history lessons:
• Wine history lesson 3: Bring on the French wine!
• Maynard Amerine on quality, price, and value
• Wine business history: The more things change, the more they stay the same

Artificial intelligence and wine recommendations

cooper's hawk
Drinky is embarrassed that his AI brethren think the WC likes buttery California chardonnays.

Wine marketers are betting millions that algorithms will help us find wine we like

Most computer-generated wine recommendations have traditionally been pretty much worthless. There’s this, which we’ve noted before on the blog. But there’s also this, from wine.com, which arrived last month: The email said I would like a $64 bottle of Veuve Clicquot (I think not), as well as a $20 Kim Crawford sauvignon blanc (I think not, again), as well as a $12 California pinot noir and a $12 sweet red blend (I really, really think not).

That’s because the formulas used to put these recommendations together depend on things that aren’t necessarily related to wine – like income, age, and gender — and use past purchase information probably more than they should. Just because I bought wine A doesn’t mean I’m going to like it enough to buy wine B. And AI-generated recommendations have been notoriously lousy at using price to determine what we’ll like.

In addition, most algorithms have not been able to effectively process the wine-related criteria that do matter, like style, alcohol levels, and so forth. And I’m not sure that marketers understand the challenge. One highly-touted AI effort in 2021 said the the goal was “to personalize wine recommendations based on individual preferences, for example: Is the subscriber a red wine or do they prefer white (or maybe a little of both)?” Which seems more of a 1990s approach than something in 2021.

Another, the BottleBird app, asks a series of questions to find out what we like, including “How do you feel about the smell of flowers?” How we answer, says its publicity, will make sure we “never buy a bad bottle of wine again.” So, of course, when I tried the app, I got a 97 percent match with two Fre non-alcoholic reds and two buttery California chardonnays. Hardly the WC’s kind of wines, are they?

The process is so difficult, in fact, that a friend of mine who has written extensively about the subject once told me the only way AI wine recommendations could be successful is if they included information from human tasting panels. Which hardly sounds very AI.

So why have wine marketers spent millions of dollars trying to find a way to teach machines to make wine recommendations? My hunch is that it’s not so much about helping us find wine we like as it is selling us wine. Which, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing – if they work. But when they recommend wines I wouldn’t buy even if they were free, what’s the point?

A few words about “healthy” wine

healthy wine
“So what kind of ‘healthy’ wine can I pair with this?”

No, wine is not healthy, and any attempt to make it so does a disservice to wine and to health

How do we know something bizarre is going on in wine? Because “healthy wine” is all the rage. Or, as a wine marketing friend told me recently: “I’m receiving an insane amount of press requests (and coverage) about low-calorie / keto / sugar per content wines from lifestyle media. And I am quite confused, to be honest.”

Never fear. The Wine Curmudgeon is here to make sense out of the nonsensical.

Diets and diet fads are like fashion – someone is always reinventing the hemline, and what was au courant 20 or 30 years ago is au courant again. Keto, for instance, bears more than a passing resemblance to the infamous Atkins diet, and Atkins may well have its roots in something especially nasty – the so-called diet plate of cottage cheese, canned fruit, and hamburger patty that was the rage from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.

And who can forget when pizza and beer were diet food?

So no, it’s not surprising that lifestyle writers – whose knowledge of trends is much more detailed than their knowledge of wine – are agog over “healthy wine.” After all, lifestyle writers gave us “Mommy wine,” as well as the neo-Prohibitionist terror that alcoholic mommies, zombie-like, are walking among us.

In this respect, “healthy” wine makes sense. Why not tell people that they can drink wine and still maintain a healthy lifestyle? It’s what they want to hear, for one thing, and it sort of, maybe, kind of, has a little medical validity. Everyone should consume fewer calories and less sugar, and the idea behind “healthy” wine is that it has fewer calories and less sugar – mostly because it has less alcohol.

That wine is not healthy – that it can be addictive and kill you — is just a minor inconvenience that the lifestyle writers will be sure to mention in a sentence or two about three-quarters of the way down the story.

A friend of mine, who writes about this subject with the same passion and crankiness that I bring to wine scores and ingredient labels, has said that the entire idea of “healthy” wine is not just a fraud, but a disservice to wine. If you want to drink wine and be healthy, then drink wine in moderation. Why buy special wine that almost certainly won’t taste as good (low- and no-alcohol wines are notoriously noxious) and will cost as much as traditional wine?

Because, as I learned as a young newspaperman, there’s only one way to lose weight and to be healthy: Eat less and exercise more. Everything else is just lifestyle writing.

Photo: Restaurant-ing through history

 

Wine foolishness, 2022 edition

wine stupidty
“Of course, lovage. What else could it be?”

In which the WC gathers up a lot of foolishness and tries to get a laugh out of it

A good newspaper reporter learns to “gather string;” that is, you collect bits and pieces from here and there, whether from news releases, information from interviews that didn’t fit one particular story, or clippings picked up because they seemed interesting and that you might be able to use later.

It’s a tremendous technique that has helped me do lots of good writing over the years. Unfortunately, almost the exact opposite is true when it comes to writing about wine.

That’s because wine – to put it bluntly – is filled with so much foolishness. Gathering string in wine doesn’t necessarily lead to good writing or good stories. Instead, it leads to long lists of silliness, like this one.

So try to find some humor in the following, which I gathered over the past several months (and no, there won’t be any links, since I don’t want to be sued):

• The $5,000 cycling tour of Italy’s Prosecco region. Led by a sommelier, of course, because otherwise it certainly wouldn’t be worth $5,000. One of the goals of the tour, and I swear I’m not making this up: To learn why “it is worth spending more for a quality sparkling wine.” In other words, I’m spending five grand to learn that $30 Prosecco is likely better than $12 Prosecco.

• The following review from one of the Wine Magazines: “Glimpses of golden ripe mirabelle plum and the slightest hint of lovage create a lovely nose and continue to feature on the creamy, finely foaming palate.” Lovage? Lovage? Lovage?

• Yet another study claiming the pandemic has turned us into hopeless alcoholics: “Understanding how alcohol purchase behavior is changed by events such as COVID is important because heavy alcohol use is known to be associated with numerous social problems, especially within the home,” The catch here? The disclaimer at the end of the release noting that the study has some limitations, including that data from “many states were not included.” Which, of course, raises the question of why they authors bothered, other than to take grant money to perpetuate a neo-Prohibitionist myth.

• And what would one of these lists be like without healthy wine? These wines, says the marketing drivel, “are both great tasting and health conscious. … supporting their desire for a healthy lifestyle.” And why health conscious? Because they have only 100 calories a serving. Or, about the same as light beer — and when did wine become a diet food? Is is any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

• Finally, a list of the most overrated wine styles, as compiled by a sommelier survey. It included rose, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, red blends, sauvignon blanc, and pinot grigio. So I’m wondering: What are we supposed to drink?