Winebits 732: Minimum pricing, wine marketing, Champagne pyramid

This week’s wine news: Ireland sets minimum prices for alcohol, plus a look at the failings of wine marketing and a world-record Champagne pyramid

• No more cheap wine? Ireland has set minimum prices for alcohol, including wine, in a bid to cut binge drinking and drunken driving. The concept, reports the New York Times, revolves around the amount of alcohol in the drink, as well as its size. So, of course, quite complicated. The upshot? A bottle of wine with 12.5 percent alcohol can’t sold for less than €7.40 (about US$8.35). And the Irish do drink – those 15 and older downed the equivalent of 113 bottles of wine in 2019, compared to about 12 bottles for the typical U.S. consumer. Some U.S. states have minimum pricing, including Connecticut and Michigan, but this is far more extensive than those systems. Will minimum pricing cut consumption? An official for an Irish anti-drunk group says no, since prices for most premium brands won’t change much.The key, she says, is education. I wonder: where have we heard that before?

• Consumers aren’t stupid: Randy Caparso, a long-time wine journalist and photographer, doesn’t mince words when talking about wine marketing: “. .. If consumers are stupid, it’s only because, 1, we assume that about them, and 2, we treat them that way by giving them crap.” It’s an interesting and intriguing essay, and I’d say that even if I haven’t written many of these things many times before. Says Caparaso: “The wine industry—not just wine producers, but also distributors, retailers, restaurants, media, and anyone else who has anything to do with pushing wine on consumers—has a history of selling crap to consumers. All for the sake of the almighty dollar.” And then we wonder why wine has fallen so far out of grace, yes?

• Way too much Champagne: This is not significant in almost any way, but given the trials and tribulations of the wine business (see first two items), it’s worth reporting: A hotel in Dubai showed off its world-record Champagne pyramid, more than 27 feet high and composed of 54,740 glasses of bubbly. Which, of course, is impressive, but perhaps even more impressive is that the glasses contained Moet & Chandon, which isn’t cheap. A typical bottle costs about $50, and the pyramid used almost 11,000 bottles – so how about one-half million dollars in wine?

Photo: Clarita via Morguefile