Winebits 749: Wine marketing, supply chain woes, 500-year-old wine book

This week’s wine news: The blog’s official wine marketer sounds off on the failures of wine marketing, plus supply chain price gouging and the oldest wine book written in French

• Failure all around: Paul Tincknell has a more than a few words of wisdom for the wine business in its hunt for younger consumers – and they aren’t compliments. Tincknell, the blog’s official wine marketer, calls out producers, the Winestream Media, restaurants, wholesalers, and consolidation on his company’s blog. The result, he says, has given us too high prices – and even price gouging – and this “excessive pricing … raises the risk of purchase for many to unacceptably high” levels. So they drink beer instead. The piece is a bit long, but well worth reading for a thorough analysis of what’s wrong and how to fix it.

• Speaking of price gouging: The New York Times, dissecting the supply chain woes we’ve come to know all too well in wine, writes that shippers are gouging small companies for no other reason than they want to. “Carriers are exploiting the supply chain chaos to breach contracts and jack up rates,” says the story, also noting that a variety of experts predicted that this would happen when the federal government deregulated the shipping industry. Says one small businessman: “Contracts are not worth the paper they are written on these days. They just don’t honor them.”

• Oldest wine book: The University of California-Davis, world-famous for its viticulture and enology programs, has acquired the first wine book written in French. The school’s library bought the only known copy of “Le débat du vin et de leaue,” printed about 1515. The price was not disclosed. The book is a debate between water and wine, used to offer advice about how to live a virtuous life, a common topic during the Renaissance.