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by Putnam Weekley How Much is This Wine Worth? I'm gathering a list of Kermit Lynch-imported
wines and these annual production figures suggested a contrast: There are two wine economies: brands and underground wines. You’d think brand wines take advantage of economies of scale, but large scale production is at odds with timeless values of good taste (low-yields and careful, intelligent selection, not mass-production formulas based on chemical analysis.) Brand wines depend on the advertising art of illusion, consumer ignorance and middling product style. Some brand wines are good, but finding a bargain among them is like finding a needle in a haystack. The other wine economy is underground. News and trade of a particular estate's wine follows a hidden, word-of-mouth network. It’s an elastic system, stretching and contracting just enough to accommodate supply without distorting prices. "Independent" national and international editorials on wine have trouble explaining this set of wine partly because they can not be distributed evenly across their audience communities. Where consumers are educated, self confident and enthusiastic, these underground wines sell perfectly well, even to the exclusion of brands. Where consumers’ brains are filled with pseudo-factual lifestyle magazine fluff, where consumers have been intimidated by ideologies of status, where symbols of status are intermixed with soulful and humane wine, brands will rule the day. Brands are symbols. Wine, on the other hand, is truth, liberty, power and life. Launching Brands By way of example, let me “pile on” one brand in particular (I am not the first one.) Chateau St. Jean’s red blend called Cinq Cepages (11,000+ cases annual production) received the hype equivalent of an atom bomb blast when Wine Spectator awarded the 1996 vintage Wine of the Year. That was in 1999. Brand managers quickly raised the price from $28 to $75. It was common to see it offered for more than $100 at one point. With one cover story it had launched from underground to brand status. But the new price was pure fiction; it wasn’t based on the cost to produce it but rather on the cost to sustain its credibility. Unfortunately for Chateau St. Jean/Beringer-Blass/Fosters Group stockholders, the transition of Cinq Cepages to brand status was attempted when there was a lot less play money to be spent on fictional wine. Sluggish sales of the 2000 vintage recently forced a Michigan wholesaler to drop the price to $32 (from $53.67.) Sure, this may help deplete stocks. Cinq Cepages continues to bask in the residual glow of one famous lifestyle magazine’s endorsement, but for serious wine drinkers the price is still too high. Fictional Wine, Industrial Agriculture Once the world of wine is completely branded (the plans were approved years ago) all that will remain will be price wars between mega wine concerns and their proprietary fictions. Will Yellow Tail be more or less expensive than Charles Shaw? You can already see this with the thousands of brand name Chardonnays crowded around the $10 price point and precious little just north or south of that. Price is designed into such wines. Price pressure ultimately hits quality grape farming. An essay by Michael Pollan on NYTimes.com changed the way I thought of wine economics. Michael Pollan wrote:
This affects traditional notions of quality too. As prices for fruit spiral down greater efficiencies are required in the vineyard. Fruit is cropped as cheaply as possible and then corrected in the lab -- er, "cellar" -- for balance. The only problem is the nose knows natural from phony. Meredith Booth in The Advertiser wrote:
And this is in Australia, not France. What is happening is a colossal market
differentiation. The vast majority of global grape growing is under
extreme price pressure (from over-production); this makes costly
low-yield, natural farming, to the extent that it was practiced,
essentially impossible. The growers who pursue traditional wine quality
on the other hand, and who have earned validation from the global
opinion duopoly, have enjoyed greater demand and higher prices.
The other night we drank two bottles of
2000 Cotes du Rhone Villages,
Domaine de l'Espigouette (800 cases produced!) It is one of the
most consistently behaved wines every year: harsh and difficult for the
first 2 or 3 years, stunning, hypnotizing and amazingly drinkable
thereafter. On this occasion it commanded our attention even after a
healthy young August Clape Cornas.
Does any major critic rate this wine? It is made by
Bernard Latour, friend of
Jean Paul Versino who is best known
for Bois de Boursan Chateauneuf du Pape
(a wine fairly celebrated by the critics.) Its price has gone from $10
in 1998 to $14 in 2005. Put yourself in my shoes. What do you do with a
wine like this? While it "competes" easily with Rhone wines that cost
triple, it is hard to take it seriously at "only" $14. It amazes me how
easy it is to nitpick a wine with such an ugly label and no point scores
to its name. For those who might once have indulged its curious slow
evolution in the bottle at $10, now $14 may seem too steep. After all,
there are tons of $7,
$6,
even $4 wine around now, a lot of which may even be favored by popular
consensus. Plus, those are made in quantities a thousand times this. Be patient. Trust the craftspeople. It’s only money.
Previously in Putnam's Monthly: Putnam Weekley's Home Page and Main Index © Putnam Weekley 2005 |
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