Monthly Archive for September, 2007

Alert reader and club member Jim C. from S.F. sent me today’s NYT wine article entitled "Happiness for $10 or less".  Today, the creative and talented wine writer Eric Asimov and his tasting panel recommended several wines from the hyper-competitive <$10 category.  I’m confident the panel selected the better wines.  Whether "Happiness" was attained, I have my doubts.

I usually find wines under $10 to be drinkable but unremarkable.  I rarely remember such a wine, unlesss it was particularly unpleasant, so I don’t dedicate much time or space to them.  But the article prompted me to address a question I frequently hear, and which may have been Jim’s unspoken question in the first place – "Why is your wine so expensive?"

A short and thoughtful answer is elusive.  When someone tells me a wine is expensive, I know their conclusion was determined by their attitude toward spending money as well as their sense of taste – you may like a wine I hate, and vice versa.  What one perceives as a pleasurable wine is subjective, even among trained palates (and even trained palates are schooled to appreciate wines that are of an era’s current style – as Napolean Bonaparte once said "the human palate can, given enough time, become accustomerd to anything").

And since it’s impossible to know if a flavor tastes the same to you as it does to me, such conversations get sticky very quickly!  Does "Red" look the same to you as it does to me?  Does a rose smell as sweet, an onion as pungent?

Aside from the subjective pleasure a wine delivers, its price also reflects intangibles such as prestige and branding.  An expensive wine might not tickle its buyer’s pleasure center, but it can gratify his/her ego or meet the needs for a particularly memorable gift or event.  These are legitimate factors in pricing a wine, but they often provide little indication as to how much the wine will be enjoyed. 

So when I’m asked "which is the better wine?" I usually answer obliquely with "Which is the better school of art, the Impressionists or the Dutch Masters?  While this might be a topic of passionate debate among art majors, it quickly clarifies my point among most customers.

Let’s look at what determines a wine’s price, focusing on two groups of factors – those affecting a wine’s quality and its price, and those affecting only its price.

Cost Factors Affecting Quality and Price

1. Grape Source.  Just as with show dogs and race horses, the "trainer" impacts the outcome.  Expect to pay more iif the label carries the name of a prestigious appelation, even more for the name of a prime vineyard known for premium viticultural practices.
2. Yield.  Such information is rarely seen on a back label, but the lower the yield, the better the quality and the more you have to charge for your wine.  Look for yields below two or three tons per acre, depending on the grape, instead of several times that for lower-quality wines.
3. Production Practices.  (AKA, Winemaker Talent, Integrity and Resources)  I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about shoddy or dishonest winemaking practices.  Sadly, there is no way to uncover such shenanigans using price or label information – one must see the winemaker and production staff at work.  But one usually can learn about legitimate though perhaps undesireable practices such as micro-oxygenation (man, I’m going to get in trouble for that one!), the addition of concentrated coloring agents, excessive sulphites (or insufficient), adequate cleanliness, and…
4. Oak Treatment.  This deserves its own listing.  The use of oak chips, staves or even concentrated oak flavoring is now common in low-end wines.  These add the oak flavors American wine fans love, but not the softness that gentle aging in an oak barrel provides.  Of course, French barrels cost $1,200 each, delay the wine’s time to market, and require significant storage space and time-consuming, manual processes.  This all adds up to an increase of several dollars at the retail level.
5. Closure.  The use of inexpensive corks may be fine for a wine intended for near-term drinking, but can ruin a wine that one lays down for a few years.  And inexpensive corks have a higher incidence of TCA – that pesky little bugger that makes any wine taste of wet, moldy corrugated cardboard.

Cost Factors Affecting Price Only

1. The bottle.  There is a trend today towards big, heavy bottles with large punts.  They are nearly as heavy when empty as a regular-szed bottle is when full.  Frankly, the wine is equally well preserved in inexpensive glass (it is also well preserved in Tetra Paks and collapsable mylar bags, but that’s a topic for a different day).  There are many downsides to these slightly larger bottles – they don’t fit in some cellar racks, they come six to a case instead of twelve, and they require more fuel for transportation (and thus, create more CO2).  Are they worth it?  Only the buyer can decide.
2. The Label.  Other than delivering information about the wine, the label is another way to convey a brand image through the ingenuity of its design and quality of its manufacture.  And let’s face it, who among us has NEVER chosen a wine based on its label?  Top label designers are to the wine world what Chanel was to fashion design.
3. The Capsule.  This is the foil or plastic that covers the top of every bottle closed with a cork.  These range from inexpensive materials with generic designs, to expensive foils with custom designs.
4. Advertising & Promotion.  Other than attending public wine tastings, fingers-crossed submissions to competitions and wine writers, and basic sales materials for their distributors, small producers rarely have the funds for serious marketing.  Wines with sufficient scratch to advertise in newspapers, industry rags, radio, television, bottle neckers, shelf talkers, end caps etc… well, you know what that does to costs.
5. The Hospitality Center. While a good hospitality center should earn its own keep, they are expensive to build and seldom found at wineries with low prices (the one exceptoin being at facilities that sell driect to consumer).  Ever heard of the Two-Buck Chuck tasting room?  Ain’t no such thing.  Never will be.

So what is the right price for wine?  It’s impossible to say, and I can bet the price set by the winery was (at least initially) something of a craps shoot. 

As a buyer, it helps to know as much as possible about what’s in the bottle before you shell out your hard-earned cash.  That’s why my club shipments arrive with my subjective tasting notes as well as objective technical data on each wine.  I believe these are preferable to the shorthand of scores or ratings, and lead to a happier (and more loyal) customer in the long run.

Cheers!

Dave Chambers, Wine Merchant

Dave@SidewaysWineClub.com

Today’s Quote by Henry Brooks Adams:

"Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels."

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