The Wine Curmudgeon

Winebits 269: Champagne, wine in grocery stores, Amazon

• More bad news for  bubbly: Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse for Champagne, it did. Sales fell 4.4 percent the 12 months through December, according to the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne trade group. And Champagne shipments to the U.S. were down 25 percent in the first six months of last year, continuing that trend. And to think – it wasn’t all that long ago that the Champagne business was considering expanding the size of the Champagne region so they would have more land to get grapes from.

• Never underestimate three-tier: Abut a year ago, a federal judge ruled that a Kentucky law that banned grocery store wine sales was unconstitutional. So what’s advancing through the Kentucky legislature? A more constitutional version of the ban, reports wkyufu,org. Said the bill’s sponsor: “So we would have liquor in convenience stores, dollar stores, wherever they could get a liquor license. And that's something that nobody wanted.” Nobody, of course, not being the state’s wine drinkers, who don’t have the campaign cash to pay legislators to write bills for them. but the state’s retailers who want to keep grocers out.

• Amazon adds two states: And they’re not New York and Pennsylvania, which speaks volumes about how difficult it is to sell wine directly to the consumer in the U.S. If you live in Colorado or South Carolina, you can now use the Amazon service, which includes 15 states and the District of Columbia. Amazon usually doesn’t break out many sales figures, but we should be coming up the first quarter of its wine retail operation. The numbers would be fascinating.

The 2012 Wine Market Council report: More of us are drinking cheap wine more often

Are more of us drinking wine more often? That’s one of the conclusions from the Wine Market Council’s annual report, which tracks U.S. wine consumption habits and trends.

The report, which has been published since 1994, says that core wine drinkers – those of us who drink wine at least once a week – make up 25 percent of the U.S. adult population and drink 93 percent of the wine. The good news? That the number of core wine drinkers has increased by two-thirds since the first study.

"Wine drinkers are gravitating towards higher consumption," says John Gillespie, the president of the market council. "And the driver seems to be they see more occasions as wine drinking occasions."

But, even then, we're watching prices. More than 9 of 10 core wine drinkers said it's possible to buy wine without spending a lot of money. (Insert plug for The Cheap Wine Book here). Says the report: "The most desirable characteristics in a wine bought at retail are value, high quality, previous trial, and a high level of comfort when serving it to friends." Note that this does not say anything about scores, reviews, or any of the things that drive the traditional wine business.

This fact, tempered with the demographic information that showed that Millennials (consumers ages 21-36) drink more wine than the Baby Boomers, should make everyone in the wine business break out in a cold sweat. Because, though Boomers make up 38 percent of wine drinkers, they consume only 32 percent of the wine. The numbers for Millennials are 29 and 38 -- and that doesn't include the 8 million of them who aren't old enough to drink yet.

There are still some numbers in the report that bother me, not the least of which is that per capita wine consumption in the U.S. has remained more or less the same for 40 years. But, says Gillespie, that's probably not as big a problem as I think it is. His focus is on the core numbers, which shows that Americans are taking wine more seriously than ever before. I'll settle for that.

Winebits 268: Wine prices, cult wines, grape names

• So much for the price hikes: The Wine Curmudgeon mentions this not to beat a dead horse, but because he was once again passed over as a person of knowledge, insight and authority in the wine business. Apparently, getting this pricing thing right is not nearly as important as knowing toasty and oaky. But the 2012 California grape harvest was the biggest ever, and prices will do what prices do in those situations. Furthermore, the continuing Euro crisis will lower the cost of European wine. Or, to quote someone who knows about this (and who is on the list), “All in all, it looks like the business is in balance but we'll see some early price reductions.”

• Greatest quote ever? The Artisan Family of Wines blog on cult wines: “To win a few snobs with money to burn, we’ve alienated a large part of our potential market, to our harm and their loss.” Hmmm. Sounds like something I should use in The Cheap Wine book (Q&A explaining how Kickstarter works; Kickstarter link; What the book is). The entire post is worth reading, and I would quote more, but then I would end up quoting the entire post.

• New grape names: Cornell University has announced the names of its newest grapes, a white called Aromella and a red named Arandell. They were the winners of a contest that attracted some 7,000 entries. The former got its name because it is an aromatic, muscat white, while the latter is a combination of "arandano," the Spanish word for blueberry, and the "ell" from Cornell.

Winebits 267: Pennsylvania sales, restaurant wine, hangovers

• One more time: Pennsylvania’s governor will propose legislation to privatize the state’s government-owned liquor business, the second time since 2011 it will have been tried. Pennsylvania, said Gov. Tom Corbett, could raise as much as $1 billion by privatizing the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. He said that Pennsylvania and Utah are the only two states in the U.S. to have “fully state-controlled liquor systems.” Chances for success? Probably not much better than the attempt two years ago.

• Consumers trade down: The restaurant business, which has always taken wine drinkers for granted, is finally facing the revolt many of us have been hoping for. The recession hurt restaurant wine badly, and the recovery hasn’t been much better, says a recent report. Diners ordered 13 percent fewer bottles in 2012, and bottle sales accounted for just one-eighth of wine orders and only 41 percent of wine revenue. In other words, consumers, tired of overpaying for crappy wine that is often oxidized or spoiled, stopped paying for it.

• Avoiding the morning after: There’s nothing in this post that’s especially new, but it’s good to have it all in one place: You can minimize a hangover by drinking water while you booze and by drinking less alcoholic wines. It also argues that high tannic red wines help keep hangovers at bay, since they make us drink more water. Though I have to admit it’s difficult to follow the main piece of advice: “With every glass of wine, drink a glass of water.“

Winebits 266: Winery start-ups, Mega Purple, beer-wine hybrids

• Money doesn’t matter: Only two percent of people starting wineries do so to make money, says a new study of winery startups conducted by a University of Missouri researcher. That’s an amazing figure, even for those of us laugh at the “How to make a million in the wine business” joke. The study found that 30 percent of started a winery, because they loved wine, 22 percent wanted to improve their quality of life, 19 percent wanted to farm, and 10 percent did so because of a sense of community. The other interesting number: The number of wineries in the U.S. has quadrupled in the past decade.

• Truth in labeling: Yet another reason why we need better ingredient labels on wine bottles – a wine additive called Mega Purple, which is grape juice concentrate used to darken the wine’s color without adding flavor or aroma. This post from Blog Your Wine is fascinating; Mega Purple, apparently, is common in $10 pinot noir, where it’s used to make the wine look more wine-like. My favorite bit? That Mega Purple is made from rubired and royalty grapes. Yes, that’s an excuse to use the Wine-Grape Glossary.

• Mix and match: If craft beer isn’t trendy enough for you, how about craft beer made with wine? Or, dare I say, bwine? Shanken News Daily reports that brewers see a chance to lure consumers to craft beer with the hybrids, which have been developed over the past couple of years. The best known may be Blue Moon Vintage Blonde, produced by a unit of beer multi-national MillerCoors and that includes juice from chardonnay grapes. These bwines, notes the story, are not only popular with craft beer drinkers, but with women wine drinkers.

Winebits 265: 2013 wine prices edition

Because everyone wants to know what wine prices are going to do this year:

• Limited price hikes: From no less an authority than Rob McMillan at Silicon Valley Bank in his annual state of the wine industry report: “Wine businesses expect to increase bottle prices in 2013, although SVB believes that will prove difficult.” The report doesn’t say so specifically, but the reasons for this could lie in two other findings – that mergers and acquisitions of vineyards and wineries will continue at a record pace, which means increased economies of scale to keep prices in check, and “massive” bulk imports, especially for the cheapest wine, as producers look globally to keep costs down.

• So what do we call it now? Trader Joe’s is raising the price of Two-buck Chuck in its California stores, the first increase since the brand was introduced 11 years ago -- It will go from $1.99 to $2.49. Before everyone panics, though, note that the wine costs $2.49 to $3.79 in the rest of the country, and that the rate of inflation since then would have pushed the cost of the wine to $2.54 – so you’re still saving a nickel.

• No more £5 wine? The average price of wine in a British shop has crossed that threshold, but not necessarily because of rising wine costs. Since 2002, reports thedrinksbusiness.com, 80 percent of the increase has come from higher taxes. The British government is trying desperately to crack down on binge drinking, and this appears to be one of the most effective methods. By compairson, the average cost of wine in the U.S. is around $6 -- less than £4.

Winebits 264: Grocery stores, wine strikes, sweet red wine

• Ontario testing supermarket wine: Two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, are famous for their state store liquor system. But even they’re feeling the pressure to deregulate alcohol sales; Ontario has announced a test program to sell liquor and wine in 10 grocery stores. The National Post newspaper reports Ontario wine drinkers will buy wine at state stores set up inside the grocery stores. This means they’ll have to pay for their wine separately from their food – not as dumb an idea as Pennsylvania’s wine vending machines, but not all that brilliant, either. How much fun will it be to wait in two check-out lines during rush hour?

• South African wine workers on strike: Thousands of of South African farm workers are on strike in the Western Cape wine region, says Reuters, part of a series of violent strikes in which two workers were killed and vineyards were damaged. The farm workers, many of them black seasonal hires employed to pick and pack fruit, suspended their strikes in December.

• Consumers clamoring for sweet: And especially sweet red, says Nielsen – up 62 percent in the year ending Dec. 8. Sweet red, in fact, has passed moscato, last year’s sales darling, in annual growth. Where this ends is anyone’s guess (and horrific fear, if I know the Winestream Media), though I’m sure sweet red is going to get a lot more popular before it peaks. I was at a consumer wine thing last week, and Cupcake Red Velvet was one of the most popular topics of conversation.