What wine magazines — still — don’t understand about wine
Food & Wine magazine is a well-done and professional book that has hundreds of thousands of readers. The Wine Curmudgeon likes Food & Wine. For one thing, it occasionally acknowledges regional wine, and its wine stuff is mostly written in English. Compared to the rest of the Wine Magazine universe, that ?s top of the class.
But what Food & Wine doesn ?t understand is the same thing that all of the rest of them don ?t understand. Cheap wine does not cost $20. Cheap wine costs $10 or $8 or even $5. The average price of a bottle of wine in the U.S. (all together now, regular readers) is $6.
But Food & Wine, apparently, has the same blind spot that the rest of the wine world has. The winner of the ?value ? pinot noir (Manhattan magazines hate to use the word cheap) in its American Wine Awards, which will be announced in the October magazine, cost $20. Yes, $20 ? or three times the average price of a bottle of wine.
Or, to quote the magazine: ?This entry-level bottling.
Entry-level bottling? For Donald Trump, maybe. Why this matters, and that it ?s not just another excuse for a Wine Curmudgeon rant — after the jump: