Tag Archives: Big Wine

Winebits 643: Wine archaeology, consolidation, periods and spaces

wine archaelogyThis week’s (mostly) wine news: Archaeologists recover centuries-old wine bottles, plus impending wine industry consolidation and whether a period at the end of a sentence gets two spaces or one

• Old wine bottles: Regular visitors here know how excited the Wine Curmudgeon gets about wine archaeology. So there’s this: Scottish researchers have uncovered a massive mid-18th century glass factory whose cone furnaces once towered over the port district of Leith and supplied wine and whisky bottles to all corners of the British Empire. The Wine Spectator reports that the factory, near Edinburgh, may have produced as many as 1 million bottles a week. The factory’s downfall? The American Revolution, which cost the factory most of its business with the newly-independent United States.

• More consolidation on the way? The Wine Economist tells us to expect consolidation among wineries and wholesalers sooner rather than later, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Writes Mike Veseth: “Although much is lost in generalization, there is a tendency for larger distributors to focus their value chain on bigger retailers and larger wine producers.  Scale matches scale matches scale. This pattern magnifies an on-going movement to a two-speed wine market with those in the middle range (both domestic and imports) squeezed in the process.” This is not good news for consumers in wine business, which is already top heavy: the five biggest wineries make more than three-quarters of the wine sold in the U.S., while the three biggest distributors control more than half of the market. Fewer and bigger companies will restrict our choices even more.

• Periods and spaces: This item, courtesy of Lifehacker, has nothing to do with wine. But it’s a welcome respite from wine and the coronavirus – a discussion dealing with a significant post-modern writerly conundrum: How many spaces follow a period at the end of a sentence? The answer, of course, is one. The confusion comes from typewriter days, when we used two spaces – period, space bar, space bar – to set the new sentence off from the old. But post-modern word processors don’t need our help to set the new off from the old. Still, the argument comes up every once in a while, and the Wine Curmudgeon is always happy to remind younger consumers how much silliness their elders get into.

Photo: “Wine” by CyberMacs is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

Winebits 641: The “Big Wine makes mega-deals” edition

international styleThis week’s wine news: Constellation Brands and E&J Gallo finalize their cheap wine blockbuster, plus Geyser Peak is sold again and Treasury wants to set Penfolds free

• Finally done? Constellation Brands’ $1.1 billion sale of its low-price wine labels to E. & J. Gallo is expected to close by the end of June, despite the coronavirus pandemic, reports the Press-Democrat website. The deal will send almost all of Constellation’s $10 wines to Gallo, including Black Box, Ravenswood, Clos du Bois, and Mark West, as well as vineyards and wineries in California and New York. The original April 2019 deal, worth $1.7 billion, had to be revised after U.S. regulators objected.

• Poor Geyser Peak: When I started writing the blog, Geyser Peak’s $10 sauvigngon blanc was one of the most dependable cheap wines on the market. But that was also several owners ago, and quality has never been the same. So it’s not necessarily bad news that the brand has been sold once again. The current owner, Australia’s Accolade Wines, will sell Geyser Peak, Atlas Peak, XYZin and Outlot to something called 2 Bears LLC. No word on who is behind 2 Bears.

• Whither Penfolds? Australia’s Treasury Wine Estates, one of the two or three largest producers in the world, has been feuding with stock analysts for the past year or so, defending what the analysts have been calling the company’s poor performance. So Treasury may spin off Penfolds, one of the world’s great wine brands and home to the legendary Penfolds Grange (which I’ve been lucky enough to taste and so can attest to its greatness). Whether this pleases anyone in the shadow boxing world of financial analysis is anyone’s guess, but it points to the pressures Treasury faces in a world where people drink less wine and Big Wine companies are being urged to shed brands.