Tag Archives: wine trends

Follow-up: Two days judging European grocery store wine

grocery store wine

Yes, that’s E&J Gallo’s Apothic and Barefoot for sale in Amsterdam — and no bargains either, at €14.95 and €9.95 (about US$17 and US$12).

Cleaning out the notebook after tasting European grocery store wine

Two days judging European grocery store wine

A few more thoughts after judging the Private Label Manufacturer’s International Salute to Excellence wine competition at the beginning of April, where my panel tasted 112 wines made for and sold by grocery stores around the world. (Full disclosure: I’m consulting for the PLMA in its quest to convince U.S. retailers to step up their private label wine effort. Because, of course, Winking Owl.)

• One odd contradiction: The best cheap European wines in the states, including cava and cabernet sauvignon, weren’t that great in the competition. I was especially surprised at the poor quality of the cava, which usually costs $10 here and is almost always a value. But the other judges told me that there wasn’t a lot of well-made €5 and €6 sparkling in Europe.

• We tasted a lot of wine made from grapes we never see in the U.S. This makes sense – why try to sell something like a white wine from Lugana in Italy in a country devoted to chardonnay? But it’s also a shame. Lugana is made with the verdicchio grape, which may or may not be an Italian version of my beloved ugni blanc (there’s some DNA confusion). The best one we tasted was stunning – crisp, fresh, and sort of lemon-limey, and for about €5.

• There’s sweet, and then there’s sweet. The panel spent a fair amount of time talking about residual sugar, and how much of it makes a wine sweet. In the U.S. we consider a wine dry if it contains as much as .08 percent residual, and something like Apothic, at 1.2 percent or so, is considered sweet. In Europe, the others said, the Apothic is seen as very sweet, while dry ends around .05 percent..

• Europeans don’t get to taste much U.S. wine. This surprised me, since we drink so much European wine. But, as I was reminded, most U.S. wine is sold in the U.S., and save for some Big Wine brands like Barefoot, there is very little wine made in this country that makes it to Europe.

Finally, the competition was held at the Amsterdam Hilton, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their legendary 1969 bed-in for peace. Their suite is still there, and you can stay in it for €300 a night. The bed-in business impressed me no end, given I still own considerable Beatles vinyl. But not, however, the 30-something Czech judge sitting next to me. Yes, he said, he knew who John Lennon was, but can we get back to tasting wine?

Photo by Dave McIntyre

Two days judging European grocery store wine

grocery store wine

Imagine those wines costing €5 instead of $15.

The Wine Curmudgeon spends two days in grocery store wine heaven

Imagine a delicious, fresh, cherryish Italian red for about $6. Or a Hungarian riesling, taut and crisp, for about $7. Or a $3 pinot noir – a little tart, but still more than drinkable.

Welcome to the world of European grocery store wine, which puts the junk that passes for supermarket wine in the United States to shame. I spent two days last week in Amsterdam judging the Private Label Manufacturer’s International Salute to Excellence wine competition, where my group tasted 112 wines made for and sold by grocery stores around the world. (Full disclosure: I’m consulting for the PLMA in its quest to convince U.S. retailers to step up their private label wine effort. Because, of course, Winking Owl.)

I couldn’t have been happier. For the most part, the wines – and especially those sold in Europe – were cheap and well made. Many would have made the $10 Hall of Fame, including the Italian red. Which, frankly, was spectacular. It was made in Tuscany with a local version of the sangiovese grape called morellino and was bright and fresh and interesting – all for €5. That’s less than the cost of a bottle of Barefoot, and half the price of a bottle of Cupcake.

In this, almost all of the wines we judged were everything I wish cheap wine in the U.S. would be – mostly varietally correct, mostly tasting like the region it came from, and widely available. Or, as the other judges on my panel, all Europeans, said to me at one time or another, tongue firmly in cheek: “Jeff, we didn’t know you had it so bad in the states.”

Little do they know.

That was the good news. The bad is that there are still too many obstacles to getting that quality of wine in your local Kroger, Aldi, Ralph’s, Safeway, and Wegman’s. Not surprisingly, the U.S. liquor laws and the three-tier system are at the forefront.

One judge, who used to be the buyer for one of Europe’s biggest grocers, said the regulations and restrictions governing U.S. wine sales are indecipherable to most Europeans – even those who are paid to figure them out. It has taken years to understand the system, she said, and it has been a long, tedious process.

In addition, the U.S. lacks Europe’s sophisticated private label supply chain. In Italy, for example, the supermarket buyer can make a couple of phone calls to get the morellino. Here, by contrast, retailers usually have to work through bulk wine brokers, a much costlier and more complicated process.

Still, if what I tasted is any indication, there are dozens of reason for optimism.

More on grocery store wine:
• Aldi wine road trip
• Can grocery store private label wine save cheap wine from itself?
• Wine terms: Private label and store label

Wine business foolishness already underway as 2019 rose season draws near

2019 rose seasonExpect higher princes for 2019 rose season because that’s the way the system works

The 2019 rose season is barely underway, and the wine business foolishness is in full swing. How else to explain a $22 rose I saw in a top Dallas retailer the other day whose only claim to fame is that it’s named after one of the places the hipsters go to drink rose?

Or, as rose winemaker extraordinare Charles Bieler said during our podcast last month: Be wary – the wine business is going to do everything it can to screw up rose.

With that warning in mind, here are several things to keep in mind before the blog’s 12th annual rose extravaganza at the end of May:

• Expect to pay a little more this year, as much as $15 for quality pink. This isn’t as much premiumizaton as it is supply and demand, given rose’s increasing popularity. There is still plenty of top-notch rose for $8 and $10, but importers and distributors are going to try and take price increases where they can.

• Expect to see more very expensive rose – $50 and up – on the market. I talked to a Chicago sommelier for a magazine story about rose, and she said she can’t get enough of the pricey stuff. Apparently, high-end wine drinkers want trophy rose just like they want trophy red wine. Which defeats the purpose of rose, but that’s their problem.

• Expect to see the wine geeks lusting after Austrian rose. Yes, I know there is almost none of it and most of it don’t even know it exists (and especially if you don’t live on the east coast). But that’s why they’re wine geeks. California rose should also be trendy this season, as more mainstream wine drinkers decide to try rose but will only buy it if it comes from the same region they buy merlot and chardonnay.

April Fool’s 2019 wine post

A hallowed blog tradition: The April Fool’s wine post

One of the blog’s traditions ended last year when I didn’t write an April Fool’s post. As I noted in 2018, “in a wine world where critically acclaimed, $25 wine can contain fake oak, a boost in color from something like Mega Purple, and tree sap, who needs to celebrate April 1 just once a year? Every day can be April Fool’s Day.”

Or if that’s not enough, how about the Blendtique — AS SEEN ON SHARK TANK!!!!!! For $90, you get four 1/2-sized bottles of wine, a flask, and a pipette so you can blend the four wines to your heart’s content. Why this costs $90, when you can do the same thing with a couple of glasses and wine at the house, is beyond me. But I’m not rich or smart enough to be on Shark Tank, so what do I know?

Hence, while I’m in Amsterdam judging a grocery store wine competition this week — really — here are links to the six previous April Fool’s wine posts. They’re still funny and still relevant (even if some of the names have changed). And, most importantly, no mater how many people thought they were real, they aren’t. We have the Blendtique for that.

The blog’s April Fool’s wine posts:
• Wine Curmudgeon will sell blog to Wine Spectator
• Big Wine to become one company
• Wine Spectator: If you can’t buy it, we won’t review it
• Supreme Court: Regulate wine writing through three-tier system
• Gov. Perry to California: Bring your wineries to Texas
• California secedes from U.S. — becomes its own wine country

TV wine ad survey: 1970s Boone’s Farm Wild Mountain

How bad is this TV wine ad for Boone’s Farm? As bad as they come, unfortunately

The one thing that has been sadly consistent during the blog’s historical survey of TV wine ads is their incompetence. Past incompetent, actually, in which the infamous Orson Welles Paul Masson commercial is merely bad.

The latest example? This TV wine ad for Boone’s Farm Wild Mountain “grape wine” from the early 1970s. Those of a certain age will remember Boone’s Farm as the stuff one got drunk on as a teenager; those not of a certain age will be glad they don’t have to remember it.

The Boone’s Farm ad is so awful that it doesn’t require any more analysis. Watch and groan. And then wonder why TV ad quality hasn’t improved all that much between then and today. Right, Roo?

Video courtesy of KTtelClassics via You Tube

Three reasons to be optimistic about the future of the wine business

wine business futureMaybe there are reasons not to be so doomy and gloomy about the future of the wine business

Mike Dunne, one of the most perceptive people I know in the wine business, left a comment recently that not all is doom and gloom with wine. The Wine Curmudgeon has been especially doomy and gloomy about wine’s future, and with good reason. Just when it seems like the news can’t get any worse, it does.  How does Constellation, one of the smartest companies in the business, overvalue assets it’s selling by a billion dollars?

Still, Mike being Mike, his comment made me ponder. Does he see something that I don’t? In one respect, Mike is completely correct – the wine business isn’t going to vanish tomorrow. And who knows? Maybe young people, who currently seem as interested in wine as I do in the Kardashians, will eventually change their minds. I’m always willing to admit I’m wrong — and hope I am, in this case.

So, given those two conditions, maybe there are three reasons for optimism that I have overlooked:

• The re-emergence of lower alcohol wines. We won the battle against 15 percent chardonnay and 16 percent cabernet sauvigon at the end of the recession, and most wines today are made with more or less normal alcohol levels. If wine drinkers can convince producers we don’t want our rose to kick like tequila, then maybe we can convince them that smooth and sweet isn’t a good idea, either.

• Rose’s success. When I started the blog, rose was a dirty word and difficult to find in shops, stores, and restaurants. The wine business told us to drink white zinfandel and lump it. Today, white zinfandel is an afterthought and even the biggest of Big Wine companies are scurrying to produce what they call dry rose. So we won that one, too.

• Reform in the three-tier system, which limits the wine we can buy and where we can buy it, and decides how much we pay for it. I recently exchanged emails with the blog’s unofficial liquor law attorney, and he was excited about a Connecticut three-tier case that upheld that state’s minimum pricing law. Why excited, since three-tier won the case? Because, said the attorney, the appeals court’s decision was so silly and went against so much precedent that it could be overturned by the Supreme Court. Throw in the Tennessee case currently in front of the Supreme Court, and we have a chance to fire two silver bullets into three-tier’s body.

podcast

Winecast 36: Rose winemaker Charles Bieler

Charles Bieler

Charles Bieler, right, and his father Philippe. They’re a long way from the pink Cadillac.

Charles Bieler is one of the best rose maker in the world; more importantly, he is one of the reasons the rose boom exists. For which we are all most grateful.

Charles Bieler was between jobs in the late 1990s when his father suggested Charles help sell the family rose in the U.S. Charles took up the challenge, painted a Cadillac pink, and traveled the country to convince retailers and restaurants to sell dry pink wine. As Charles says, that was at a time when everyone thought rose was sweet, and he truly wondered if dry rose had a future in the U.S.

Which, of course, it did. We talk about the rose boom, the pink Cadillac trip, and the challenges facing rose today — with advice on how to find the best cheap pink.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 22 minutes long and takes up 8.4 megabytes. This is longer than usual, but Charles is passionate about the subject. The sound quality is very good; Skype’s new recording feature still has some bugs, since it is a Microsoft product.