Winebits 368: Wine terms, wine retailers, winery buyouts

wine terms ? I’m so tired of that: Amanda Chatel at the Bustle lifestyle website says she’s tired of being picked on by beer drinkers, noting that it’s a scientific fact that cheap wine tastes better than cheap beer. She posts 21 questions about wine she doesn’t want to be asked anymore, and if some of them aren’t especially clever, her heart is in the right place, and especially with screwcaps. And because it’s a lifestyle site, there’s a picture of “Scandal’s” Olivia Pope with the post, and the site has 127,000 Facebook likes. Which is something for wine sites to ponder.

? Corporate buyouts: One of the world’s great cheap wine retailers, Cost Plus World Market, could get a new owner this year, if analyst speculation is worth anything. They think World Market’s parent, Bed Bath & Beyond, may be in play since it has underperformed the market. Don’t worry if you don’t understand that sentence; financialspeak can be as obtuse as winespeak. Know that the companies that do leveraged buyouts think they can make money buying Bed Bath & Beyond, stripping its assets and cutting costs, and then selling it again. Which usually means that the company becomes a shell of itself and underperforms the market again, setting itself up for another leveraged buyout. In this, World Market could suffer as well, a cheap wine horror too terrible to contemplate. Hopefully, the analyst speculation isn’t worth anything.

? $40 million, anyone? Those of us who wonder why cheap wine doesn’t get enough respect always overlook the economics of cult wines. California’s Kosta Browne, among the cultiest, was sold for what reports are saying is more than $40 million. Which is a nice return for a 20,000-case winery that makes mostly pinot noir and owns just 20 acres of vineyards. Which means that he deal was almost all about the brand, demonstrating how powerful the allure is for a cult producer. That’s a lot of money for a name, but in the high-end wine business, name is all.