Hits my pet peeve square on: lengthy wine lists with absolutely nothing interesting or well-chosen.
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I like the article. I wonder if what is happening in these restaurants is what is also happening at gas stations. Notice how one gas station is dominated by Hersey brands and another by the Mars brands, etc? I suspect these companies offer an entire range of candy and snacks to the gas stations and give them an extra discount if they carry their brands exclusively. I wonder if this is happening with restaurants. âHey, I can get you every kind of wine your buyers would want to order and give you an extra discount if you only buy from us!â
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Iâve been pejoratively calling them âdistributor listsâ for years. And now that I have copies of the distributor books, Iâve been able to nail exactly whom any of our semi-local restaurants are using. I donât know for sure, but your guess on incentives and exclusivity seems eminently plausible.
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My friendâs distributorship, Wine Warehouse until he sold it, printed many, many restaurant wine lists.
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Slotting fees in supermarkets for product placement https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/economics-slotting-contracts
Ordering from one distributor has to be easier and probably cheaper for a restaurant. .
Jason is a great follow on substack. I came to his writing via his book Godforsaken Grapes, but love what heâs doing on substack.
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Been going on for a long time. Take a look at the wine list of any Ritz hotel restaurant. Plenty of other examples.
Exactly this. And âgive us your whole wine list (or like 90%) and weâll give you all your well liquors for free.â And variations of this.
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Of course, Jason was the jerk as usual, the âwine snob.â
That actually sums up Jasonâs contribution to the piece for me. The other author makes some good points, but they both come across as very holier than thou.
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I think one thing this article gets wrong is implying that a lot of the big labels exist âout of sheer marketing will.â Properly invested marketing dollars do drive sales, but if consumers didnât like the wine, it wouldnât sell.
Itâs easy to say as a wine geek that these products are bad, but the authors basically refuse to consider that most consumers actually enjoy these wines. Sure, the wines are manipulated, less complex, donât show vintage character, etc., but from my observation, that is kind of what the average American wine consumer wants.
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You have a good point. People are drinking this type of wine, even if itâs not what WBâs might prefer, and in some ways it does make the whole community worse off in the long run (at least in my view) but it doesnât feel like there is much effort on the part of the fine wine industry to really get the entry level consumers to trade up. Look at the difficulty in even getting modern closures / cheaper packaging adopted â how many consumers think something sucked just because they did not realize it was TCA afflicted?
Iâm on board with the articleâs lament that too many restaurants have uninteresting wine lists and some of the reasons behind it. Not so much with the whining about not being able to express an opinion.
Plenty of people like mass-produced swill. The fact that we donât doesnât make us snobs. Weâre snobs because we canât express our opinions without using words like swill. Even if we avoid the overt disdain, when we start winesplaining we sound like weâre just hiding it poorly. Not that any of us would do that.
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Always difficult to tease out the direction of causality, because marketing drives tastes and tastes drive marketing, at the same time. But the counterfactual is that if people were exposed to other wines in the same way, they would enjoy them just as much (or more).
The issue is of course scale, because the wines we consider better are made in smaller quantities. Which is why it requires imagining a different system of wine sales and distribution. Not my area, but it doesnât strike me as crazy to imagine that the system could be better for everyone (except the current winners).
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The thing that gets me with these wine lists is that they often donât mix these mass-market brands with others to give consumers a real choice. Basically, your choice is to drink a very narrow selection (including varietals, styles, and brands) or not drink at all. Most of the time, the best choice is the latter.
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Nobody is denying that people enjoy these wines. A lot of people enjoy McDonalds hamburgers, but nobody feels like they need to respond reflexively to the sight of a Big Mac with an obsequious âeat what you like!â
The McDonaldâs analogy is one I make a lot. And that puts another angle on the issue- if I go to a restaurant that carries food of no particular character, Iâm not surprised if the wine/beverage list reflects that same lack of interest. I wonât expect Olive Garden or TGIF to have Bandol or Saperavi.
But when I eat at a place which at least pretends to have pretensions of good and distinctive food, I expect something more creative and interesting than Josh, The Prisoner, Kim Crawford, CakebreadâŚ
My other bitch is the almost universal lack of great local wines on lists, but thatâs a story for a different day.
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Because people are not as overtly judgemental about what people eat as they are about the wines they consume . . .because in the US, wine is way too often more about status than anything else.
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Everything everywhere is about status. But curious if you think there is a US-specific component to this? Perhaps because there is less of a tradition of people reflexively drinking local table wine as part of the culture, so itâs more of a conscious status-driven addition to the lifestyle? Although that would then apply to lots of other places as well.
Thatâs one of the things Iâm pushing; itâs an element of European culture that we would do well to emulate. The âbottomâ of my list is delicious local table wines of no pretension but high drinkability. Turn your nose up at Meat Market Red if youâre feeling snobbish, but for $6, you get a glass of something local that works great with a hamburger. Reaction from the local crowd has been quite positive.
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That is a big question I have - and one that Iâve inquired about elsewhere. Do folks in the UK âscoffâ at the folks drinking supermarket winesâ? Or in Italy?
Yes, I do believe that in other parts of the world, Wine is definitely well into the culture of the community, or as in the US, it simply has not.
Curious how others feel.