I don’t see restaurant people complaining that McDonald’s and Applebee’s are dumbing down American tastes and making it too difficult to sell meals at fine dining restaurants. That’s basically the argument the article makes with wine. A lot of people just want food and beverages that people nerdy about such things find boring or of poor quality. I actually think they should eat and drink what they like; I’m not just saying it because I’m “supposed” to. I say all of this as someone who sells wine to consumers for a living.
5 Likes
Indeed! I can’t count the number of times I’ve had this conversation at a business dinner - “Why are you ordering a beer? I thought you were a wine enthusiast .” “I am, and that’s why I’m choosing beer over the corporate wines offered.”
6 Likes
It’s not as much that they like mass produced swill as it is that they’ve never had the option to drink something better. Happens all the time to me. I’ll pour a wine and someone will ask, “What’s that? oh, I don’t like Chardonnay.” or “that’s awfully light for a Pinot Noir” or “I love Korbel”. Then it’s “Wow, that’s really good!”
But they can’t buy it at the grocery store and being lazy shoppers they never pursue it. They’ll say, “I like coming to your parties, you serve good wine.” They could too but the effort level in obtaining a good bottle is too much for them. Trader Joe’s is upscale wine buying.
8 Likes
I shouted to her: “Chloe? Wtf is this? Is this Josh’s age-gap girlfriend?”
I can’t imagine making fun of the wines my friends like to drink. That is truly snobbery.
The “drink what you like” ethos, as it’s come to be practiced on social media and in social settings, vilifies any judgement about one wine being higher quality than another, dismissing that judgement as “snobbery.”
No, it doesn’t. People just shouldn’t be rude about it. This is a straw man argument.
Even if one wants to advocate for certain wines—made the right way
So, large production is the wrong way? 
Yes, a busy, popular beach restaurant in Florida has a boring wine list. It’s because the staff probably doesn’t know much about wine, and the big brands sell. They are familiar to people. Most Florida vacationers want something they recognize. I completely understand that many lists like this get written by a single distributor and all that goes along with that (quotas, incentives, etc.), but when it comes down to it, this is not a bad move for the restaurant in terms of sales. If we were talking about a different type of restaurant in a different place, I might actually agree with the criticism. There are lists like this in places where they don’t belong. This is a poor example.
There’s a bit of chicken-and-egg, but a big part of the reason the big brands are so successful is that they’re crafted (successfully) to suit mass-market tastes. Artisans don’t do that (thankfully). It isn’t as if the Chloe Chardonnay drinker would try some obscure concrete-aged Italian white and prefer it. In most cases, they wouldn’t.
Caroline’s points about consolidation and pay-to-play are spot on. This is bad for restaurants, retailers, and consumers. I spend a lot of my time as a retail wine buyer bringing in items that are not carried by my local distributors. And this is in a market that is not dominated by a single huge distributor the way some are.
Given that most suppliers mark up their wine 50 to 100 percent from production cost
I don’t know where she gets these numbers. It sounds misleading. If she’s saying supplier markups are often well above 50%, and even commonly up to 100%, that is incorrect.
The end result is that consumers experience only a fraction of the wine available in the U.S. How could they ever drink what they like if they haven’t experienced enough wine to even know what they like?
Again, I love broad selection and work hard to provide it. But, many consumers don’t want to go on some wine nerd journey to explore every corner of the wine world. They want to find a couple of things that they can afford, are not challenging, and taste good to them. Then they want to stick with those things. The fact that choice is too limited in some markets (I agree) doesn’t mean people have zero access to good wine. Many people just don’t want the wines that we do.
This refusal to call out any wine—or even to engage in honest critical comparison—has normalized wine lists full of questionable quality across the country.
There are several false assumptions here that I’ve already commented on.
Wine culture and the wine industry are not going to be saved by playing nice nor by being polite and accommodating to the big brands
I guess he sees himself as a savior. None of his goals will be accomplished by being condescending, which is very much what he is doing.
big brands, to be clear, who would be more than happy if smaller artisan wineries disappeared from the face of the earth
Large suppliers are actually investing in small producers. This is a big trend over the past few years.
7 Likes
It’s situation where, weirdly, state run liquor stores actually help out with more diversity. The strongest lever for distributors often comes when a larger distributor has a dominant slection of popular spirits. They can make is extremely appealing to just buy from them.
In Oregon, where all spirits go through the liquor store and freebies are ilegal, there’s no real path to strong-arm/incentivize an account to only buy from a single distributor. It still happens, but less often and mostly only in places that don’t care very much about wine to begin with.
3 Likes
I apologize in advance for being so negative.
It is the total lack of values in our society. Business is ‘how we make money’ and nothing more to most people. We block out the fact that it is a significant portion of our time lived, and of the impact we have on others. Very few think about whether or not they are doing something they feel is ‘right’ or something that they believe in.
When I worked for a distributor I spoke to a restaurant that was a customer and he was telling me that he was taking in Josh, and Caymus. He was trying to focus on more important and meaningful wines before that point, but he said “people want this other stuff.”
I told him he was breaking my heart, not because it would cost me sales, but because I loved his approach and thought he was doing something more meaningful. I told him that I could never judge what he was doing as I do not know his situation. “If you aren’t in the black, or you ‘need’ the money, do what you need to do, and only you can decide if you need it, but if you are doing OK financially, think about what you would look back on in 10 years, and be proud of.” Very few people do that!
Here is a quote from Elizabetta Fagiouli of Montenidoli in San Gimignano that I referenced in a class this past Thursday. It starts about organic wines, but I thought also worth leaving in here.
“To be organic, it’s a question of culture. It’s not a question of fashion. Remember that culture stays and fashion goes. Now everybody has new ideas about culture, about being organic. Everything now has to be organic, but that is a way [a fashion]. It’s not the truth of humans. Humans had to come back to the earth. That’s why the Foundation. That’s why you can be real[ly] organic when you speak to the soil, when you speak to the plants. Wine is made speaking to the vines, not going in the market to see what is the wine in fashion.”
7 Likes
I think the local part does a lot of work. Once you bring something from across the country (or across the world) it is difficult to avoid having some pretension, and the context changes, even if the wine was humble in origins.
2 Likes
Are you asking if snobbery and status are part of UK (wine) culture?!
Not sure how one can rigorously compare the extent of snobbery across countries, but I suspect the US is far from the bottom of the list.
I would guess the US is like anywhere else, including the UK. You can’t define any where with a singular term.
When I was visiting in the UK there were shops dedicated to fine wines, as well as Oddbins, and basic VdP wines on supermarket shelves everywhere. If there was any all encompassing feeling I got from UK wine people, it was “the right wine for the right occasion”. People were happy to drink Dolcetto at a wine bar for a couple of Euros or old Bordeaux at a nice dinner.
The US may be a bit different but probably not much. There’s some snobbery to the spoofy “sweet while pretending to be dry” wines from more serious enthusiasts but on the whole it seems like wine is enjoyed considerably more frequently by a wide range of people here who enjoy the differences in wine rather than prop themselves up with fancy terminology.
As much as “Drops of God” may be fun to watch, in real life a much larger percentage of people here have a working knowledge of wine now and aren’t wowed by super nerds. It’s just wine.
3 Likes
That statement really hits the nail on the head these days.
Inexpensive excellent wines used to be commonplace, even in the US. Import or domestic. But Kermit Lynch really changed that. Once a very new to wine market (the US) got into Adventures Along the Wine Route, pricing became more about the story of these off the beaten path producers and less about traditional pricing. As importers realized that you could buy from houses used to selling at low Ex Cellars prices and wow new US consumers with great storytelling and create a very, very handsome margin while doing so, importing wines for QPR seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur.
As the US market has matured, and the storytelling really hasn’t evolved, the market has saturated butnit hasn’t stopped importers from trying.
I never used to have to use mass market wines for btg slots at the restaurant. There was a plethora of great options from pretty much everywhere but Burgundy (and sometimes even those showed up). Because Oregon has state run liquor stores and is a COD state, there are a lot more small distributors. So there are still a lot of very cool wines to choose from, but the quality of wine in the btg range still isn’t that great. Most very good wines are priced higher than btg will allow, and most great wines (like Thibaud Boudignon’s Anjou Blanc) may start at $17 wholesale (high for a Chenin Blanc btg but doable for a truly great wine at that price) but are $30 wholesale very shortly.
I do wish we could shed that pretense that comes with wines that travel around the world, but it’s more expensive than ever to do business in the US (it may be the same in other places but I am ignorant of that). I also wish we could produce wines here that could represent the kind of value you find in Europe but the cost of production here makes that very difficult.
7 Likes
It doesn’t feel any more pretentious to me to see California, Oregon, or European wines on a local restaurant list than to see a beer or whiskey made in another state or country listed. Especially if local choices are limited. It doesn’t feel pretentious at all unless the list is dominated by high-priced rarities.
1 Like
Hopefully in time. So many of those value wines come from grapes that have been in those regions for centuries, or more so mother nature has already vouched for the grapes being suited to that place. I think in the US, we are slowly finding more suitable locations for particular grapes, but I think we have a long time of trial and error with hundreds of grapes still to go.
It may not feel pretentious to you, because you know about wine. But it’s still a different context from European wine growing regions where the local table wine costs as much as the bottled water and it flows as freely. By the time that wine lands on your US restaurant list, the price is beyond what it can deliver. So people begin to expect more from wine, and the good stuff crowds out the casual low-cost consumer.
2 Likes
Of course all countries are diverse.
My point was that if any place is structurally seeped in status snobbery, it’s the UK.
Oh, sorry. It seemed like you were suggesting the US has considerable snobbery (which isn’t untrue).
" It’s situation where, weirdly, state run liquor stores actually help out with more diversity."
Hail to socialism with vino characteristics!
The wholesaling of spirits is the lever on many occasions. It is a contextual mistake (in most US states, non-state control of liquor) to separate out liquor from wine in both on and off-premise buying decisions. I cannot speak to the restaurant financials aspect as never privy to such. But suspect that there are more than a few “must have” spirits that are accommodated around to get favorable pricing.
People ITB are so scared of being called the s-word they will twist themselves into a pretzel to avoid being perceived as one. If a person only eats at fast food or chain restaurants, and their idea of Mexican food is Taco Bell and Chipotle, their idea of Italian food is Olive Garden, then are we supposed to pat them on the back and say “You’re absolutely right! Well done!”
The “drink what you like” dogma is relativist nonsense.
1 Like
Which reads, “distributors with highly sought after spirits brands will leverage those to have placements for specific wine brands they also represent placed on lists.” Said wine brands often being brands with significant “goals” for the distributor for both on premise and off premise placements.
Not trying to be a jerk about it, but that is the situation.
Say Hallelujah and Praise the Lord of the Vine.
1 Like