This is sounding increasingly promising for me and Schioppettino. I’d put Teroldego and Lagrein into the light-weight peppery reds with guts category, too; sadly, those two, too, are few and far between around here.
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I love well-made Teroldego and Lagrein! However, while they might have some spicy notes, I think they are still more in the dark fruit / dark berry spectrum, whereas a classic Schiopettino takes the crushed black peppercorn aspect and cranks it up to eleven! If a classic cool-vintage NR Syrah can be peppery, a Schioppettino can be double that!
However, not all Schioppettinos are like that - I wonder if it has to do with the winemaking, the vintage temperatures or viticultural choices. Some Schioppettinos have been just pretty mundane, quite similar to your Teroldegos and Lagreins. However, the style I like is like a Sangiovese / Teroldego with a big dose of NRS peppery spice!
Those capitalized letters raise the question - are you now talking about my photo or James? 
To add to the list of peppery wines, I find pepper in both Pineau d’Aunis (white pepper too) and Pelaverga, less in the latter. Obvs cool vintage N Rhone Syrah can be very, very peppery.
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Agree 100%!
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is Cercial the same grape as the Sercial grape used in Madeira production?
Apparently you didn’t read the whole post. 
I addressed this point already:
I don’t want to hijack Otto’s thread, but I do think it’s a good place to talk about market segmentation. The pricing of these wines are from an American perspective very affordable, of course. Maybe they’re just too affordable?
European wine pricing has always fallen into a race-to-the-bottom death trap approach that has been going on for as long as I can remember. Exactly that same mentality was what flooded the Swedish monopoly with bad cooperative village plonk when I grew up and in a very real sense opened those markets up to the new world. Just too many bad Spanish, Italian and French wines in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
I think it would work out much better in the long run for all producers if they made less wine, at a higher quality and with higher prices. But the Southern European mindset is that this is a basic food staple that needs to be affordable at all cost. I think that thinking is very outdated. The Gen Z there is also drinking less, being more conscious, not just here, so the daily plonk use base is going away. I think many European producers need to start approaching wine as a treat, an everyday luxury if you will, and not just like a produce. It will help them all in the end.
I’m equally opposed to the gouging that goes on here in the US, so I’m not advocating our broken system either. But Otto was drinking some €8 wines at that winery. I just feel that’s too cheap. You can’t sustain or make a quality product at that price, even if you own the land and facility outright.
Considering how Portugal is one of the poorest countries in western Europe*, I’d say the opposite. I was surprised to see how many wines we saw now were noticeably more expensive compared to the wines I saw when I was in Portugal in 2013.
I think you’re starting to get too US-centric with the pricing. If the wines seem too cheap from your perspective, maybe you should stop and think if the wines are as cheap for everybody else?
*In 2022, the median annual income in Portugal was around $11000.
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Fair, but I have the same thoughts when I go home to Sweden in the summers. Since I export my wines there, I know exactly how much gets taken out of it, so when I see 100 SEK wines at the Monopoly, I know the Monopoly takes their 17.5% cut, the distributor takes at least 35% cut and with the alcohol taxes on top, that bottle of wine is now about 30 SEK for the producer. That’s $3 dollars. No artisanal or small family winery can sustain that kind of pricing, so what you’re getting at that price is a huge cooperative or conglomerate industrial wine. There is no other way. I would say Swedes (and I would think Finns too), think that anything over 200 SEK ($20) is an expensive wine. Reverse engineering that, it only leaves the actual winery maybe $6-8 left. Again, not something that’s very doable for artisanal winemakers.
In the end everyone loses. The customer doesn’t get good wine and the artisanal winemaker can’t survive without an outlet.
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The Swedish pricing is probably one of the most competitive in the world.
The Finnish monopoly takes a 52% cut, our alcohol tax is +3€ per a 0,75 liter bottle of wine and our VAT is soon at 25,5%. And since our market is much smaller compared to those in Sweden, the distributor can easily take a cut in excess of 50%.
It’s not once or twice I’ve seen wines that are sold at 20€ in European web shops, 200 SEK in Sweden and 40€ in Finland…
But if, say, 75% of a Portuguese producer’s wines are sold locally and 25% are exported, they just can’t raise their prices to the American level of pricing - they’d lose their local market because nobody in the domestic would be able to afford the wines anymore. This is the reason why wines are priced so differently in different countries. In Portugal an entry-level wines costs about 3-4€, a decent wine something like 15-20€ and an expensive wine 50€. In Switzerland entry-level wines are +10€, decent mid-tier wines 20-30€ and expensive wines 100-200€. I guess the same thing applies to the US wines (even if you have wines like Two-Buck Chuck which cost the same as the cheapos in Portugal).
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I disagree. There are a number of really good European wines I can get in the states for about $15, some less. Doesn’t sound that much off of a wine the costs 8 euros at the winery when you consider shipping across an ocean and getting it to a retailer. Sure, there is plenty of trash at the lower price tiers, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be good wine made at those prices. Saying they should make wines to cost more alienates all of the people who can’t or simply won’t pay more. If we think that it’s already hard to convince people to get into wine, how much harder does it get if there is less quality at lower price points?
Also if it sounds cheap by American standards, that would seem to say much more about the wine industry in the US than about how Europeans are making wine. Why should they change how they do it? What is your basis for assuming they are doing it wrong? Or that it isn’t sustainable? Don’t you think they probably have a pretty good idea on what they can, should, or must sell their products for? What do they do when they raise prices and it just doesn’t sell? To Otto’s point, how are people in Portugal going to pay more when they earn on average 11,000 Euros per year? I’m assuming for most of these producers the local market remains their most important by leaps and bounds, so it would seem odd to suggest they change to align with America’s tastes. Even there though, most Americans who drink wine drink very cheap wine.
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For those of us that can afford the treat, that thinking maybe holds water, but I would hate to envisage wine becoming any more of a ‘plaything for the rich’. It’s bad enough at the moment.
The most healthy situation is where there is a broad spread, including at the very bottom, two very different ends of the scale:
- Amenable wines, easy to drink, with no rough edges. There is a large market for these, even if few here would find them appetising.
- Rustic wines, true to grape and region, but made without applying the finesse of the wines we often talk about here. They might not be easy wines, but they can still be very interesting, and I’ve enjoyed rediscovering the charms of such wines (thankyou basic Cahors for re-enlightening me). There are some evenings I would actively choose such a wine, in preference to something more refined, and enjoy it more. I’d hate to see such wines disappear.
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Whooops!!! Eeek!! I thought I read all the introductory stuff yesterday — guess I didn’t make it all the way to the end. Great job anticipating and answering this question off the bat, and sorry I missed it without you taking me by the hand and leading me all the way there. … it sounds like an interesting wine. 
Sadly, of the reds, only one appears to be available anywhere in the USA, and it’s on the other side of the country. 
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I’m not at all advocating the US pricing model, which is out of control the other end. I’ve complained about that many times on here.
I just don’t see how a small producer can survive on selling an everyday wine for €4-5. The have the same bottle, label and cork costs I have, pretty much. But I guess what I’m trying to say is, that a shift away from volume thinking would benefit them and customer in the long run. I mean, where do you go as a €4/bottle producer when the world consumes less wine? To €1/bottle?
IDK, but for starters, imagine you’re in a place where the average income is 11,000 Euros per year.
I rather suspect they don’t.
How do you know that their market is shrinking? Even in the US we don’t know to what extent the wine market is actually shrinking and we don’t know if it’s lasting or cyclical. Even if it is, raising prices and aiming for more luxury is only going to work for a small portion of the producers. For most to simply aim to increase price is going to be a death sentence.
To me it’s just kind of insane to hear someone say, “you know, Europe seems to really be doing this wine thing wrong and they should increase their prices.”
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And Cercial is different than Sercialinho which is made only by Luis Pato within Bairrada. On the mainland, the Madeira Sercial is the same as esganacao (dog strangler).
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Towards the end of the Salazar regime, growers were almost forced to sell their crop to the local cooperatives. After the carnation revolution (50th anniversary this past April 25) and people could sell their own wines again, most wines were still pretty rustic. They were used to providing fruit to the coops. There were a few exceptions, Caves Sao Joao is one, because they provided wine to the colonies.
These indeed.
However, this is incorrect. Luís Pato is probably the most successful proponent of Sercialinho, but not the only one. There are several others who grow tiny amounts of the variety to add acidity to blends and for example Sogrape makes a varietal Sercialinho, too.
You’re now getting ahead of things - I was about to discuss these points in my next update!