Money, Taste, and Wine
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PRAISE FOR MONEY, TASTE, AND WINE “In Money, Taste, and Wine, preeminent wine economist Mike Veseth teaches us how to be a rational, informed wine consumer by better understanding available wine choices, personal tastes and preferences, and common wine- buying mistakes. Along the way, he provides fascinating insights into the workings of the wine industry in a fun and interesting way with his engaging and provocative writing style. A must read for anyone who drinks wine or has an interest in the wine market.” —James Thornton, Eastern Michigan University; author of American Wine Economics “A remarkable blend of research, history, and examples straight from the heart of a genuine explorer makes this book a must read. Mike skillfully walks his readers through the multifaceted relationship of money, taste, and wine and leads them to a smart, optimistic, and enjoyable conclusion. A perfect fit for those who thirst for more.” —Evy Gozali, CEO of Sababay Winery, Bali, Indonesia 15_023_01_Praise.indd 1 5/5/15 12:33 PM 15_023_Veseth.indb 2 5/5/15 5:42 AM Money, Taste, and Wine 15_023_Veseth.indb 1 5/5/15 5:42 AM 15_023_Veseth.indb 2 5/5/15 5:42 AM Money, Taste, and Wine It’s Complicated! MIKE VESETH ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London 15_023_Veseth.indb 3 5/5/15 5:42 AM Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK Copyright © 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Veseth, Mike, 1949– Money, taste, and wine : it’s complicated! / Mike Veseth. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4422-3463-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-3464-2 (electronic) 1. Wine industry. 2. Viticulture. 3. Wine and wine making. I. Title. HD9382.5.V47 2015 338.4'76632—dc23 2015000756 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America 15_023_Veseth.indb 4 5/5/15 5:42 AM Contents Part I: Buyer Beware! 1 The Wine Buyer’s Biggest Mistake 3 2 Anatomy of a Complicated Relationship 13 3 Wine Drinker, Know Thyself 23 Part II: Get a Clue! Searching for Buried Treasures 4 Dump Bucket Wines 35 5 Treasure Island Wines 45 6 Sometimes the Best Wine Is a Beer (or a Cider!) 57 7 Bulk Up: Big-Bag, Big-Box Wines 69 Part III: A Rosé Is a Rosé? Money, Taste, and Identity 8 More Than Just a Label: Wine’s Identity Crisis? 83 9 Wine Snobs, Cheese Bores, and the Paradox of Globalization 95 10 Anything but Champagne 107 Part IV: What Money Can (and Can’t) Buy 11 Restaurant Wars 121 12 Follow the Money 133 v 15_023_Veseth.indb 5 5/5/15 5:42 AM vi • CONTENTS 13 Invisible Cities, Imaginary Wines 145 14 Groot Expectations 157 Notes 165 Acknowledgments 177 Selected Bibliography 179 Index 183 About the Author 193 15_023_Veseth.indb 6 5/5/15 5:42 AM Part I BUYER BEWARE! 15_023_Veseth.indb 1 5/5/15 5:42 AM 15_023_Veseth.indb 2 5/5/15 5:42 AM Chapter 1 The Wine Buyer’s Biggest Mistake The biggest mistake that wine buyers make? Buying books instead of wine. No wait. That can’t be right. Let me start again. Give someone a fish, the old saying goes, and she will eat for a day. Teach her to fish, and she’ll eat forever. Good advice, I suppose, but not very useful to me. What about the wine? How am I supposed to enjoy all that fish if I don’t have any wine to drink with it?—Sauvignon Blanc if it is Alaskan halibut beurre blanc, maybe a nice Pinot Noir if it’s grilled Chinook salmon. No end of choices for trout, depending on how it is prepared. It’s just not the same without wine. I won’t go so far as to say fish isn’t worth eating (or life’s not worth living) without a nice glass of red, white, or rosé, but the experience (for me) is greatly diminished. That’s the trouble with these wise old sayings—they only give you part of the answer. THE BIGGEST MISTAKE YOU CAN MAKE Wine buyers make a lot of mistakes, whether guided by wise old sayings or other sources of advice, which is easy to understand. A typical upscale supermarket in the United States will offer between eight hundred and two thousand unique wine choices. The breadth and depth of choice can be overwhelming. I suppose you could just settle on one wine that satisfies you (searching by trial and error for the most part) and then simply buy that wine 3 15_023_Veseth.indb 3 5/5/15 5:42 AM 4 • MONEY, TASTE, AND WINE again and again and again, the way that I buy Grape Nuts breakfast cereal— but where’s the fun in that? With so many wines to choose from, it is no wonder that wine buyers made hundreds of different mistakes, but the biggest is very easy to say and dif- ficult to overcome: we confuse price with quality and often spend too much on wine. The myth is that more expensive wines are better and that cheaper wines are necessarily inferior. Deep down we know that this is nonsense, because wine is a matter of taste. Are more expensive books always better books? Are more expensive movies, plays, or musical performances always more enjoyable? Does the most expensive menu item at McDonald’s make you happier than a good ol’ Big Mac? So why do we think wine is different? One answer is that most of us aren’t able to taste all the different wines at various prices, and if we did taste them, we might not trust our own palates to correctly tell good, better, and best. So we make the heroic assumption that if it costs more, it must be better—how else could they charge such a price? And if they have to sell it for less, it must be pretty mediocre stuff. Not everyone thinks this way (reverse wine snobs unite!), but enough do to make a cautious generalization possible. A typical wine buyer finds a price comfort zone and sticks with it, reach- ing up to a higher price for special occasions and stooping down to cheaper stuff when quantity is more important than quality. If you were shopping for a wine to bring to a special social function, do you think you would reach up or down? It’s instinctive—I catch myself doing it, even though I know better. But it is a mistake. PRICE AND QUALITY BY THE NUMBERS It isn’t very difficult to come up with circumstantial evidence that qual- ity doesn’t always rise with price. If you live in the United States, you can probably do all the research you need while you are standing in line to pay at the grocery store. Just choose a long line (so you’ll have a little extra time to gather empirical evidence), and then grab a copy of Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, or any of the other wine magazines you are likely to find near the checkout stand. Now turn to whatever part of the magazine has the wine rat- ings (they are in the back in Wine Spectator) and take a close look. (Because I insist on playing my own games, I’m going to report from an issue of Wine Spectator that was sitting on my desk as I wrote this.1) 15_023_Veseth.indb 4 5/5/15 5:42 AM THE WINE BUYER’S BIGGEST MISTAKE • 5 If you page through the wine ratings, you will surely see that some types of wines are more expensive than others. But if you drill down within a wine category, the notion that higher-priced wines are not necessarily better wines will start to emerge. I’m going to look at the section in this issue on French wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon region. The top wine in this category is a Côtes du Roussillon-Villages 2009 by the famous winemaker M. Chapoutier. It cost $110 and received a fine score of 92/100. (I’m using Wine Spectator’s 100-point rating numbers here as a con- venient way of making a point, not because such scores are perfect measures of wine quality.) The tasting note makes it sound really yummy—wish I could sample it, but even if I was willing to spend that much money, the chances that I would stumble onto this wine are fairly low—only 150 cases were made, and there are lots of wine drinkers in the world! Next on the list is another Côtes du Roussillon-Villages wine, this one from the 2011 vintage. Domaine Gardiés made 3,300 cases of it, and while the tasting note is different in detail, the wine sounds just as interesting but costs much less—just $21.