good cheap wine blog
I blogged last week about blind wine tastings — my own casual experiments as well as some more serious academic ones. The bottom line is that in blind wine tastings, there is a zero or even slightly negative correlation between the ratings of regular people and the price of the wine they are drinking; for experts the relationship between rating and price is positive. I’ve learned a few more things from blog readers about cheap wine over the last few days. Robin Goldstein has an excellent book, The Wine Trials, which describes the blind wine tastings and which cheap wines people liked. The beauty of this book is that you can bring an $8 bottle of wine to a party and explain that it tastes better than the $28 bottle you would have bought. If the host of the party is an economist, you can tape a $10 bill to the bottle for an even split of the joint surplus. Not until I read Goldstein’s book did I realize just how weak the correlation was in blind tastings between expert evaluations and price in experimental settings.
Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational) and his co-authors have an interesting experiment with beer and balsamic vinegar.
top wine brands globallyIf you tell people ahead of time there will be vinegar in their beer, they won’t like the taste.
buy red label wineIf you don’t tell them and do a blind tasting, they do like the taste.
best red wines in nzIf you let them form their opinions and then tell them there was vinegar in the beer, most continue to say it tasted good. I am generally skeptical of neuro-economics, but here is one such study which finds that the firing of neurons in the brain is affected by how much the subject thinks the wine he/she is being served cost. The bottom line seems to be that if you think a wine is more expensive, you really do enjoy it more.
Finally, a wonderful tale published in The New Yorker a year ago, written by Patrick Radden Keefe, profiled an ambitious conman who fooled the world’s leading wine experts for more than a decade before his nefarious plot unraveled. I can’t remember the last time I read an article this long from beginning to end in one sitting. How to Buy Good Wine at Cheap Prices Always overwhelmed when you’re at the supermarket or liquor store? Use our helpful cheat-sheet to find wine that tastes good—at a reasonable price. CelebrityCooking TipsCooking With KidsDessert RecipesDid You Know?Entertainment & BooksHobbiesHoliday RecipesHome & GardenQuizzes & PuzzlesRecipesTechnologyTravelLarry King HuffPo 50: Here’s The Down-Low On Down-Sizing The 9 Unwritten Rules of Grandparenting HuffPost 50: Study Reveals Dramatic Rise In Binge Drinking Among Those Over 50 The 7 Most Common Internet Security Mistakes 10 Fun Holidays Gifts for You & Your Grandkids Latest in Our Grand Deals
Win a Signed Copy of the Pajama Mama Monday Book Pack! Win the New Atomic Beam Lantern! See more Deals & Giveaways Grandparent Movie Quotes Quiz How Cool a Grandparent Are You? How well do you get along with your grandchild and other family members? Want to know if your personalities mesh? Become an AGA Premium Member.Beer, Wine, and Liquor Published on July 31st, 2014 | The question on Quora was simple: How is Trader Joe’s wine so cheap? What are the economics of the Trader Joe’s Wine? The Charles Shaw Blend (aka the Two Buck Chuck) costs only $2.99. How do they produce wine at such a low cost? Is it “blended” from surplus/discarded source wines? Its a good question. People ask me similar questions about cheap wine all the time (hence, my blog posts Artisanal vs. Corporate Wine or Why the hell should I buy artisanal? and How To Buy Good Cheap Wine). A few folks on Quora weighed in and shed some light on the Trader Joe’s Wine debate.
Chris Morrison, whose bio tells us nothing more than that he is from San Francisco, is somehow affiliated wit Evergreen State College and has 243 Quora followers, notes that Two Buck Chuck is produced by Bronco Wine, who is owned by Fred Franzia who comes from a family famous for its boxed-wine empire. Morrison goes on to mention a CNN Money profile of Franzia written in 2007 : But Franzia’s main war – the one he’s kicking ass at – is against pretentiousness. Bronco, which he owns with his brother Joe and cousin John, has (including vineyard partnerships) 3,000 employees and does an estimated $250 million in annual sales of mostly low-cost wines such as Estrella, Forest Glen, ForestVille, Montpellier, and Silver Ridge. It also gets income from providing distribution, bottling, and juice to other wineries. In 2002, Franzia persuaded Trader Joe’s to sell a low-end label called Charles Shaw (after the winemaker who sold the tony label to Franzia, and dubbed Two Buck Chuck by consumers) that waged war on domestic wines in the $4 to $10 range – and was named best chardonnay in a blind taste test at July’s California State Fair over far pricier competition.
The label is one of America’s fastest-growing, selling 5 million cases per year, all through one chain of stores. Morrison clearly isn’t a fan of Franzia and goes on to make some disparaging remarks and show some unflattering images. The next Quora contributor to add his two cents was Chris Knox, a Wine Shop Manager/Wine Buyer for BiN 2860 Wine Shop, a small boutique style wine shop and tasting room in Los Olivos, CA. Knox adds to the conversation by strongly agreeing with Morrison in his dislike for Franzia. He also notes that Franzia is a “shrewd business man who sees it as his mission to pretty much remove any shred of pretentiousness (and dare I say integrity and quality along with it) from the wine world.” Knox notes that Franzia started by buying the then failing Charles Shaw label years ago along with massive amounts of bulk wine in the 90’s for pennies on the dollar and a staggering 35,000 acres of land in the very cheap San Joaquin Valley which he then planted to vines.
The vineyards are located in the Central Valley in California which is notoriously flat and quite hot producing massive yields of overripe grapes. Franzia planted those vineyards in such a way as the rows run north-south, giving the vines maximum sun exposure and he made the rows as long as he possibly could, minimizing the number of turns his tractors would need to make. Like most mass produced wine, Bronco’s grapes are not hand-picked but rather they are machine harvested. And that means large tractors go down the rows of vineyards grabbing the grapes. They not only grab ripe grapes, but unripe and rotten grapes, leaves, stems and rodents, birds, insects and whatever else is on the grapes and mixes them all together. Bronco, like many if not most mass produced wine, then manipulates the finished wine by adding sugar or unfermented grape juice if needed to make the wine palatable. And then the wine goes into bottling, packaging and shipping facilities, all of which Fred Franzia owns himself.
They then get put on trucks (also owned by Fred Franzia) and shipped to Trader Joe’s. To make $2 wine one must compromise all sense of integrity and quality, own tens of thousands of acres of vineyards in the worst possible wine region possible where land is incredibly cheap and yields are exceptionally high, use machines to execute every part of a homogenized system that substitutes manipulation for hand crafted quality, and own every step of the winemaking process including bottling, packaging and distribution, all while giving the finger to the entire wine industry and plowing down anyone who gets in your way. That’s quite an indictment. But, while I don’t quite understand why Franzia deserves such singular wrath, I do agree that cheap, mass produced wine is rarely fair to stakeholders such as workers and vendors, nor is it typically good for the local economy or rarely mindful of the environment. As I said in a blog post, Artisanal vs. Corporate Wine or Why the hell should I buy artisanal?, the higher cost of small winery wine goes straight into the quality of the wine.