Log In / Join Now News & Features Home What Am I Tasting Food & Travel Home Wine & Food Pairing Free Trial Online Membership Wine Spectator's 2017 Tasting Events Sample hundreds of the world's best wines at our annual tasting events! Grand Tour tickets are on sale now for Las Vegas, Chicago and Miami. Plus, register early for the New York Wine Experience Oct. 19-21. What should I do with a collection of wine labels? A bright South African white with honeysuckle notes ($10) A ripe, juicy Italian white with creamy tannins ($20) This finely balanced Italian red has a spicy finish ($41) 2015 Bordeaux: 250+ Reviews Top Values / Easy Finds Newest 95- to 100-Point Wines Top 100 of 2016 (free-access) Latest: News, Views & More Frost, Hail Damage Vineyards in France and Italy Vintners from Champagne to Piedmont are fighting freezing temperatures Wine Spectator's 2017 Grand Tour Is Coming Tastings in three American cities will showcase 241 wines from around the world

13 Don't-Miss Chicago Restaurants for Wine Lovers Dive into the Windy City's exciting dining scene with these stellar wine lists Piedmont’s Roero region has just delimited its best vineyards for Arneis and Nebbiolo; senior editor Bruce Sanderson takes a look 8 & $20: Cheese-Stuffed Chicken with Green Beans Amandine Spring herbs and fresh goat cheese brighten this crowd-pleaser, paired with a snappy Portuguese white Contributing editor Robert Camuto talks to Chinese wine success story Robert Yang, whose 1919 has grown from one wine shop to a network of 1,000 What Am I Tasting? Follow silky tannins to a chocolate mousse finish and this wine's secret identity Silver Oak Buys Napa Cult Winery Ovid The Duncan family obtains ultramodern winery and 15 acres of Pritchard Hill vines Actor Chris O'Donnell Delivers New Pizzeria Also in Unfiltered, go green with wine, dogs and … bugs? Somm Talk: Jon McDaniel, the "Sommbassador" The beverage director for Acanto, the Gage and three other Chicago spots is a sommelier for the people

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On Sale Now: May 31 issue Matching Food & Wine » Magazine Customer Service » Buy a Back Issue » Advertise With Us The most exciting wines of the year for quality, value and availability! do it yourself wine rack ideasSee top 10 profiles, plus 25+ years of Top 100 lists!best sweet white wine brands 2 Vineyards, 2 Cover Crops: Strategies for Different Vine Ages at Coutetbest wine of 1999 10 Standout Virginia Winesbest wine for evening 14 Crisp Santa Barbara Chardonnays 8 Values from Northwest Italy Our exclusive lists of the world's top wine values, value producers and easy-to-find wines. Oregon Pinot Noir for $30 or Less46 affordable picks for the state's most popular red grape

27 Italian RedsSelections from Piedmont, Tuscany and beyond in good quantities ChileFrom Cabernet to Sauvignon Blanc, 30+ producers that make the most red and white values INSIDER New for April 26 40 wines up to 95 points, including California Chardonnay and Tuscan reds ADVANCE New for June 15 Sneak peeks of Best Values, Smart Buys, Collectibles and Highly Recommended • Personal Wine List: Track your purchases • My Library: Save your favorite articles and more • My School Courses: Follow your class progressThree sets of numbers — two public, one passed to me by my source in Big Wine — show just how dominant Big Wine continues to be, and how Big Wine growth will affect everything we drink. The first public chart, reproduced here, was compiled by Lew Perdue at Wine Industry Insight, and shows that the three biggest companies — E&J Gallo, Constellation, and The Wine Group — control almost half of the U.S. wine market. In this, the eight biggest companies sell 60 percent of the wine in this country, which leaves more than 7,500 wineries to fight over the other 40 percent.

Those are almost the same numbers in the second public study, the annual Wine Business Monthly top 30 producers list, which are similar to the finding in the magazine’s 2014 report, when Gallo, Constellation, and The Wine Group controlled half the U.S. market. Meanwhile, the top 30 companies in the 2016 report accounted for 74 percent of all the wine sold in the U.S. Interestingly, that’s less than they reported in 2014, when the top 30 sold 90 percent of the wine; chalk that up to bigger companies, like Diageo, selling their brands to smaller companies. The three biggest companies (again, Gallo, Constellation, and The Wine Group) controlled about half the U.S. market in the landmark 2011 Big Wine study conducted by Phil Howard at Michigan State. It’s important to understand how big big is. First, the Wine Business Monthly top 30 total just .04 percent of all U.S. wineries, which makes the infamous One Percent look like an all-inclusive kumbaya sing-along. Second, Jackson Family, which makes Kendall Jackson and is about as close to a national brand as wine has, isn’t one of the half-dozen biggest producers in the U.S.

It’s eighth in the Wine Industry Insight chart and ninth in Wine Business Monthly’s rankings with almost six million cases. That’s still big, but the biggest companies are so gigantic that even some of their brands, like Gallo’s Barefoot, sell more than all of the Jackson Family portfolio. In other words, every time we buy wine, the odds are better than not that we’re buying a Big Wine product even if we don’t want to. My colleagues in the Winestream Media pooh pooh this whenever I write it, arguing that wine drinkers have more choice than that. What about those other 7,500 wineries? The catch, and what they don’t understand, is that most of us don’t shop in places that sell wine from the other 7,500. We shop at Costco and Walmart and grocery stores, and those retailers account for almost half the wine sold in the U.S. Case in point: Sales statistics for 2015 that my source in Big Wine passed to me for 10 U.S. states (none of which are California), and where Big Wine (defined as a company that appears in either the Howard study or the Wine Business Monthly top 30) dominates at all prices: