Like many of you, the economy has been on my mind recently. These days, it is not necessary to read the latest polls to realize that people are tightening their belts and being a little more careful with their spending. Being a vintner, I can’t help but wonder what this will mean for the wine industry. As I read wine magazines and blogs, or just speak with friends in the business, it seems that there are endless opinions on the subject. While some people predict an impending correction in the wine market after a long run-up (similar to what we are seeing with housing), others see the luxury wine market as essentially recession proof, endlessly sustained by new markets and new money abroad.
I don’t presume to know which way it will all play out, but I have noticed something interesting lately, as a once taboo word seems to be gaining more and more traction in the ongoing discussion about wine and the economy. That word is value.
Value has always been a tricky word for our industry. Simply put, it does not connote many of the things that the wine world likes to focus on: namely quality and craftsmanship. In a way, associating a wine with the word value – no matter how great that wine is – has historically relegated it to a niche category that often seems more about advantageous pricing than excellence. To get around this semantic dilemma, wineries have often used a variety of alternate words and phrases. They talk about “over-delivering,” being “well-priced” or offering “a lot of wine in the bottle.” Sadly, all of this confuses what is becoming an important question for wine lovers in tough economic times:
“Can I find a great wine at a fair price?”
First off, I think the answer to this question is an unequivocal yes! This said, finding these wines requires a certain openness when discussing the relationship between quality and price – something I am happy to see more and more of the wine trade doing. Part of this requires asking what you are actually paying for when you buy wine. Are you paying a premium for the winery’s name, or a winemaker’s reputation? Are you paying for the buzz built up after a good vintage and some nice scores? Or are you paying for a winery’s lavish overhead and the lifestyle it represents? For better or worse, many of these things are sometimes factored into the price of wines, which is something to think about when you’re browsing the shelves.
For me, fair pricing is simply an offshoot of being fair in general. It’s about building long-term, sustainable relationships, not only with customers and distributors, but also with vineyards, and in a broader way, with the environment. The wineries that chose to locate in warehouse space on Eighth Street East and in other places far from the lush estates elsewhere in Sonoma Valley have gone a long way to reduce their impact on the landscape as well as their expenses. By forgoing fancy tasting rooms and other bells and whistles, these wineries have been able to avoid driving prices up unnecessarily, a practice that has served their customers well. In the end, value isn’t defined simply by the price of a bottle of wine. It is defined by the worth of what’s in the bottle. Value looks beyond ego and status and hype, and instead recognizes concrete things like stellar vineyards in esteemed winegrowing regions, good tools and the right techniques. Using this metric, there are $50 dollar wines that are a great value and $10 dollar wines with no inherent value. The reverse is also often true. Whether we want to use the word or not, more and more genuine wine enthusiasts are looking for value these days. They are also expecting exceptional wines. The trick is finding a way to give them both.
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