The Seedy Underbelly of Cheap Wine

Importer Kermit Lynch's book Adventures on the Wine Trail, in an attempt to de-romanticize the pristine image consumers often have of wine, relays several anecdotes about the art of blending in Burgundy. One vignette describes how a tanker truck went from village to village in Burgundy acquiring wine and the documents indicating each wine's point of origin. However, when the tanker truck "blend" was bottled, every bottle bore the label of the most well respected village that was most likely to fetch the highest price at market. Lynch also mentions that negociants, the middle men who bring the finished wine from cellar to bottle, often had a "house style" that trumped the sort of vineyard to vineyard distinctions one typically finds in Burgundy. It turns out that some negociants--perhaps those who weren't fully satisfied with the tanker blend--mixed bulk wine from Algeria, which was much higher in alcohol, fruitier and generally more robust, with the more delicate, nuanced Pinot Noir of Burgundy to produce a more enticing blend reminiscent of a sturdy Rhone wine.

Although major producers now are more careful to control what goes into bottles bearing their names, these sorts of tricks are still employed. Take for example the American equivalent of Burgundy, California Pinot Noir. Anyone who has seen the movie Sideways knows Pinot Noir is a varietal capable of reaching great heights. However, Pinot Noir, more than most varietals, is rarely very good at moderate prices. It only grows well in very specific locations, and because it is generally lighter bodied than other popular red wines, it's harder to mask deficiencies without introducing a gross imbalance to the wine. Although Pinot Noir wine traditionally is made from 100% Pinot Noir, a producer legally can have as little as 75% Pinot Noir in a blend and still call it Pinot Noir. Yes, the trick of Burgundian negociant "blending" is alive and well in California.

A local retailer advertised RedTree 2008 Pinot Noir via email recently. It had received good press recently from a major wine magazine and was priced to move at $8 per bottle. So how do you make really good Pinot Noir at $8 per bottle? With tea bags of oak chips and generic red blending wine of unknown provenance, of course! It's a win for the consumer if a wine is both good and inexpensive. But it's also a case of deceptive marketing when a consumer buys a Pinot Noir that's really a well-engineered red table wine that meets the varietal Pinot Noir standard. To me it's akin to those fruit juice drinks that have illustrations of real fruit on the bottle, but are 15% juice and 85% high fructose corn syrup water. Pinot Noir sells by name alone, and smart marketers know it's good business to label intelligently in a fashion that's perfectly legal. It's tricks of the trade like these that make me wary of any varietal wine in the sub-$10 range. The wine surely has 75% of the varietal in it, but beyond that the producer is looking to make something that will meet the expectations of the largest number of customers. Good for quality table wine. Bad for any varietal or regional expression in the finished wine.

I noticed another slightly less nefarious, yet equally fascinating detour brought about by the wheels of commerce today. A well-respected Rhone producer has an inexpensive wine they sell under the label La Vieille Ferme. This label has a picture of a chicken on it and sells for $7 per bottle at a local wine shop. Trader Joe's, meanwhile, sells wine from the same Rhone producer for $5 a bottle with the exact same appellations designated on the respective red, white and rosé wines. They go by the name La Ferme Julien and display a picture of a goat. Searching around the web a bit, it appears the same wine goes into these different bottles. One is widely distributed and well received by professional critics, while the other it seems goes exclusively to Trader Joe's. By the transitive property of wine labels, I'm going with the one that costs 28% less as an easy drinking wine for a hot Saturday afternoon.

Blind Tasting, Fun with Numbers and Some Cab Franc

A recent news article about the inconsistency of wine competition results that Jamie Goode commented upon in his blog has put me in a bit of an analytic mindset. In short, a rigorous study found that not only were judges wildly inconsistent from year to year, but also tasting the same wine from the same bottle at different times in the same competition. I've been to a couple of blind tastings recently with a large quantity of inexpensive wines tasted back to back. This strikes me as not all that dissimilar to the sort of situation a judge at a wine competition encounters. Without doing any serious statistical analysis, I figured it would be worth looking at how my own ratings stacked up plotted against price.

The plot on the left shows the results of two separate tastings of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz/Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. There were about six examples of each wine ranging from $2 to $20 in price with the exception of Cabernet Franc, which was only sampled twice. I've included a trend line that averages the score of multiple wines sampled at a single price point. The most interesting and obvious feature in this plot occurs at the $2 price point consisting of Charles Shaw (aka Two Buck Chuck) Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon. Although my written notes include a few qualitatively negative descriptions such as "wet dog" for the Shiraz, "sweetish, mold/funk" for the Cabernet and "flabby" for the Sauvignon Blanc, the average score was 82.75 with a standard deviation of 3.59. A score in the low 80s from my perspective means more or less that a wine is simple, easy to drink and has no really obnoxious flaws. It seems that the Two Buck Chuck is consistently mediocre based on these tastings, which is a pretty good accomplishment for $2. Although I wouldn't buy Charles Shaw even as a cheap daily drinking wine because it's essentially boring, its light body, low alcohol and minimal to non-existent oaking seem to endow it with a mysteriously consistent innocuous quality that allows it to outperform wines with more serious imbalances like excessive alcohol heat and over-oaking.

The second most obvious feature is that there really is no strong trending of the data towards higher scores at higher price points. If you exclude the Charles Shaw data as an outlier, you might argue that there's a slight positive correlation between scores and price. The $12 to $14 range does appear to do better than the lower price range, but the scores at $15 and above simply have wildly large deviations from wine to wine. Part of the explanation might be traced to my qualitative notes on these wines. Those that I rated especially poorly typically had too much obvious alcohol content. Over-oaking and flabbiness were also common complaints, though these flaws tend to make me indifferent to a wine whereas high alcohol and the sinus burn that follows induce outright hate regardless of other merits. I suspect that the $10 to $20 range is where producers start to have grapes that are ripe enough to reach high alcohol levels and where producers start putting money into oak treatment. In most cases, though, I'd rather have a simple, light wine than an overdone wine. Less ripe grapes with less oak tend to work well for me in a cheap wine. Nonetheless, hypothesizing aside, there just isn't much of a price to enjoyment correlation among the wines I tried in these two blind tastings.

Maybe the only really telling result is that the mean score over all 26 wines was 80.12 with a standard deviation of 6.64. In fact, only 5 wines scored better than 85 points and one of those was the only wine that I selected. In my personal ratings 86 points is the threshold where I tend to consider a wine worth buying if the price is reasonable. I simply was not excited by many of these wines, though the majority were serviceable.

Wines that I tasted outside of these two blind tastings tell an entirely different story. The plot on the right shows score versus price on a quasi 100 point scale (a non-100 point scale has been tweaked to look like a 100 point scale) with the price plotted logarithmically. There's good reason to plot the price on a logarithmic scale. Robin Goldstein, author of The Wine Trials, and his collaborators assumed that price grows exponentially with quality in a fairly rigorous study of how tasters rate wine in comparison to price. This is a very reasonable model since a $100 wine is not ten times better than a $10 wine or even twice as good as a $50 bottle. (Incidentally, Goldstein found that there was actually a slight anti-correlation between price and scores assigned in blind tastings by non-professionals, particularly in the under $20 per bottle price range where most of the data was collected, which seems eerily similar to the results I saw in my scores.) If you assume this sort of exponential price model, then ratings plotted against the logarithm of price should result in a straight line. Indeed, the data trends to nearly a perfect straight line except at the lowest price points.

Of course, it is important to point out that these were all wines that I selected to taste one way or another, and particularly above a certain price threshold (say $10) I tend to be selective in terms of buying wines produced in styles that suit my taste. Additionally, these wines were not tasted blind. If anything, this data suggests I'm willing to pay more for wines that I like or at least expect to like. It may also be true, though, that if I pay more for a wine, I'm more willing to be forgiving towards a small flaw. I also tend to taste wines at home over several hours and use a decanter, which is vastly different from tasting blind where a taster typically gets one taste right after the bottle is opened. A wine that improves with air time simply will not perform its best under these conditions.

Regardless of the potential methodological flaws in my "study," what suggests the results are not complete bunk is the realistic variance of scores in the dozens of data points. Some of the more expensive wines around $20 performed quite poorly, while some inexpensive $10 wines scored quite well. While I suspect price does influence my non-blind scores, clearly other factors such as style and quality more strongly influence my personal ratings, especially when I can sample a wine over an extended time period.

Before wrapping up this post, I'll add a couple of Cab Franc reviews from the last blind tasting I attended. I haven't had any Franc content on this blog in a while and am quite overdue. In the interest of disclosure, I knew which wine was the Buttonwood 2004 Cabernet Franc because I brought the bottle and immediately recognized it based on the characteristic bouquet and style of the wine.

Happy Canyon 2007 Chukker: This is a blend of 70% Cab Franc with 15% Merlot and 15% Cabernet Sauvignon. The nose is suggestive of Cab Franc with candied raspberries and some forest floor. But the taste of this wine was almost comically bad. Miles described a particular Cab Franc in Sideways as "hollow, flabby and overripe" and he might as well have been describing this wine. It was sweet and utterly lacked any tannic or acidic structure. I've tasted this wine before and that time there was some spritz when I opened the bottle suggesting there was some in-bottle fermentation. It certainly tasted like it was loaded with residual sugar, so this seems plausible. Regardless, this wine drank like cough syrup and had only the slightest resemblance to Cabernet Franc. I rated this 77 at the tasting probably because the bouquet was decent, but I suspect drinking more of this wine would have caused the score to plummet out of sheer exasperation. Not good at $15 or any price for that matter.

Buttonwood 2004 Cabernet Franc: This wine was dark and tannic. There were the typical floral, leathery, earthy and mushroomy qualities, but the fruit was dark as night. There is much more black currant than red fruit in this vintage than others I've tasted from Buttonwood. The body is not particularly heavy, but the acidity and tannins are both relatively high, which again seems specific to the vintage. This actually drank more like a serious Cabernet Sauvignon than any of the actual Cabernet Sauvignons, most of which were too jammy or oaked to express the varietal. Rated 88 at the time which I think is a fair score. This wasn't the purest Cabernet Franc expression, but it was one of the few honest, well-made wines in the entire blind tasting. Recommended, especially if you like a little rustic edginess to your wine.

Foster's, Australian for Wine

When you walk into a grocery store with an aisle of wines, picking one bottle out from the dozens of similarly priced brands appears to be a daunting task. But unless your local grocery store consciously stocks wine from smaller or local producers, this seeming preponderance of variety is largely an illusion. Foster's, for example, markets its beer as THE beer that Australians drink to give it a unique niche in the US market. But in reality it's less popular in Australia than Milwaukee's Best is in the US. Foster's is just cheap beer in a different colored can.

The same can likely be said for many of Foster's wines. Among the brands that Fosters lists in its portfolio are premium brands of outstanding heritage such as Penfolds, Stags' Leap and Beringer. For these wineries, that likely means wider distribution for their top-end wines while making a few cheaper options in large quantities taking advantage of their well-known name. Also under the Foster's umbrella are more pedestrian but widely available labels like Meridian, the Little Penguin, and Cellar No. 8. Rosemount, which is known as much for its square-based bottle as its wine, also belongs to Foster's.

I don't intend to imply these wines are swill like Foster's beer. Quite to the contrary, many of these brands put good stuff in the bottle. But because they are ultimately looking to maximize profit, a lot of these wines are products manufactured to suit the prevailing tastes of the market. Uniformity and consistency become more important than individuality. The upside is that you know what to expect. There won't be spoiled bottles with weird aromas or unpleasant microbes. But the downside is a lack of differentiation across different labels and varietals.

Foster's is not the only large beverage corporation in the wine business. E&J Gallo owns, among others, Australian labels Black Swan, McWilliams and Mattie's Perch (the one with a koala), American labels Dancing Bull, Turning Leaf and Barefoot, French label Red Bicyclette, Italian label Ecco Domani, and South African label Sebeka (the one with a cheetah). Big boys Constellation Brands includes several lines of Mondavi wines, Rex Goliath (the one with the giant fighting chicken), Ravenswood (as expected, there's a raven on the label), Blackstone, Wild Horse and Arbor Mist under its umbrella. Meanwhile, beverage giant Diageo owns not only Smirnoff, Baileys, Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal and Captain Morgan, but also Beaulieu Vineyards (or BV for short) and Sterling Vineyards. Pernod Ricard has Campo Viejo, Mumm Napa and Jacob's Creek nestled among its collection of hard liquor like Wild Turkey and Absolut.

In another category all to itself is LVMH. They've managed to consolidate luxury (i.e. outrageously expensive) labels such as Chateau d'Yquem, Dom Perignon and Veuve Cliquot. You won't have to worry about homogeneity here, but it is nonetheless symptomatic that one entity owns so much different stuff that ultra-wealthy people love to buy to show how different they are from other ultra-wealthy people. It turns out if you've brought a $200 half-bottle d'Yquem as the desert wine in an attempt to out-do your Dom Perignon Champagne drinking hosts, your money is all going to the same monolith.

Next time you walk into your grocery store, do not fret over the infinite choices presented to you. First, you'll only find about 5 or 6 different varietals. Cabernet, Merlot, Syrah and Chardonnay are about the only choices you'll have. But most of the red wines will taste like generic red wine because they've been manufactured to suppress their individuality in the interest of suiting the tastes of the broadest base of consumers possible. Next, remember that all the labels you see are just marketing angles from a handful of corporations. Animal labels on "critter wines" are sure giveaways that you've found something from a big conglomerate. Kangaroos (YellowTail) are just a way to grab your attention. A corollary is that the consumer ends up paying more for the wine despite its low price because a large chunk of the price goes to marketing and other overhead. You can be pretty sure that whatever you pick out in a grocery store will be similar to 90% of the stuff you didn't pick out and that the critter on the label is not going to make much of a difference on what's inside the bottle.

I'm not arguing against cheap wine, though in many cases you'll get much better value from a small brewer than from a large wine producer for the same price (a bottle of wine gets about the same mileage as a 6 pack of beer). I am suggesting, however, that consumers can make informed choices. There are hundreds if not thousands of cheap wines imported into the US by knowledgeable importers. You won't find these at a grocery store, but often a wine shop will have a selection of these less expensive wines for the everyday shopper. Cheap, interesting wine requires a little research and effort on the consumer's part. After all, you wouldn't go to a grocery store to find a wide selection of micro-brewed ales.