The National Wine
UnClub
Newsletter
Grapey Nuts II
(Why Can't California Produce Good Everyday Wines?)
We are in the era of Two-Buck Chuck folks; admit it! I can't tell you how many times I have recently been approached by customers and friends with the query: "Where can I get some Two-Buck Chuck wine?". If you haven't heard about Chuck's (actually labeled as "Charles Shaw") $2 wine ($2.99 in Nevada and Arizona) you're not watching the national news, surfing the internet, or shopping for wine, period.
The fact is that, with the advent of such a cheap, and not-so-awful, everyday wine like this in American markets, we have seen a ground-swell of savvy buyers lining up for their daily wine rations. The prestigious labels gather dust on the redwood racks while cases of the $2 Chuck red and white are consumed almost before the ink has dried on the cardboard boxes they're shipped in.
Why hadn't this consumer pattern been noticed before by the California wine industry? Such a boon in demand for the products of an industry struggling to stay afloat shouldn't have come as such a mystery to so many producers in the Golden State. Hadn't the rapid pace of sales in recent years for low-priced premiums from Chile, Argentina, Australia, and South Africa, as well as many European wine countries, been enough to convince the marketing gurus of the California wine industry that Americans are desperate for affordable everyday wines?
Why did it take an aggressive wine retailer like Trader Joe's to innovate this wildly popular trend in the wine world? Wouldn't it have been just as easy for the wineries themselves to separate their overproduction of source fruit from their set levels of premium-grade wine and offer this under a Fighting Varietal label designation of their own choosing? These and other relevant questions beg to be answered for today's knowledgeable wine enthusiast.
Well, in deference to California's wine producers, demand had been quite good in the decade of the '90s (boosted especially by the 60 Minutes report in November '89 by Morly Safer illustrating the possible health benefits of wine (the French Paradox). Sales went up dramatically also because of the dotcom explosion of wealth during this period. Everyday Americans were getting rich just by playing the dice with stocks from their home computers. So our Californian wine friends were just producing more and more expensive bottlings to keep up with the burgeoning national interest in their product.
However conspicuous consumption fell off just as precipitously as it rose when the bottom fell out of the dotcom market in the late '90s followed by the events surrounding that terrible day in September, 2001. The Enron and WorldCom debacle followed and we all know how these events affected how we live our lives today. Even though we are in the midst of a gradual Recovery (we hope!), our outlook has perceptibly changed. In other words, we've come down to earth.
The rest of the wine world has been down on this plane (excepting high-rent districts like Burgundy, 1st-Growth Bordeaux, Piedmont and some Super-Tuscan wineries) for many decades. Wine couldn't be sold as an expensive, luxury item because it was seen as a foodstuff commodity that was to be consumed daily with the family meal. Knowing this, the producers made sure they were offering what the general public desired in this regard: good everyday wine.
Retailers like Trader Joe's got this message because they see these kinds of people daily in their stores all over California, Nevada, and Arizona. When they realized this (probably long ago actually) and noticed that there was a massive grape glut in California's fine wine regions, they acted, with their considerably deep pockets, to contract with the most desperate wineries for their excess production. The rest is recent history with the not-so-remarkable wild success of their proprietary Charles Shaw label. Good juice at a more than fair price...my, what a revolutionary concept!
Two-Buck Chuck is destined to be a short-lived brand or the price of it will increase, I predict, as falling supply will not keep up with growing demand. The current, high-quality sources will dry up and prices will rise inevitably; Economics 101. But the lesson should be obvious here for California's wine industry: Keep your quality respectable and your prices reasonable or you'll be upstaged by another round of $2 wine-dumping at your local wine shop!
Cheers!
Donald W. White