I say this as a millennial who drinks and actually did whisky tasting as my main hobby with reviews for 12 years; I get it. I worked with and in the alcohol industry. They have no clue. It’s all ego and razor thin margins and old ways of running a business. They are heavily resistant to change of any sort. They will not be able to handle this at all.
Add to that they are owned by rich people as vanity projects who want their ROI ASAP at levels that healthier margin/growth industries could barely achieve and we will start seeing them disappear. Which is too bad, because it’s centuries of tradition in some cases, and I find it tasty.
Add to that they are owned by rich people as vanity projects who want their ROI ASAP at levels that healthier margin/growth industries could barely achieve
They say it’s a vanity project and they just love wine…
But yeah, its just another investment.
We end up with bargin bin wine at 10x the price because a rich person who doesn’t know wine is running the business.
Europe has wineries that have existed for decades at least, ran by people who know how to make wine, and how to make a profit for it
For American “boutique wine” I really wouldn’t be surprised if packaging and marketing is a bigger expense than actually making the wine. As other mentioned, lots of Americans are priced out of it, the American economy focuses on selling to the wealthy because no one else has disposal income anymore.
And rich people always just assume that expensive equal better and a rich person knows how to do anything better than someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
Yep. The only way to taste wine is to do it blind so you don’t have preconceptions of quality based on the price. Doing this really exposes that there’s not a ton of rhyme or reason to wine pricing. There is a general trend that you get a better wine for more money, but there are so many outliers, especially expensive wines that just aren’t anything special.
Really the only trend, from my friends and coworkers who have done wine tasting, is that once you climb above the absolute bottom tier, the field is…kinda flat until you start paying hundreds per bottle. That $14 Yellow Tail white will, without a lot of outliers, taste just as good as a white that’s $150. The more expensive one might have a more depth or complexity, but they will be fairly easily comparable overall.
A huge problem with the wine industry in America is that they’ve always tried to position themselves as a premium product with respect to other forms of alcohol. With respect to the information available to the consumer, the pricing seems to be random. Products that are aged understandably are going to cost more, and huge brands should be cheaper than small brands. Other than that, prices just seem to be set to correspond to whatever market segment they are targeting. A $20 bottle of wine may taste way better than a $15 bottle, but it could also be worse. There’s no indication of what could make the $20 bottle better than the $15 bottle other than the fact that it’s more expensive. Some brands put a little bit more info in, like the percentage of grapes, and sometimes they tell you where the grapes came from, but most consumers are just going to grab the cheaper bottle.
Contrast this with beer, where you know higher abv=more ingredients=more expensive, aged beers are more expensive, and beers from smaller or foreign breweries are more expensive. Breweries often tell you the exact ingredients that went in, so you can get a decent idea of what a beer will taste like before ordering, and you can make an informed decision to buy slightly more expensive products.
Wine is a little more tricky because there are fewer ingredients, and less processing, but they could absolutely give way more info. The wines that are good just try to market it as the magic of terroir in a bottle, rather than actually pointing out how and why they are better or taste different.
The “problem” is that wine and other forms of booze generally don’t work as a “new” business. Because you generally can’t charge top dollar without it being aged but also need to make sure that you can guarantee you sell out all those aged bottles/barrels. Because even a few seasons in a glorified warehouse are a mess for bookkeeping and a large investment. It isn’t even that you can’t make five year old bourbon on demand. It is that you have to plan how much you need closer to six or seven years out.
Same with beer, just to a much lower timeline. The reason why EVERYONE has ninety IPAs is that you basically CAN brew that on demand. According to chatgpt, an IPA takes 3-4 weeks (and I have seen a lot shorter periods…) whereas a pislner is 6-8 and others go even farther. But that is still an extra 3-4 weeks of barrel and warehouse time.
So you really do need the mega-corporations to do anything at scale. Which means it is inherently “bad” because people want The Culture and to pretend they can tell the difference between two different vintages of the same wine rather than comparing general families or regions of wine. And corporations won’t have that magic special something.
They did mention that in the comment, they were talking about Wine creation requiring larger amounts of cash to invest in which generally requires corporations.
Yup. Startup cash to cover the potentially months without profit as well as operating cash to be able to plan out a year or two in advance (let alone a decade) and not be beggared if you have one bad season.
But hey, reading is hard when someone can instead key in on one phrase, isolate it, and feel like they have reading comprehension skills.
I couldn’t care less what happens to the wine industry, but are people really using weed as an alternative? They’re completely different experiences. I enjoy drinking, but cannabis is in no way pleasurable to me at all.
Christopher Jordan Ganzel, 24, of an apartment on the 20th block of Poplar Street, was charged Aug. 21 with felony theft by unlawful taking, felony receiving stolen property and misdemeanor unauthorized use of a car, according to court documents.
Felony theft and felony receiving shouldn’t be allowed. It’s one theft that got three charges, but it’s these two in concert that really rub me the wrong way. This is why innocent people plead out.
In principle, I get the idea: that you can’t have someone else steal something for you and then get off the hook because you weren’t the one who stole it. That said, I feel like the laws should be written in a way that precludes someone being charged with both for the same offense, or in a way that delegates the fault such that “taking” and “receiving” add up to the consequences of a single theft charge.
Of course, the US is a Prison State so it’s unlikely one wasn’t added simply to pad out sentence lengths or leverage plea deals.
If you tried to introduce legislation to correct the problem you’d have DAs coming out of the woodwork saying how this would make it impossible to secure plea deals and that would be terrible because they already have too many cases to prosecute. The whole thing would be dead on arrival as a result.
To be fair, that’s pretty much every American. They’re all blood thirsty monsters. Just watch them come to tell me I’m a Nazi for not supporting a second holocaust lmfao
This would be the same as saying pretty much all Palestinians are bloodthirsty monsters who support Hamas, or pretty much all Israelis are bloodthirsty monsters who support the eradication of Palestine. Do you not see that? Do you really think your statement is reasonable or considered, or are you just trolling?
Everythings genocide with you ppl. Get a clue and realize America is extremely pro Israel. You’re in the cast minority and nothing will change no matter how hard you demonize Democrats you’re just going to end up with trump who’ll be worse.
Yes. Hell yeah. I hate how alcohol gets pushed as a “cool” thing to do when it’s so destructive. If anything, getting wasted should be looked down on, not celebrated.
It always has been, whenever marketing isn’t involved. Hell, for example: not only does the US have nearly every single major holiday now orbit drinking as a core element, but long-standing racist tropes do too. It’s a whole thing, this “bread & circuses” they’ve got us plebs distracted by…
I’ll buy the flu and demand angle when I see the egg suppliers post losses.
So you’re rejecting verifiable and well known facts to appease your feelings? Cool.
This is called inflation. Every company ever has done this. Prices are increased explicitly to reduce demand. If they were to lower the prices and take a loss when there’s already no supply, they’d go out of business. Every company adjusts the price of their goods based on demand.
If you’re not happy about it, don’t buy the product. Or, buy products that are already priced at the value they offer. I’ve been paying over $5 for eggs for over ten years. The prices have not changed. Paying a dollar for a dozen eggs is absolutely ridiculous. Finding out that people were pissed because an egg was costing in excess of a dime or two is something I’m still struggling to come to terms with.
If you want to go on about corporate greed in agriculture, you should be looking at the beef and pork producers. The entire industry is a literal organized crime ring run by four companies using a shared database of sales and profits to push prices up in unison.
August egg sales were up more than 5% compared to 2023, and producers sold 237 million eggs in the most recent four-week period. “We haven’t seen that number since the first year of COVID,” he said, when sales soared as consumers stocked up on staples including eggs and toilet paper.
Are these those verifiable and well known facts to appease your feelings? Cool.
Kinda. That’s an additional problem caused by resellers. This topic is about farmers and whole sale prices and consumer demand. What you’ve linked to is not inflation but corporate greed.
“On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation,” Groff wrote.
You don’t need even near the amount of male hatchlings that get produced for reproductive purposes. The vast majority of male chicks on egg farms get ground up.
Also, from an animal rights standpoint, “hey we don’t kill all of them, we need some males in order to subjugate their offspring to cruel conditions!” is more of an argument against egg farming than for it.
It’s why I have my own chickens. When they don’t lay eggs, we let them live until they die or get sick. Fun fact: a chicken can eat up to 80 ticks an hour! And their poop is excellent manure for apples and pears.
obviously yes, did you not know that? they also sear their beaks off with hot metal to keep them from pecking each other in their horrifically cramped conditions, the egg industry is insanely cruel.
It’s a 3 trick pony - red, white and rosé… sure you could probably differentiate $10 wine with $250 wine with the latter generally tasting better, but the baseline range of flavours is the same. Beer is great since you can drink a lot and get a milder buzz, whiskey and spirits get you drunk more instantly, where wine is an in-between that isn’t very appealing. Beer/Cider/Seltzer/Hard Soda types of drinks and Spirits have a great range of flavours in comparison to wine too.
If wineries and breweries want people drinking more, they have to invest in trains (lol), so that they can serve their product on them and we won’t have to worry about drunk drivers.
You are completely wrong about it being a 3 trick pony. There is tons of variety in wine beyond the color. But I’m not actually here to argue that because I completely agree with your last point. The thing that most often keeps me from drinking is the need to drive home at the end of the night. I don’t want to kill someone and I didn’t want to lose my job (I drive for work) because I went out to drink. So I drink at home which is not a healthy way to drink. So I don’t drink regularly.
If I didn’t have to drive to work I’d walk more which would put me on the ground, passing more bars and restaurants with the option to pop in for a pint and a bite to eat. Then hop on a tram or underground or light rail and head home full and happy. But we can’t have nice things like that in the US because oil rules or politics.
Yeah it’s not like I hate wine either, and characterizing as 3 types I agree is a massive oversimplification. It’s just it has fewer elements that interest me to go out of my way for it compared to craft beer and spirits.
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