And don’t get me started on the white trash managers and supervisors in those places. Literally run by some strange asshole thug druggie meth types. Oscar Mayer plant in west/southern Illinois is absolutely crazy.
This has got to be part of it. IMO, most red wine tastes like boots, and while this is anecdotal, everyone I personally know in my age braket agrees. Non-anecdotally though, there’s so many other options for booze out there that are cheaper and it’s never been easier for a person to try multiple things until they find what they like. I personally think wine is so hyped up culturally in the US and the end product is just… spectacularly underwhelming. Like manky water. Why would I get that when I can spend the same money on 2x the volume of a drink I personally like?
The issue with wine is quality control is dependent many factors, weather, fertilizer management, water management, disease pressure, pest pressure, harvest conditions, unpredictable fermentations and the skill of the winemaker. The more variable the conditions the more unpredictable the finished wine product is.
A good bottle is really tough to make. A mediocre bottle is difficult to make. A poor bottle is what is usually made. I’ve never had an excellent bottle of wine and I think it is a myth. Pricing is mostly unrelated to the quality of the product as well.
When you usually put out a poor product people tend to avoid it unless there is a cultural expectation of low performance. What’s changing is the cultural acceptance of drinking horrible tasting stuff.
The wine industry in needs to adapt and put out a better product or else they will go under.
You’re probably right. But many years ago we wife and I splurged at a fancy restaurant where a sommelier helped pair wines with our food and boy that was something else. When wine works it really works. The issue is that most of us don’t know how to pair wine and foods as well as a pro and it is definitely a luxury product for sure.
I’m glad to see this shift. I hope drunk driving diminishes, too.
Alcohol will be around for a long time I’m sure. But if overall consumption declines, that’s a good thing.
Of course, business owners see anything but constant growth as a “tragedy”. But the smart ones will plan on scaling back and/or getting into something else and/or repurposing grapes.
Personally, I came to realize that alcohol just makes me feel blah, and interferes with quality sleep. I almost never drink anymore, and I don’t miss it.
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.
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