Phd Wine Education

I’m sure I’m going to catch hell for this post from any number of quarters, but it needs to be said.

Big wine companies are favorite punching bags for wine lovers that would never buy their products. Sometime’s there’s a good reason for this, like when they throw their weight around in the marketplace in ways that aren’t exactly good for the industry. The bigger the company, the bigger the mistakes they can make as well.

When they make mistakes, sometimes these companies can be hung out to dry simply because they have deep pockets. And that’s exactly what seems to have just happened to Gallo and Constellation Wines .

You may remember a bit of a scandal last year involving these two big players in the wine world. They bought a bunch of wine from the southern part of France that was supposed to be Pinot Noir and put it into their Red Bicyclette bottles. It turns out, however, that it was only partly Pinot Noir, and happened to contain a lot of Merlot and Syrah as well.

The wines were fraudulently sold by a number of parties in France, all of whom have been prosecuted under French law, even on appeal.

The incident was a severe embarrassment for Gallo in particular, who apparently thought they were buying legitimate Pinot Noir. There are tests, usually involving DNA sequencing, that can determine the grape variety of a wine, but they are very expensive, time consuming, and aren’t normally used in the course of, say, buying a few thousand gallons of bulk wine.

Gallo and Constellation took the steps that you would have expected a company to take when faced with this situation. They pulled whatever product they could off the market, apologized, and cooperated with the authorities that were going after the folks who perpetrated this fraud.

But then three wine consumers in California sued Gallo and Constellation, along with two of the guilty parties in France, alleging “unfair competition, fraud and false advertising.” Now Gallo and Constellation are paying these people and their lawyers $2 million.

We hear various politicians talking about “tort reform” in this country, and stupid lawsuits like this are exactly what they’re talking about.

These consumers were in no way damaged or harmed by the fact that the wine they purchased wasn’t 100% Pinot Noir. The suggestion that competition or the market as a whole suffered as a result is equally specious. Gallo and Constellation certainly made a mistake by buying the wine they did, but it should not result in paying litigation happy consumers who thought they could make a buck by going after a big wine company with deep pockets.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for consumer protection. If Gallo had failed to disclose that it put peanuts in its wine, and some allergic person died of anaphylactic shock, Gallo should be held responsible. If the wine they sold wasn’t actually wine, but was some concocted fake beverage that they synthesized in a lab, then I think there would be grounds for fake advertising claims, like in the 80s when all those “juice” companies were forced to put just how much real fruit juice they were using on their packages.

Those who generally disdain companies like Gallo, will at this point no doubt be shouting at their screens “They knew! They knew,” but I don’t think that’s true. To my knowledge there is not a shred of proof that Gallo or Constellation knew that they were buying adulterated Pinot (which, admittedly says something about the quality of the wine that goes into their bottles). Now, if for some reason it came to light that Gallo and Constellation knew exactly what they were doing, that would change things slightly (i.e. intent to defraud versus an accident) but ultimately the issue is the same: these folks are being wrung for dollars because they did by accident that many winemakers in California do on purpose all the time.

By law, in order to call a wine Cabernet Sauvignon and put it on the label, only 75% of the wine has to be Cabernet Sauvignon (and only 95% of it has to come from the same vintage). The rest can be whatever the winemaker wants. And if you think that those $3, $5, and $7 wines you’re buying at the grocery store are 100% pure, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Most large (read: non-artisan) winemakers manage their production at some level using the bulk wine market, purchasing juice here and there both to ensure that they can produce the volume they need to meet their targets, as well as to find blending components they think can help them make a more appealing wine. Even smaller winemakers will buy some extra grapes or even some extra wine that allows them to turn a few extra barrels of something into a second label wine or a special bottling. Why? So they can sell it. Remember folks, the wine industry is a business, first and foremost.

So while I’m no apologist for the behemoths of the global wine trade, I certainly am appalled at the fact that our legal system not only permits, but tacitly encourages the kind of lawsuits that these companies have been needlessly subjected to.

I’m sure that in the future I’ll be criticizing Gallo and Constellation for something, but for today they have my sympathies.

Punching bag image courtesy of BigStock

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Sunshine, gathered from flowers by tiny apian efforts, forged into ambrosia that tasted of immortality to the Greeks and Egyptians. The alchemy of honey seems no less marvelous even to those that have braved the swarm to witness its creation. Like honey, wine serves to transmute the world’s most basic elements into a form seductive and irresistible. When wines taste of honey they seem to taste of sunlight itself, a brightness that coats the mouth with a satin warmth and gently tugs at the heart like a summer breeze. The scents of honey wafting from a glass urge us on to abandon.

Marc Kreydenweiss Wiebelsberg Riesling, Alsace, France
Chateau Climens Sauternes, Barsac, France
Ken Forrester “T Noble Late Harvest” Chenin Blanc, South Africa
Royal Tokaji Wine Co. Tokaji Aszú 6 Puttonyos Mézes Maly, Tokaji, Hungary

This is part of an ongoing series of original images and prose called The Essence of Wine

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Review by Tim Patterson.

A big part of wine’s allure is that it is so many different things: a source of alcohol, a source of pleasure, a gateway for entry into the mystical, the erotic, the enlightened, the divine, the silly, and sometimes the idiotic. But for thousands of years, it has also been a commodity–and that’s where this book comes in.

Worrying about wine as a commodity seems uninspiring, even tawdry, compared, say, to worrying about the distinctive terroir of some patch of dirt in Alsace. But without the buying and selling, we’d all be home winemakers, wine production would still be primitive at best, none of us would ever have heard of Argentine Malbec, and that special spot in Alsace wouldn’t have its own Facebook page. Money makes the wine go round, and Wine Wars helps to make sense of it all.

Veseth teaches political economy at the University of Puget Sound, is active in the American Association of Wine Economists, and writes the Wine Economist blog. The book’s central metaphor is the “wine wall”–the complicated, diverse array of regions, grapes, brands and price points that can be found at most any wine shop or supermarket. Shelf by shelf, Veseth decodes the logic of what’s where on the wine wall and how it got there. The book’s subtitle–The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists–highlights three dynamics threaded through the story: the bad old days of cheap, insipid, industrial wine (Blue Nun, a wildly popular parody of good German Riesling a few decades back); the much better days of modern, efficient, technologically advanced, global winemaking (Two Buck Chuck); and the militant defense of fine, terroir-driven wine by another whole tier of producers around the world.

Not to spoil the end of the story, but Veseth remains hopeful in the end about the mix of wine dynamics. Despite the seemingly crushing power of global price-cutting and homogenization, he thinks distinctive, even quirky wines have a bright future–in other words, something for everybody.

Along the way, his overview of economic forces that have shaped wine’s career take the reader on a number of historical excursions and international visits. We learn about the German discount wine juggernaut behind the “surfer dude” cosmetics of the Trader Joe’s chain, the convoluted, multi-century relationships between French winegrowers and British drinkers, the marketing logic behind how Costco arranges its shelves and bins, and the rise of Hong Kong as the center of world wine auctioneering. The treatment is breezy and easygoing; not only are there no intricate economic formulas, there is not one single table or graph between the covers.

Nonetheless, Veseth does get to some fundamental economic realities behind the surface of wine, and even readers who pay attention to the ups and down of the wine market will learn something. For example, most wine fans know that the emergence of New Zealand as a high-profile player in the international wine trade is a very recent development, maybe two decades old, seemingly out of nowhere. More studious geeks know that the years of New Zealand’s obscurity were also years when the main grape varieties grown were French-American hybrids, thought to be more suitable to cooler climates but not likely to make any export waves. That reliance of non-competitive grapes might seem to be the prime reason for decades of international non-competition.

What Veseth adds to the picture is that for many years, New Zealand followed an official policy–known as import substitution–of encouraging domestic production by creating barriers to foreign imports. In the case of wine, this meant that backward production practices and grape choices had a free ride, and no incentive existed for joining join the modern wine world. When New Zealand dumped the import substitution strategy and opened the doors to trade in and out, New Zealand winegrowers suddenly discovered they could grow amazing Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, and the rest is drinking history.

This kind of information may not change the way your next glass of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc tastes, but it surely will help you understand how it got there. And that, to go back to wine’s many wondrous properties, gets us back to the lure of enlightenment.

Mike Veseth Wine Wars: The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists, Rowman and Littlefield 2011, $24.95 (hardback).

Tim Patterson writes for several wine magazines, blogs at Blind Muscat’s Cellarbook, co-edits the Vinography book review section, and is the author of Home Winemaking for Dummies.

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