Veseth - Money, taste, and wine: its complicated!

Praise for Money, Taste, and Wine

In Money, Taste, and Wine , preeminent wine economist Mike Veseth teaches us how to be a rational, informed wine consumer by better understanding available wine choices, personal tastes and preferences, and common wine-buying mistakes. Along the way, he provides fascinating insights into the workings of the wine industry in a fun and interesting way with his engaging and provocative writing style. A must read for anyone who drinks wine or has an interest in the wine market.

James Thornton, Eastern Michigan University; author of American Wine Economics

A remarkable blend of research, history, and examples straight from the heart of a genuine explorer makes this book a must read. Mike skillfully walks his readers through the multifaceted relationship of money, taste, and wine and leads them to a smart, optimistic, and enjoyable conclusion. A perfect fit for those who thirst for more.

Evy Gozali, CEO of Sababay Winery, Bali, Indonesia

Money, Taste, and Wine

Money, Taste, and Wine

Its Complicated!

Mike Veseth

Rowman & Littlefield

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

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Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Veseth, Mike, 1949

Money, taste, and wine : its complicated! / Mike Veseth.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-3463-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-3464-2 (electronic) 1. Wine industry. 2. Viticulture. 3. Wine and wine making. I. Title.

HD9382.5.V47 2015

338.4'76632dc23

2015000756

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Part I

Buyer Beware!

Chapter 1

The Wine Buyers Biggest Mistake

The biggest mistake that wine buyers make? Buying books instead of wine. No wait. That cant be right. Let me start again.

Give someone a fish, the old saying goes, and she will eat for a day. Teach her to fish, and shell eat forever. Good advice, I suppose, but not very useful to me. What about the wine? How am I supposed to enjoy all that fish if I dont have any wine to drink with it?Sauvignon Blanc if it is Alaskan halibut beurre blanc , maybe a nice Pinot Noir if its grilled Chinook salmon. No end of choices for trout, depending on how it is prepared.

Its just not the same without wine. I wont go so far as to say fish isnt worth eating (or lifes not worth living) without a nice glass of red, white, or ros, but the experience (for me) is greatly diminished. Thats the trouble with these wise old sayingsthey only give you part of the answer.

The Biggest Mistake You Can Make

Wine buyers make a lot of mistakes, whether guided by wise old sayings or other sources of advice, which is easy to understand. A typical upscale supermarket in the United States will offer between eight hundred and two thousand unique wine choices. The breadth and depth of choice can be overwhelming. I suppose you could just settle on one wine that satisfies you (searching by trial and error for the most part) and then simply buy that wine again and again and again, the way that I buy Grape Nuts breakfast cerealbut wheres the fun in that?

With so many wines to choose from, it is no wonder that wine buyers made hundreds of different mistakes, but the biggest is very easy to say and difficult to overcome: we confuse price with quality and often spend too much on wine. The myth is that more expensive wines are better and that cheaper wines are necessarily inferior. Deep down we know that this is nonsense, because wine is a matter of taste. Are more expensive books always better books? Are more expensive movies, plays, or musical performances always more enjoyable? Does the most expensive menu item at McDonalds make you happier than a good ol Big Mac? So why do we think wine is different?

One answer is that most of us arent able to taste all the different wines at various prices, and if we did taste them, we might not trust our own palates to correctly tell good, better, and best. So we make the heroic assumption that if it costs more, it must be betterhow else could they charge such a price? And if they have to sell it for less, it must be pretty mediocre stuff. Not everyone thinks this way (reverse wine snobs unite!), but enough do to make a cautious generalization possible.

A typical wine buyer finds a price comfort zone and sticks with it, reaching up to a higher price for special occasions and stooping down to cheaper stuff when quantity is more important than quality. If you were shopping for a wine to bring to a special social function, do you think you would reach up or down? Its instinctiveI catch myself doing it, even though I know better. But it is a mistake.

Price and Quality by the Numbers

It isnt very difficult to come up with circumstantial evidence that quality doesnt always rise with price. If you live in the United States, you can probably do all the research you need while you are standing in line to pay at the grocery store. Just choose a long line (so youll have a little extra time to gather empirical evidence), and then grab a copy of Wine Spectator , Wine Enthusiast , or any of the other wine magazines you are likely to find near the checkout stand. Now turn to whatever part of the magazine has the wine ratings (they are in the back in Wine Spectator ) and take a close look. (Because I insist on playing my own games, Im going to report from an issue of Wine Spectator that was sitting on my desk as I wrote this.)

If you page through the wine ratings, you will surely see that some types of wines are more expensive than others. But if you drill down within a wine category, the notion that higher-priced wines are not necessarily better wines will start to emerge. Im going to look at the section in this issue on French wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon region.

The top wine in this category is a Ctes du Roussillon-Villages 2009 by the famous winemaker M. Chapoutier. It cost $110 and received a fine score of 92/100. (Im using Wine Spectators 100-point rating numbers here as a convenient way of making a point, not because such scores are perfect measures of wine quality.) The tasting note makes it sound really yummywish I could sample it, but even if I was willing to spend that much money, the chances that I would stumble onto this wine are fairly lowonly 150 cases were made, and there are lots of wine drinkers in the world!

Next on the list is another Ctes du Roussillon-Villages wine, this one from the 2011 vintage. Domaine Gardis made 3,300 cases of it, and while the tasting note is different in detail, the wine sounds just as interesting but costs much lessjust $21. The rating? The same 92/100 as the wine by the more famous producer.