Have you ever wondered what exactly makes French wine so special? While a true wine connoisseur could explain it 100 times better than me, I can't help but think of the interesting role America had in making French wine so darn coveted and expensive. During the mid nineteenth century, around 1863 to be more exact, American viticulturalists nearly wiped out the entire European wine industry with a root disease they unwittingly introduced into England’s botanical gardens. Oops. Devastating as this incident was, during the period leading to the recovery of the vineyards abroad, the demand for French wines in the U.S. started skyrocketing, and has remained in high prestige ever since. As American consumers become more knowledgeable about all the great wines of the world, and access to those wines improves, a lot of the cache those French wines once held will likely soon confront a reality check not unlike our current U.S. real estate bust. As they were saying after each economic bubble we've experienced this decade: What goes up, must come down – to reality. C'est la vie, mon ami!
A quick side note: There is a well known wine marketplace that is soon about to dump millions of wine bottles onto the market by making many private wine collections available to the general public. Look out for headlines and falling prices everywhere.
Value Perception Smackdown
In a culture where we easily swing from the generically branded version of a product to the most popular of the lot (take for example generic vs. branded Tylenol), it’s especially easy to see how when it comes to wine selection we need vendors to help us make easier purchase decisions. Thanks to growing consumer interest in wine, and more flexible legislation around distribution, grocery store aisles have grown exponentially in the past 10 years alone. Nevertheless, today, the average wine consumer still lives in what is analogous to the pre-Starbucks Coffee era, where the vast selection of middle-of-the-road wines, ranging between three and six years old, is – we think – as good as wine needs to be for our wallets. Suffice it to say, most of those wines on the store shelves are quite average. Ahhh, the smell of fresh Folgers coffee wafting from that red tin can as you puncture the huge chrome top with the can opener. Remember those days?
Wine distributors, with their legacy distribution and pricing models, have for the most part created the “middle class” wine consumer; having established mediocre quality benchmarks for consumers to base wine purchase decisions on. Most consumers see the wine selection in grocery stores as falling into either the proverbial Trader Joe’s $1.99 “two buck chuck” category on the low end, or the stuff kept on the top shelves, usually sold between $30 to $90 as the high end category. Everything else in between is priced at around the same level, and where most of us try to stay. Under this value perception paradigm, when you want to feel that you are splurging, you simply dip deeper into your wallet and grab a bottle from the higher shelf; which might come from France or Italy, but in reality its quality may not be any higher than that of the locally produced variety of the same type that sell at half the price.
Regardless of our typical purchase habits or wine knowledge, even the least of wine geeks knows that a properly aged bottle of wine should have a higher value than it’s younger competitor. We seem to know this almost out of instinct or common sense, as the notion of something being good as old wine has become somewhat of a cultural cliché, although it’s also really a growing measure of what is now average consumer wine knowledge. Now imagine that one day you walk into your favorite neighborhood grocery store to pick up something special from the wine aisle to pair with your dinner. As you scan the shelves trying to recall which brands you've either liked or disliked in the past, out of all the confusion you suddenly start to find solace in scanning for a nicely designed bottle that falls into your sweet spot price range. Then all of a sudden, what is this? A 23-year-old bottle of wine boasting a gold medal, and it's offered at the same price as the rest! Something does not compute. Everything I learned about determining wine value, I learned from Safeway's distributors, and they learned it in kindergarten!
Grocery store wine distributor training video.
Yes, there’s so much more that goes into a purchase decision other than price and the age of the wine. There's also the brand, process, climate, soil, and countless other variables that go into a successful production year. All great fodder for a good wine marketing story, without a doubt. I would even go as far as saying that individually none of these variables is as impactful in marketing wine, as are all of these attributes when woven into a cohesive story that helps us understand a wine’s character. Moving towards my point, what if this award-winning wine not only happened to come from the same grape varietals as the famous French wines, but also happened to be grown on rich soils at the same latitude as Bordeaux, France, with the same advanced technologies and richer soil? Quick! Get online! What are our favorite publications and blogs telling us about this value phenomenon? There has to be a catch! Right? No. Welcome to the Moldovan wine country.
In my personal experience, Moldova is the land where one’s traditional value perception of what a good wine is, not only gets turned on its ear, but also gets recalibrated with every pour of a new variety of wine you taste. In my discovery, Moldova is the last wine frontier – a bountiful wilderness at the edge of the settled, global wine country - awaiting its discovery by the rest of world.
Big deal, you say. These great wine values are on the other side of the globe. What will this do for the traditional grocery store shopping experience in the near future? What will it do for me? My guess is, in the short run, nothing. There are way too many politics and old traditions to overcome in wine distribution before products like this go causing any major disruption all the sudden by going toe to toe with all that wine in the middle tier at the grocery store. The day you are able find a bottle of 1986 Negru de Purcari wine at your neighborhood store among the other $40 bottles, I guarantee it will be an experience to remember. Until then, I recommend looking for a boutique Moldovan wine distributor, or simply take the plunge and make it out there to Moldova and check it out for yourself.
As for all of you wine lovers who are curious about the U.S. wine consumers being on the verge of busting out of the wine version of the proverbial pre-Starbucks Coffee era, here’s a little investment tip for you: Vino Volo wine bars.
Shhhh.
