Category Archives: Washington wine

Strong Wine

May 11, 2008 By in Fielding Hills, Washington wine 1 Comment

Wine’s strength is usually measured in percent of alcohol — and everyone complains that it is too strong, too hot. A recent charity event reminds me that there are other ways of measuring the power of wine and that perhaps it can never be strong enough.

Tacoma Wine Classic

Mike and Karen Wade of Fielding Hills Winery asked us to pour their wines at the Tacoma Wine Classic, a charity dinner/auction organized by the Tacoma Community College Foundation to benefit TCC’s scholarship fund and education programs. It’s their major fund-raising event and they were hoping to generate about a third of the $500,000 annual target on this one night. More than 200 people paid $150 each to attend. Wineries and others donated thousands of dollars of goods and services (including a “mountain of magnums”) to the auction. Scores of volunteers contributed their time to pull it all together.

We poured the Fielding Hills wines during the reception alongside representatives from Fort Walla Walla Cellars, Kestrel Vintners, McGavick Winery, Milbrandt Vineyards, McCrea Cellars, Northstar, Page Cellars, Spring Valley Vineyards, Woodward Canyon Winery, Maryhill Vineyards and Saviah Cellars (what a great group of wineries). Everyone had a good time tasting and noshing and bidding on silent auction items (wines and wine-related packages). Then the dinner bell rang — more wine, good food, and the oral auction, which included a five-year vertical of Leonetti Cellar Cabernet Sauvignon magnums that went for about a thousand dollars.

As I reflect on this experience the thing that stands out to me is the power of wine to bring these people together to support a good cause. Providing adequate resources for higher education is very important, but the free rider principle is powerful and the “collective action problem” is therefore difficult to solve. It is hard in general to get people to support projects that provide widely dispersed benefits. Mancur Olson, the great political economist, argued that “specific incentives” are often needed to motivate individuals to cooperate to produce collective goods. People need to feel that they benefit as individuals in some way from their support of collective goals and that their individual benefit and the collective benefit are linked. (This is one reason public television stations both ask for your unselfish support of their public good and at the same time try to give you some sort of private good — a Masterpiece Theater coffee mug? — in exchange for your donation.)

Wine’s Hidden Strength

It seems to me that wine lends itself very well to solving the collective action problem. Wine has obvious private benefits, but it is well known that these benefits are best appreciated (magnified?) in association with others. This is obviously true about wine consumption — half the fun of drinking wine is talking about it with friends. But it is also true of other aspects of wine. People gain private benefits from display of their wine knowledge and taste and from the generous feeling one gets in sharing with others. But these benefits can only be realized in the company of other people — they are private goods that are collectively produced, if that makes any sense (I was tasting as well as pouring last night, so my logic may be a bit fuzzy). Educational benefits are both private and public in a similar way, at least to some extent, which makes the wine and education link useful in both symbolic and practical ways.

In an age when many social activities such as listening to music are increasingly individualized and privatized (think iPod here) the power of wine to connect remains strong and perhaps has become more profound. I would like to say that wine has a universal power to bring people together, but that’s clearly wrong. Some people just don’t care about wine — they have other interests– and some positively object to it because of its alcoholic content.

But it is interesting to observe how effective wine can be at events like this to bring together people of different ages and backgrounds to share collective experiences and support a good cause. The TCC Foundation is wise to uncork wine’s hidden strength by making it the theme of their annual fund-raising event.

Taste the Washington Wine Market

April 8, 2008 By in alcohol, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Fielding Hills, Supply and Demand, Washington wine, wine markets Leave a comment

Demand meets Supply in Seattle

Mike and Karen Wade of Fielding Hills Winery in East Wenatchee, Washington asked me if I’d like to pour their wines at the big Taste Washington event in Seattle on Sunday. I jumped at the chance, of course, because you hardly ever get to see supply and demand in the wine market at work in such a personal way. I will admit that I enjoyed this opportunity and I might have been a little too enthusiastic at times. I think my boss, Robin Wade, had to restrain me at times from talking up the wines and the winery more than I should. (Robin is my student at Puget Sound during the week, but she was my supervisor on Sunday at her family winery’s tasting table).

Taste Washington is a big event: more than 220 wineries, 70 restaurants and a long list of what I would call “lifestyle product” vendors ranging from Viking, the maker of high end kitchen appliances, to Maserati, the Italian sports car. Click here to download a pdf of the program. People paid $125 to attend the VIP tasting from 2-4pm. Then the doors opened to the “masses,” who paid $85 for unlimited tastings from 4-8pm. Many of the VIPs were industry people – winemakers, distributors, restaurants, wine shops, and so forth. The “masses” were a very mixed group that I’ll discuss below. I guess about 3500 people came in all.

The event is all about giving things away. Wine is sampled, but cannot be sold. Restaurants give samples of food. No cash changes hands once you are inside the room, but I suppose that exchanges can be arranged for future delivery. Apparently someone bought a Maserati ($135,000) off the show floor. There was a moment of silence (while everyone drew a breath) when that was announced.

The Supply Side of the Pour

The list of wineries was long and diverse. Columbia Crest makes at least 200,000 cases each of some of their Two Vine wines, for example, while Benke Cellars, located near us in the exhibition hall, has a total output of just 200 cases. Some of the most prestigious wines in Washington were represented (DeLille Cellars was across the aisle from us and Quilceda Creek was across the room) alongside humble family start ups. Fielding Hills was one of several wineries in a sort of intermediate position: a small family operation, but one with an impressive record of ratings and reviews and hence a built-in audience among wine enthusiasts.

What do wineries gain from giving away wine at tasting events like this? There needs to be a benefit, especially for the smaller wineries who may pour away a couple of percent of their annual production. Some of the large volume wineries seemed to use the event to show that they were about more than just fruit forward popular premium supermarket wines. Chateau Ste Michelle, for example, poured these wines

  • 2005 Boreal, Columbia Valley $30
  • 2005 Ethos Cabernet Sauvignon, Columbia Valley $38
  • 2006 Chardonnay, Horse Heaven Hills $22
  • 2007 Eroica, Columbia Valley $22

and Columbia Crest offered these

  • 2005 Grand Estate Merlot, Columbia Valley $11
  • 2004 Reserve Red Walter Clore, Columbia Valley $44
  • 2005 H3 Chardonnay, Horse Heaven Hills $15

These are very good wines – on average several steps above what you would probably taste for free at the winery. I like the Eroica quite a lot and I wish I’d found an opportunity to taste the Walter Clore. The Grand Estates Merlot is a great value in my opinion.

I spoke with a famous winemaker – he was treated a bit like a rock star – who spent most of his time in close conversation with customers, distributors, and fellow winemakers. He said he thought it was important to be at the tasting and to make personal contact, but he wasn’t sure if it had much effect on sales. He was “preaching to the choir,” he said, talking with current customers and business clients more than making new ones. I wonder if he’s right. I like to say that wine is good but wine and a story is better. A story about talking with a rock star winemaker adds a lot of value to a bottle of wine. Maybe he was just being modest.

Mike and Karen Wade are certain that this event benefits them by connecting them with the trade network and giving wine drinkers who read about their wines in magazines (but often cannot find them on local shop shelves) an opportunity to see what all the fuss is about. I certainly think the wines made a good impression and even created a bit of a buz in the room as word spread. It will be interesting to see how this is reflected in the market.

Spit, Don’t Swallow!

Spit! We were told to encourage people to spit the wine rather than swallow it so that they would not get tipsy so soon. The trade visitors often did spit, as you have to do if you are really going to taste a lot of different wines, but most people didn’t. They did dump out extra wine into the spit buckets, however, which was a good thing. The woman who came around to empty the spit buckets every 15 minutes estimated that she had collected 20 gallons by 6pm.

Like the organizers, I was worried about the alcohol problem. Faced with 200+ wineries pouring maybe 700 different wines – and you with a bottomless glass until 8pm – it is easy to see how things could get carried away. I only talked with a few tasters who had clearly had too much to drink, however. Most people seemed to understand the problem and, even if they didn’t spit, they tried to limit consumption so that they could continue tasting.

The people on the other side of the table were an interesting collection of wine people. The $125 VIP tasters were mostly trade people, as you might imagine, many with well-defined agendas of people to meet and wines to taste. It was fun to talk with them to get an insider view of the event and the business. The $85 general admission tasters were perhaps younger than I expected (many in their 20s) and more diverse in their apparent knowledge of wine. Many were wine enthusiasts, of course, armed with detailed notes and Parker numbers, looking to taste specific wines, interested in every detail from vineyard to barrel.

Others were “image seekers” (to use Constellation Brands’ Project Genome taxonomy – see next post). They didn’t know as much about wine but they wanted to learn. It was fun to meet them because we were pouring a 2005 Cabernet Franc – a varietal many of them had never tasted before – and I enjoyed watching them make up their minds about what was in the glass. Finally I would say that I met some “traditionalists” and even some “overwhelmed” consumers (it was easy to be overwhelmed at this event, to be honest, with so many wines and wineries present). They were spending $85 to try to figure out what was new and what they liked. That seems like an expensive education until you consider how fast you can burn through $85 on failed wine experiments.

People always ask me if interest in Washington wine is a bubble that will someday pop leaving broken wineries in its wake. It is difficult to be sure about bubbles (ask Alan Greenspan about this) and I actually worry that there might be a supply side wine bubble shaping up and a shakeout coming (Paul Thomas, a pioneer Washington winery, closed shop last year). But the demand side looked strong to me as I poured my measured tastes on Sunday. Education is the key to sustainable growth in the wine industry and I met a lot of people who seemed to be committed to broadening and deepening their knowledge of wine. The Washington wine industry can only benefit from this. That makes Taste Washington a more important program than I thought it would be.

The Chernobyl Effect

January 26, 2008 By in Hedges Cellars, Systembolaget, Washington wine 2 Comments

How a Nuclear accident in the Ukraine launched Washington wine in Europe.

Economics has been called the science of unintended consequences because economists are good at tracking down the complex indirect effects of seemingly simple policies and events. The study of global wine markets always makes me appreciate the power of unexpected connections.

The Washington and Oregon wine industries are making a major push right now to get attention (and distribution) in Great Britain and other export markets. I hope that these programs have their intended effect, but one the first significant Washington exports to Europe was not planned; it was the unexpected consequence of a freak accident. Here is a story that I have pieced together from various sources about how Washington wine made one of its first important impacts on foreign markets.

It started with an accident that occurred on April 26, 1986 in a town called Pripyat in the Ukraine. Pripyat was home to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which experienced a catastrophic failure on that April day, resulting in panic and loss of life. Pripyat was evacuated and remains a ghost town to this day. But the effects extended well beyond the reactor site. Plumes of radioactive fallout rose high into the atmosphere and were taken by the prevailing winds north and west as the map above shows (click on the map to enlarge it).

The northern radiation plume caused panic and alarm in Scandinavia, as you might expect. The uncertain long-term consequences of an unavoidable invisible threat continues to haunt residents of this region. At the time, of course, the priority was to avoid radioactive contamination: stay inside, don’t eat food that was grown in the fallout zone, don’t drink milk from cows that grazed on fallout-dusted fields, and so on. The health concern naturally extended to wine.

Systembolaget, the Swedish national retail alcohol monopoly, faced a dilemma. Much of the red wine it sold came from regions of France that were squarely in the path of the western fallout plume (although not, as the map indicates, among the most severely affected regions). There was no way that it could sell this French wine to anxious Swedish customers.

So the word went out through wine networks: Systembolaget was looking for sources of uncontaminated Bordeaux-style red wines to fill their shelves until the French wine scare was over. And so Tom Hedges received a call. Tom (a 1973 graduate of the University of Puget Sound) was hard at work trying to sell Washington wines in Taiwan — a difficult task in the 1980s as you may imagine. Tom saw an opportunity to act as a middleman between the Washington winemakers he knew who had Cabernet and Merlot to sell and the Swedish wine retailer. He became a négociant as such middlemen are called in the wine business. He bought up surplus wine from various Washington sources, blended and bottled it (under the Hedges Cellars label) and shipped it off to Sweden, where it found customers who might not otherwise have been willing or able to try a Washington wine.

The wines were good enough that Systembolaget came back from more. In fact, they wanted to visit Tom’s Chateau and Estate, to see how good wine was produced in what was to them an unlikely part of the world. This was a problem, of course, since Hedges Cellars was what we would call today a “virtual” winery. And so he responded by planting a vineyard (one of the first on Red Mountain, which is today one of Washington’s premier AVAs) and building a winery (which is now Hedges Family Estate).

Thus did a nuclear accident in the Ukraine help bring Washington wines to the international market.

Washington and Oregon Wines in London

January 21, 2008 By in British wine market, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Constellation Brands, globalization, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, Oregon wine, Pinot Noir, Sainsbury's, Tesco, Washington wine, wine awards 2 Comments

There is a special tasting of Washington and Oregon wines in London today, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at 12 Carlton House Terrace. More than 190 wines from 40 Pacific Northwest wineries are being sampled. Marty Clubb of L’Ecole 41 in Walla Walla is leading an educational seminar about the Washington wines and Howard Rossback of Firesteed is doing the same for the Oregon products. The event is funded in part by a $200,000 federal trade grant. I believe it is the largest organized effort (so far) by Northwest winemakers to break into the European markets. It will be interesting to see if this seedling can grow to bear fruit.

Washington and Oregon are important winemaking regions, of course, but their reputations and sales are concentrated in the United States. Although Oregon Pinot Noirs are always included in the discussion when people anywhere talk or write about new world Pinots, the fact is that not much of it is sold abroad. Oregon wine sales in the UK and France were just over 2000 cases in 2006, for example, out of total production of 1.6 million cases. The word may be out around the world about Oregon wines, but wine distribution and sales haven’t followed — yet.

I don’t have figures for Washington wines, but I suspect that the situation is more or less the same. Washington makes excellent wines (better than Oregon wines, if you judge by the Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate ratings, where several Washington wines receive 95+ points), but so far Washington doesn’t seem to have that one distinctive wine that could establish an international reputation. The state is too varied, I think, in terms of climate and geography for that to happen. Washington is Riesling country, judging by volume of production, but it hasn’t yet established an international reputation with this wine (although it is trying to do so with the Riesling Rendezvous conference). A variety of reds do well here, including both the Bordeaux and Rhone varietals, but no signature style of wine has emerged as the champion. Marty Clubb is telling the people in London that Washington has the ideal climate for wine (that’s the official Washington wine theme), which may be true but doesn’t really define the product for confused international buyers.

Washington does have one advantage over Oregon in the export market: distribution muscle. The Washington wine industry features a few very large players that have the financial clout to potentially open up foreign distribution channels. Money is necessary; it isn’t easy to establish a brand abroad in this crowded market and margins on exports are necessarily lower than for domestic sales, at least at the beginning. I have read that export sales by small scale winemakers are “vanity” projects and there may be some truth to this. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, however.

The Chateau Ste Michelle family of wines have penetrated some European markets. I was surprised to discover a large display of CSM wines in an upscale supermarket next to the train station in Riga, Latvia, for example. I haven’t been able to find out how the wines got there yet — my guess is that CSM’s deal to distribute Antinori wines in the U.S. may be reciprocated by Antinori in Europe but I don’t really know. Other Washington wines including Columbia, Covey Run and Hogue are part of the Constellation Brands portfolio, which may aid in their international distribution, too.

The London tasting isn’t the first effort to get Northwest wines attention in the UK. I remember being in London in about 1990 and walking into Fortnum and Mason only to be shanghaied by an excited clerk who was directing anyone she could to a lonely wine tasting display where they were sampling wines from Hogue Cellars of Yakima. Needless to say, no one had any idea where Yakima was located, but they were amazed that such a unlikely place could produce good wine. Today’s London event is a much larger project than that Fortnum display, but the goal is much the same, to make friends, establish relationships, and get our foot in the door.

I hope the London tasting goes well. Many of the wineries are apparently looking for UK distribution, which makes sense. The UK is the most important wine market in the world. It is a good market to sell wine and to establish a worldwide reputation. A disproportionate number of the world’s leading wine writers and experts are based in London, including Jancis Robinson, Oz Clark, Michael Broadbent and Steven Spurrier. A good word by any of these celebrity wine critics would encourage wine enthusiasts in the UK and around the world to give Northwest wines a try. But the real prize would be a distribution deal with Tesco or Sainsbury’s, which dominate supermarket sales, or one of the big high street wine store chains, since you can’t try wines you can’t buy.

One reason this is a good time to try to break into the UK and European markets is that the exchange rates favor U.S. exports. The dollar fell dramatically in 2007 against both the Pound and the Euro, making U.S. wines relatively less expensive. This will help, but it will still be difficult to get British wine drinkers to think beyond Gallo and one end of the market and Napa Valley at the other.

It’s tough to break into foreign wine markets. Ernie Hunter famously did it the DIY way — he brought his wines to London and entered them in the Sunday Times wine festival, where they won the people’s choice award. Ernie was from New Zealand and his surprise victory paved the road for Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc’s dramatic rise in the world of wine. Washington and Oregon are taking a direct and organized approach, with tastings and seminars. Every case is different. My next post will tell an unlikely story of how Washington wines first came to Sweden.

The California Bill and the Birth of Washington State Wine

December 2, 2007 By in Paul Gregutt, Washington wine 2 Comments

I am spending this cold, wet day re-reading parts of Paul Gregutt’s great new book Washington Wines & Wineries: The Essential Guide (University of California Press) and his chapter on the history of Washington wine got me to thinking about the origins of the industry. Is it possible to point to any one person or event that is responsible for the birth of Washington wine?

There are several possible choices. Some would say that it happened in 1937 when Washington State University horticulturalist Dr. Walter Clore, the godfather of Washington wine, began working in his research center north of Prosser. Dr. Clore and his team are responsible for many of the advances in Washington viticulture that we take for granted today. Without Clore and his colleagues, Washington winegrowers might still be planting Muller-Thurgau and Concord grapes.

Others might argue that Washington wine was born in 1967 when Andre Tchelistcheff, the famous winemaker from California’s Beaulieu Vineyards, came to Washington and praised a Gewurztraminer made by Phil Church, a partner in Associated Vintners (now Columbia Winery). Tchelistcheff’s endorsement lent credibility to Washington wine and his encouragement helped propel the industry forward. (Tchelistcheff even encouraged his nephew Alex Golitizin to make wine in Washington — the result is Quilceda Creek Vintners, the maker of Washington’s first 100-point cabernet sauvignon.)

A third important event occurred in 1976, when the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery opened at the former Hollywood Farms location in Woodinville. The $6 million winery and headquarters complex was the largest single investment in the industry to that time and it represented a great gamble by Ste. Michelle’s corporate parent, the United States Tobacco Company (the makers and Skoal and Copenhagen smokeless tobacco). CSM, which was created through a merger of pioneer wineries Pomerelle and NAWICO before being purchased by US Tobacco, is now the Colossus of Washington wine, accounting for about 70 percent of all wine production in the state.

My choice for the key event in Washington wine history, however, didn’t happen in the vineyards with Dr. Clore or the tasting room with Mr. Tchelistcheff or at the grand opening of the Woodinville winery. From an economist’s viewpoint, the critical act (and it really was an Act) took place in March 1969. That’s when the Washington legislature passed House Bill 100, the California Wine Bill. The California Wine Bill exposed the Washington wine industry to competition from both domestic (California) and international competition and forced winemakers to improve quality or disappear.

Here’s the back story. Many wineries opened or reopened in Washington when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Almost the first thing that they did was to seek protection from the state legislature from out-of-state competition. This protection was provided almost immediately in the form of the Steele Act of 1935, which set up a dual distribution system for wines. “Domestic” Washington wineries could sell directly to wholesalers, but “foreign” out-of-state wines (including wines from California) has to be distributed through the more rigid channels of the state liquor monopoly, the Washington State Liquor Board. The result was that “domestic” wines were relatively easy to purchase and widely available, but “foreign wines” including California products could only be purchased through state stores with their limited hours and strict controls. Later legislation provided for minimum prices in order to prevent competition from cheaper California wines.

The result of this protective legislation was exactly what you’d expect. With no competition to keep winemakers honest, quality suffered. The industry focused on the low end of the market, making large quantities of cheap, sweet, fortified wines like this NAWICO port. There was little incentive for winegrowers to seek quality (although some did) because good grapes and poor ones were all blended together. Although Dr. Clore was busy developing quality wine grapes in Prosser, Washington’s most important grape crop for many years was the Concord grape that went into Welch’s juice and Gallo’s sweet sparkling Cold Duck.

Rather than thriving behind its protective wall, the Washington wine industry collapsed. There were only eight wineries in Washington in 1969 (down from 42 in 1937) and, with a few exceptions such as Associated Vintners, their wine was mediocre at best.

The paradox that protecting a wine industry actually destroys it is not unique to Washington. I have seen it time and again in my research, in New Zealand, Argentina and in France under the EU’s old wine regime. The only thing that can protect a wine industry is competition, which forces winemakers to become more efficient and to raise quality.

With nothing to keep cheaper California wines out, Washington winemakers had no choice but to look upmarket. A quality wine industry emerged and has thrived — there are now more than 500 wineries in Washington state and new ones appear every month. Washington is unusual in the wine world in that it has developed a major wine industry that is not built upon a base of inexpensive bulk wine. Only New Zealand (which cannot compete with Australia at the bottom end of the market) and Washington can claim to have pure premium wine industries.

You can thank competition — and the California Wine Bill of 1969 — for Washington’s status as an important producer of premium wine.

Chateau Ste Michelle

October 28, 2007 By in Chateau Ste. Michelle, Two Buck Chuck, Washington wine Leave a comment

I gave a brief talk to a university group at Chateau Ste Michelle in Woodinville, Washington yesterday and it gave me a chance to think at bit about the Washington wine industry in general, now with more than 500 wineries and growing, and Chateau Ste Michelle (CSM) in particular.

Sue and I were fortunate to be able to spend a couple hours in the afternoon with CSM Enologist David Rosenthal (pictured here) , who is a 2001 marine biology graduate of the university. He’s worked at Mondavi as a chemist and at Oregon and Australia wineries and he now helps make the white wines at CSM. They produce about 400,000 cases of Chardonnay and 750,000 cases of Riesling in addition to smaller amounts of other white varietals. It is quite an operation and David was nice enough to answer all of our questions and take us through the cellar room, sampling wines starting from unfermented juice that had just arrived from Eastern Washington on through the various stages of fermentation and aging. I learned a lot — thanks, David.

I’ve read that CSM uses its large scale wisely, treating size as a resource that permits experimentation and diversity, and I could see this pretty consistently through our tour with David. CSM’s scale is tailored to give its winemakers a great deal of choice when it comes to blending their high volume wines and also to facilitate limited production products, including of course the single vineyard bottlings.

Chateau Ste Michelle is part of Ste Michelle Wine Estates (SMWE), which owns several other Washington brands, including Columbia Crest, Snoqualmie, Domaine Ste. Michelle (sparkling wines), NorthStar (which began as a high end merlot specialist label), Red Diamond, Stimsom Estates Cellars (up-market jug wines), 14 Hands (the manditory critter wine — the critter on the label is a horse that stands 14 hands high) and the boutique Walla Walla producer Spring Valley Vineyard. If you’ve been reading this blog you know how important brands are in the wine market today and SMWE’s strategy reminds me of the old Robert Mondavi company — to have competitive brands from the popular premium shelf on up to the icon level, leaving the low margin bulk wine market (the bottom shelf) to Gallo, Yellowtale and Charles Shaw. CSM and Columbia Crest are the leading brands, with 3 million cases produced between them.

Although everyone associates CSM with Washington, the company’s reach is much broader. Other brands in their stable include Erath (Oregon), Villa Mt. Eden and Conn Creek (Napa Valley) and Distant Bay (Monterey). They are the exclusive U.S. distributors of Antinori wines and have partnerships with both the Antinori family (to produce Col Solare, Washington’s answer to Opus One) and, with the Mosel’s famous winemaker Ernst Loosen (to make Eroica, an exceptional Riesling). SMWE is the largest producer of Riesling wines in the U.S. and possibly in the world! Together with the Antinoris, SMWE recently purchased Stag’s Leap Cellars in Napa Valley, one America’s most distinguished wineries.

In other words, this is big business, both in terms of volume and quality. Altogehter SMWE’s brands produce 4 million cases a year, which is about two-thirds of all Washington wine, and it is a correspondingly huge influence on the whole industry here. Of course, Washington is still tiny, in quantity terms, compared to California. People say that Gallo produces about 70 million cases all by itself. (Since Gallo is family-owned, it doesn’t report as much data as publicly-traded wine producers do, so we have to guess what’s going on in the big warehouses in Modesto.)

SMWE makes a lot of very good wine, which is perhaps more important that quantity in today’s market. SMWE’s brands account for the largest number of Wine Spectator 90+ wines (and the most total top 100 wines) of any producer in the world. It is an interesting fact that Washington doesn’t compete at all at the very bottom rung of wine ladder — the very inexpensive bulk wines that account for much of the total volume in today’s market. You know what I am talking about — Two Buck Chuck and the lesser wines that make that brand look so good. Of all the New World wine regions, only Washington and New Zealand have been able to build a wine industry from the popular premium level up.

But it makes sense: Washington cannot hope to compete with California’s Central Valley producers when it comes to cost-sensitive bulk wines, so it doesn’t try. New Zealand is in the same position with respect to Australia. In both cases, I believe, this actually works to the smaller, higher-cost producer’s ultimate benefit, since all of the focus is on quality and on the growing upper-tier of the market.