Category Archives: wine brands

Decanter’s Wine Power List

July 14, 2009 By in British wine market, Constellation Brands, cork vs screwcap, Costco, critics, decanter, Economic impact, EU wine reforms, globalization, Tesco, wine brands, wine critics, wine distibution, wine magazines, wine markets, wine ratings 1 Comment

Decanter, the self-proclaimed “World’s Best Wine Magazine,” takes its rankings very seriously. Wine rankings, of course,  and, in the July 2009 issue, Power rankings. Who are the most powerful people in the world of wine and what does the power list tell us? Let’s see if we can find the message in this bottle.

The Power List

The names on the power list are very interesting but the story that they tell about wine today is perhaps more important. Here are the first ten (top ten) people on the list.

  1. Richard Sands, USA, Chairman, Constellation Brands
  2. Robert Parker, USA, wine critic
  3. Mariann Fischer Boel, Denmark, EU Commissioner for Agriculture
  4. Mel Dick, USA, Southern Wine & Spirits (wine distributor)
  5. Annette Alvarez-Peters, USA, Costco wine director
  6. Dan Jago, UK, Tesco wine director
  7. Jean-Christophe Deslarzes, Canada, President of Alcan Packaging
  8. Jancis Robinson, UK, wine critic, author and journalist
  9. Nicolas Sarkozy, France, President of France
  10. Pierre Pringuet, France, Pernod Ricard

Since Decanter is a British magazine with very small US distribution you might be surprised that three of the top ten positions (and both of the top spots) are held my Americans, but don’t be. Constellation Brands is the largest wine company in the world and accounts for one out of eight bottles of wine sold in the UK. And Robert Parker is best known for his ratings of French wine, not Napa bottlings, which is important to British buyers and merchants. The presence of Sands and Parker at the top of the list does not reflect any sort of US-centrism, just the realities of the global marketplace. It really is a global list. Or at least, like those famous New Yorker cover illustrations, the globe as seen from London.

I won’t list the second ten names (out of 50 in total), but the I think they illustrate the global reach of the wine market today: America, China, Chile, Australia, Spain and so on. Even India, an emerging wine market, makes the top 50 ranking.

The list is complete and up-to-date (Gary Vaynerchuck, the US internet wine guru, shows up at number #40), but there are some interesting gaps. Fred Franzia, the godfather of Two Buck Chuck, is nowhere to be found, for example, despite his obvious influence on the US market, while Judy Leissner of Grace Vineyard in China, who perhaps represents the future of Chinese fine wine, makes the “Ones to Watch” list.

No wine economists make the list, alas. Greg Jones, the respected Southern Oregon University wine climatologist, is the only professor (#33). Maybe next year …

The Story

It is fun to see who makes the list and who doesn’t (why Jancis and not Oz?), but the ranking is more interesting if you strip out the personalities and consider what market forces they represent. Herewith my version of this  story.

The world of wine is very unsettled. Although wine is one of the most fragmented global industries (much less concentrated than beer or spirits, for example), size matters more and more as consolidation continues. [Hence the power of Constellation Brands, Pernod Ricard and Southern Wine & Spirits.] Reputation matters, of course [Parker and Robinson], but the world is changing and everything is up for grabs from how and where wine is sold [Costco and Tesco] to how the bottle is sealed [Alcan].

Although change is generally associated with New World wine, this is no longer the case. The biggest threats to “business as usual” for Old World wine come from inside the European Union itself. On one hand, the new EU wine regime [Mariann Fischer Boel] will pressure Old World wine to compete with the New World head-on and without continuing EU support. On the other hand we have an unexpected prohibitionist movement [symbolized by Sarkozy] that seeks to regulate wine like the Americans do (even as some parts of America are changing) — as a dangerous controlled substance. It is thus imperative for Old World wine to master the tricks of the New World industry — tricks that Constellation and Southern and Costco symbolize.

These changes take place, of course  within the context of the expanding global market, global climate change and a continuing global economic crisis (that’s where a wine economist would have been a useful inclusion).

I won’t pretend that the Decanter Power List is a scientific ranking (Decanter doesn’t claim this in any case), but it is an interesting peek into how wine insiders view their industry. I’ll be curious to see how the names and the story lines change when the next Power List appears.

Supply and Demand in New Zealand

June 19, 2009 By in book reviews, globalization, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, New Zealand, Rabobank, Supply and Demand, wine brands, wine markets 1 Comment

My copy of the second edition of Michael Cooper’s Wine Atlas of New Zealand arrived this week and I am having trouble putting it down. Cooper’s coverage of the wines, the wineries, the people, the industry and the market is exceptional. And it is stunningly beautiful, too, with excellent maps and spectacular photos. A coffee table book in terms of size and weight, but with real substance. One of the two best regional wine atlases I own (the other is Burton Anderson’s Wine Atlas of Italy, which is still a valuable reference 20 years after its publication).

(Note: Cooper’s NZ Wine Atlas hasn’t been released yet in the US, but it is easy buy from UK online sellers like Amazon.co.uk.)

The Amazing NZ Wine Story

I’ve always been fascinated by the New Zealand wine story — how a tiny (0.5 percent of global output) wine producer at the far corner of the earth could become a leading global brand (a NZ wine is the #1 Sauvignon Blanc in the US) and earn the highest average export price of any country in the world.

I couldn’t wait to get Cooper’s second edition because a lot has changed for New Zealand wine since the first edition was published in 2002 and my last research trip there in 2004.  A lot has changed, but a lot has stayed the same, too.

The biggest threat to New Zealand’s success has stayed the same: the problem of balancing supply and demand. New Zealand was plagued by boom and bust cycles for many years. Overproduction of low quality wines created a crisis in the 1980s. Many winemaking businesses collapsed and were snapped up by NZ or foreign buyers, leading to the internationalization and consolidation of the industry. The NZ government initiated a grubbing up scheme in 1986 to reduce vineyard plantings, especially of low quality wines, setting the stage for the current boom.

New Zealand has been extremely successful in this era of global wine, which has been characterized by high quality, a strong global brand (Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and now Pinot Noir as well), and a liberal trade regime that accepts high import levels of inexpensive wine as the price to be paid for high levels of higher-priced exports.

The Spectre of Surplus

Despite this success — or more precisely because of it, fear of wine and grape surpluses, price wars and market collapse continue to haunt New Zealand producers — at least those who are old enough to remember the crisis of the 1980s. In agriculture we know that nothing generates a surplus tomorrow faster than high prices today.

Cooper’s data make this boom-bust concern easy to understand. New Zealand’s industry has grown rapidly — can it be sustained? Producing vineyard area in New Zealand tripled from 10,000 hectares in 2000 to more than 31,000 hecrates (projected) in 2010. Wine production rose from 60 million liters in 2000 to 200 million in 2008. The number of wineries risen, too, if not quite so quickly: about 600 today, up from 334 ten years ago.

NZ domestic wine sales and wine imports have been relatively flat over the last ten years, so essentially all of the increased production has been targeted for export: 87.8 million liters in 2008 compared with just 15.2 million liters in 1998.

So far the world market has been wiling to absorb this rising production (and without diluting the NZ brand and the price premium it commands).  Can this continue into the future or does Stein’s Law (see note below) apply?

A recent Rabobank report on “New Zealand Wine Supply — Testing Limits” provides mixed indicators. Rabobank acknowledges the importance of balancing supply and demand, especially given the world economic crisis, and notes that nature may limit runaway growth. Marlborough is running out of land suitable for vineyards, according to the report.

The day will come when the quantities of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc available … will reach its physical limit and the long term supply and demand outlook looks very favorable for growers and producers in the region. It is vital that in the next 10 years the reputation and bargaining power of producers in this region be maintained in order for the region to enjoy higher returns in the future.

In other words, things look good in the long run, it’s the short run that NZ needs to worry about. Persistent short term surpluses could devalue NZ wines from premium products to commodities. That would be enormously damaging to the industry.

There are some indicators that the damage is happening now. I have heard of deep discounts on some New Zealand wines in Britain, for example, and I even saw iconic Cloudy Bay on sale at Costco this week for just $20, about $10 less than its price last year.  More to the point, however, today’s Gisborne Herald reports that Pernod Ricard, which owns a number of important NZ brands, is terminating many or most grower contracts in the Gisborne region (North of Hawkes Bay on the North Island). The president of the Gisborne Winegrowers group is quoted

I have fielded a lot of calls from very concerned and distressed growers — my advice to them is to certainly not spend any more money on any of those blocks … Meantime, they should talk to their accountants and bankers.

Gisborne is a major producing area, but it doesn’t have the name recognition abroad of Marlborough, Martinborough, Hawkes Bay and Central Otago. It is Chardonnay country with 52.8% of producing vineyard area in that varietal compared to 8.2% planted to Pinot Gris and less than 4% each to Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir. Chardonnay has become unfashionable — it is not where the market growth is these days. It makes sense therefore that Gisborne might be the first area to feel the combined effects of an overall surplus and shifting demand.

The Next Big Thing?

What is to be done? The Rabobank study looks to Pinot Gris, arguing that it could join Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir as a leading NZ export wine thereby expanding and diversifying the NZ export market. The expected growth of wine consumption in Asia is one factor in this optimistic scenario, since Pinot Gris is said to pair well with Asian foods. Food friendly and premium price — these are attractive qualities it is said in the growing Chinese wine market, according to Rabobank.

Pinot Gris is also thought to be a style that younger wine drinkers will find fun, friendly and easy to like (but also flavorful, unlike certain Pinot Grigio  you may have been served …). Michael Cooper is optimistic, too, in his Wine Atlas discussion of the varietal., citing “high potential” and “impressive weights and flavour richness” on both North Island and South wines.

Pinot Gris is profitable, too. Made in stainless steel tanks with no oak aging, Pinot Gris is a good cash flow wine.  I can’t remember seeing NZ PG on store shelves here in the U.S., however. Perhaps I’ve just missed them or maybe NZ producers are focusing on different markets — Britain, Australia or Asia? — to avoid undercutting Sauvignon Blanc sales here.

“Demand for Pinot Gris,” the Rabobank report asserts, “should underpin even greater returns for growers in the medium to long-term.” A good thing, I think, if things hold together until the medium- and long-term arrive (there’s a famous Keynes quote about this, although I don’t think he was talking about wine). There is still the old problem of the short-term supply-demand balance to be worked out.

Note: Stein’s Law (named for Presidential economic advisor Herbert Stein, is that if something cannot go on forever it will stop. Stein’s point was not that all bubbles burst but rather that market forces tend eventually to rein in unsustainable trends (although not always in a gentle way) and you don’t necessarily need government to do the job for you.

The #1 Sauvignon Blanc

June 9, 2009 By in brands, Constellation Brands, globalization, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, New Zealand, Supply and Demand, wine brands, wine markets 1 Comment

Decanter.com reports that Nobilo Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc has overtaken Kendall Jackson as the best selling Sauvignon Blanc in the United States. The ranking is based upon sales volume, but the wines retail for about the same $10 to $12 price,  so Nobilo probably ranks first by value as well. An amazing achievement, given the many obvious challenges the New Zealand wine industry faces in terms of size, production cost, shipping distances, access to US distribution and so on.

A Matter of Style

It is interesting to consider how Nobilo and the New Zealand industry have  managed to achieve this success. The first reason is the distinctive quality of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc itself. Even wine critics who don’t think very highly of Sauvignon Blanc in general (I’m talking about you, Jancis Robinson) acknowledge that the Marlborough wines are distinctive and that the best of them are truly exceptional. In my house they set the standard for Sauvignon Blanc.

Why are these wines so good (and so popular)? Winemakers always start with the vineyard and it is certainly true that Marlborough seems ideally suited to produce Sauvignon Blanc grapes. (Ironically, no grapes at all were grown there before the mid-1970s). The skills of the winemakers are also important. The distinctive style of the wines is another factor. The June 2009 Wine Business Monthly includes a fine article by Curtis Phillips on Sauvignon Blanc yeasts that nicely explains the NZ style. NZ SB, he writes, emphasizes a varietal style, letting the fruit speak forcefully. The French SB style is “anti-varietal,” he says, emphasizing texture and minerality over fruit aromas and flavors.

Finally there is the oak-influenced style, which originated in France but was made famous by Mondavi as Fumé Blanc. This barrel-fermented SB style remains very popular in the U.S., but has obviously been eclipsed in the marketplace by the fruit-forward Marlborough product.

The New Zealand varietal style is a hot commodity. New Zealand producers should hope that it stays hot and doesn’t fade as some popular regional styles have done (I’m thinking about how quickly Australian Shiraz has fallen from favor).

The International Influence

Nobilo’s rise to #1 in the US market is not an accident, according to the Decanter.com article. Nobilo is a Constellation Brands product — one of five New Zealand export brands of ConstellationNZ (see logos above).  Joe Stanton, the ConstellationNZ CEO, explains that his company’s strategy was to make Nobilo the top US SB by focusing on “traditional” wine buyers and giving them what they expect in the way of packaging for premium wine: cork instead of screw-cap, for example, and flint-colored glass bottles instead of traditional French green. Plus, of course, the intense Marlborough aromas and flavors. New wine in old bottles (and closures), I guess, and it worked.

ConstellationNZ accounts for 40% of all NZ wine sold in the US — an astonishing figure, but understandable given the strong brands that it has acquired (Nobilo, Kim Crawford, Drylands, Selaks) or built (Monkey Bay)and the efficient distribution system that has evolved to get these wines and all the other Constellation products on store shelves and restaurant wine lists.

In fact, the New Zealand industry is dominated by foreign-owned wineries, as wine writer Michael Cooper points out in the new edition of his fine Wine Atlas of New Zealand. Of the top wine producers only two (Delegat’s and Villa Maria) are Kiwi-owned. The largest producer is Pernod Ricard NZ (formerly Montana wines), part of the big French drinks group. Pernod manages 25 NZ brands according to their website, including of course Montana (sold as Brancott Estate in the US), Corbans, Church Road and others.

The most famous NZ wine — Cloudy Bay — is owned by LVMH Möet Hennesy-Louis Vuitton, the French luxury goods conglomerate.  Matua Valley, another leading NZ producer, is part of the Australian Foster’s Group. The list goes on.

It is tempting to consider the pluses and minuses of international ownership as Michael Cooper does briefly in the article linked above. This is a topic that I plan to analyze in more detail my next book. In the meantime, however, it is perhaps best to consider how the combination of the local (New Zealand’s wonderful terroir) and the global (big multinationals like Constellation and Pernod Ricard) have combined to both produce New Zealand’s tasty wines and to deliver them to our doorsteps.

New Zealand has done specutacularly well in the global wine market so far. What lies ahead? Watch this space!

Wine, Recession and Argentina

April 30, 2009 By in Argentina, Australian wine, brands, Chateau Ste. Michelle, economic crisis, exchange rates, globalization, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, New Zealand, Supply and Demand, Washington wine, wine brands, wine markets, wine price Leave a comment

The global economic crisis has been bad news for Argentina, but good news so far for Argentinian wine. Will the wine part of the story have a happy ending or, like so many Argentinian economic booms, turn eventually to bust?

Bad News and Good

The Economist Intelligence Unit reports that Argentina’s economy has been hard hit by the economic crisis. The economic forecast is gloomy (see below) with the only good news being that inflation, while still high, is falling.

Given rapidly declining business and consumer confidence, the government’s fiscal stimulus measures will have a limited effect, and we expect the economy to contract by 3% in 2009, before only a mild recovery in 2010.

Unofficially measured inflation will ease to 10-15% in 2009, as private demand falls. The official rate will end 2009 at 6.8%, with a similar rate in 2010.

The peso will continue to depreciate in 2009 owing to weaker foreign-exchange inflows, before the pace of depreciation slows in 2010. The current-account position will weaken in 2009-10.

The Argentinian wine economy situation is sunnier.  The May 2009 issue of Wine Business Monthly includes two reports that paint a bright picture of Argentinian wine trends.

The first story is a competitive analysis of Argentina wine in the United States market.  It reports that U.S. imports of Argentinian wine have risen dramatically in recent years, from 2.6 million cases in 2006 to 4.3 million in 2008.  The total value of Argentinian wine in the U.S. rose from $75 million to $146 million in this period.

It is important to put this increase in perspective, however. Total Argentinian imports are roughly equal to the annual output of a single US winemaker, Washington State’s Chateau Ste. Michelle. So the Argentinian presence is rising, but from a modest base.

Molto Malbec

Unsurprisingly, Malbec is Argentina’s calling card in the U.S. market. Malbec’s share of Argentinian wine imports increased from 35% to 48% over 2006-2008 measured by volume and from 44% to 55% measured by dollar value. I was interested to learn that Argentina wine sales are rising at all price points, not just in the value brand segment as you might imagine.  But value is still important.  Argentinian wine prices are rising, but still relatively low.  The article reports that the average FOB price has increased from $29 to $33 per standard 9-liter case.

In the same issue the results of the Nielsen company wine market survey for the period ending 2/7/2009 are reported.  Argentinian table wine imports were up 40% by dollar value for most recent year.  This compares to a 10 percent increase for Chile, one percent for Italy and a one percent decline for Australia.  Overall growth in imported wines was 2.4 percent by dollar value for the most recent year.

The 40 % annual rise is spectacular, but  Argentinian wines account for just 1.4 percent of U.S. domestic wine volume compared with two percent for Chile, nine percent for Australia, almost 10 percent for Italy. This shows that Argentina either has a lot of room to grow in the U.S. market, as optimists will perceive, or a lot of work to do to escape niche player status.

American Exceptionalism

I think the Argentina producers were wise to focus on the U.S. wine market for their export surge.  Although the European Union is more important to Argentina in other major export sectors, the U.S. is the target wine market, and that’s a good thing in this economic environment.  EU wine consumption has long been in decline because of demographic and market shifts, for example, while wine sales have been rising in the U.S.

The recession is likely to depress wine sales growth in both the U.S. and the EU, but the impact will be less in the U.S., I believe, if only because I think the recession will be shorter here. My current thinking is that the U.S. economy will benefit from greater short term fiscal and monetary stimulus, compared with the EU, and more effective medium term structural adjustment.  That said, the recession is and will be very severe.

Early U.S. evidence suggests that wine sales have actually continued to rise during in the first year of the recession, when measured by case volume, although the dollar value of those sales has declined as consumers trade down.

Opportunities and Threats

Reading the latest articles on WineSur, a noteworthy Argentinian industry website,  it pretty clear that Argentina producers appreciate both the opportunities and threats inherent in the current situation.  The opportunities — to establish a market presence built around good value and the rising popularity of Malbec — are significant. But I think it must be hard for Argentinians to see silver linings without looking around for associated dark clouds — their country has suffered repeatedly from the global market booms and busts.

Some of the threats are strictly economic. Argentinian producers are currently benefiting from a falling peso value relative to the US dollar, for example, which helps their wine hit market-friendly price points in the US.  But the falling currency is in part a reflection of high domestic inflation rates, which ultimately lead to higher production costs. A lot will depend upon how the inflation (cost) and exchange rate (export price) factors balance out in the future.

Some of the threats relate more to the fickle nature of the wine market itself.  Malbec and Argentina are nearly synonymous today, but this could change as other wine regions adopt their signature varietal. A recent visit to the Walla Walla AVA, for example, found many producers experimenting (successfully, I think) with Malbec.  Argentina has the first mover advantage in Malbec and must capitalize on this because it will face more competition in the future.  This happened to New Zealand (Sauvignon Blanc) and Australia (Shiraz) and I do not think Argentina will be different.

In exploiting its Malbec lead Argentina will need to strike another difficult balance, between establishing a useful “house style” that will build market identity and letting this deteriorate into a stylistic “monoculture” that soon bores consumers.  It seems to me that Australian Shiraz is currently suffering from the “monoculture” curse, perhaps unfairly, while New Zealand still benefits from a popular “house style,” although I’m not sure how much longer it can ride the gooseberry wave, especially given the vast quantities of Sauvignon Blanc that need to be sold.

Argentina is at a crossroads at a critical moment and moving in the right direction.  Count me cautiously optimistic regarding the future of Argentinian wine.

Update: Just hours after I posted this piece about Argentina the following item appeared on the Decanter.com website.

Argentine wine harvest down 25%

May 1, 2009  / Jimmy Langman

Due to climatic conditions, this year’s wine harvest in Argentina will be down 25% as compared to last year.

According to Argentina’s National Wine Institute, hail in some provinces, and overall higher temperatures in February and March, are factors in the lower production output this year.

The lower production this year has occurred despite Argentina having a 12% increase in land under cultivation for wine grapes.

Guillermo Garcia, president of the National Wine Institute, said: ‘If there had not been an international crisis, we would not have been able to provide wine to countries with developed markets.’

Garcia added that Argentine wine companies need to begin keeping more than three months of stock on hand to make up for such production shortfalls.

Exequiel Barros of the Mendoza-based Caucasia Wine Thinking consultancy told decanter.com that many Argentine wineries are worried about their ability to supply medium-priced wines but added: ‘We need to see how the international outlook develops this year before we can dare to make any projections.’

In Chile, wine growing areas that are not irrigated, such as Cauquenes in the Maule Valley, are predicting a similarly low harvest, with an estimated drop in production from 30 to 40% because of higher temperatures and low rainfall.

Most wineries in Chile, however, are reporting a good harvest. ‘The lack of rain has been good for this year’s harvest. But wineries in the far south, such as in the Bio Bio, may experience changes to quality because of the higher temperatures,’ said Edmundo Bordeu, professor of oenology at Chile’s Catholic University.

How Many AVAs are Enough?

January 31, 2009 By in Supply and Demand, Washington wine, wine brands, wine markets 3 Comments

“How can you govern a country with 246 cheeses?” Charles De Gaulle.

The US Treasury’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)  recently approved the Snipe’s Mountain American Viticultural Area (AVA) designation — the tenth AVA in Washington State. There are nearly 200 AVAs in the US (click here to see the list), most of them in California. Not as many AVAs as French cheeses, but we are gaining on them.

This news provokes some thoughts on the meaning of AVAs and the obvious question, how many AVAs are enough?

Staking a Claim

AVAs are geographic designations — they tell us something about where a wine comes from. They “stake a claim” as the old prospectors used to say, in a particular patch of dirt (although it might be a pretty big patch, as the map indicates).  Prior to the introduction of AVAs, American wines mainly were labeled by state — California Zinfandel, New York Riesling.   These very broad designations are still used for wines made from grapes sourced from several different regions within a state.

A Zinfandel made from equal amounts of grapes grown in Sonoma, Mendocino and Lodi (three different AVAs) must wear the generic California designation rather than a more specific geographic indicator. At least 85% of the grapes must come from a particular AVA for its name to be used. Wines that blend grapes from different states are simply American and I’ve seen this designation from time to time — most recently on a California-Oregon blend.

The evolution of American AVAs is complicated, but I think it is fair to say that they generally began with relatively broad classifications and have in recent years become increasingly specific.  In Washington, for example, the first AVA was Yakima Valley (1983), followed the next year by a much broader designation (Columbia Valley — see map above) that encompasses most of the state’s major vineyard areas and essentially replaced the “Washington” designation plus a second relatively narrow one (Walla Walla).  Both the Columbia Valley and Walla Walla AVAs span the Washington-Oregon border, showing the vines and state lines don’t always align.

The Yakima Valley AVA has been partitioned by subsequent AVA claims and now includes three sub-regions: Red Mountain, Rattlesnake Hills and the new Snipe’s Mountain AVA.  There are now seven AVAs within the Columbia Valley appellation, with an eighth (Lake Chelan) on the horizon.  If Washington’s AVAs are this complicated, with AVAs and sub-AVAs, you can only imagine what the California map must look like.

Appellation Wars: AVA versus AOC

In America we talk about AVAs while the French and others speak of AOCs (or their equivalents) and you might assume that the concepts are the same even if the names are not.  But you’d be wrong.

AOC stands for Appelation D’origine Contrôlée, a system that began as a simple geographic designation like America’s AVAs, but has developed into something more complicated and, well, more French.  Originally AOCs were all about fraud prevention — protecting the reputation of honest Champagne winegrowers, for example, by making it illegal to put the Champagne label on a wine made mainly from grapes grown in other regions. This assurance, it was believed would give the Champagne regional “brand” greater value.

And it did, but this led to a different kind of fraud.  Some producers cut corners, over-cropped and so forth, making cheaper, poorer wine that could legally wear the geographic designation because of the grape’s origins.  The only way to protect the region’s reputation (and the value of its brand) was to regulate both  where the grapes were grown and how the wines were made.  And so the contemporary AOC system was born.

AOC regulations start with a defined geography and add detailed rules regarding wine making.  They are meant to assure that the wines are made to a particular recognizable standard and are typical, in both type and quality, of the region.

(As we know from the Super-Tuscan controversy, winemakers don’t always agree believe that the AOC standard wine is the best wine that can be made — typical is not necessary superior.  Super-Tuscans are wines, frequently excellent ones, that do not satisfy the AOC rules because they use non-standard grapes and non-standard winemaking techniques.)

AOC in USA: Coro Mendocino

There is only one AOC in the US as far as I know. A voluntary association of  Mendocino, California wineries have created a wine standard they call Coro Mendocino.   Coro means chorus in both Italian and Spanish and refers to both the harmonious group of winemakers behind this program and, I suppose the designated blending of grapes.  You can read the production protocol here. The SipMendocino.com website explains that

  • Coro wines must be made exclusively from Mendocino fruit
  • Zinfandel is the dominant varietal and represents 40-70% of the final blend.
  • Second tier varietals may not exceed Zinfandel as a majority component and are limited to Syrah, Petite Sirah, Carignane, Sangiovese, Grenache, Dolcetto, Charbono, Barbera and Primitivo.
  • A “free play” of up to 10% of any vinifera source may be used for fine tuning if desired.

Coro Mendocino is a typically American solution to the problem of setting a standard.  It is a voluntary association built around a shared commerciall  brand — the labels of wines from different makers all employ a standard design so that they are recognized first as Coro Mendocino and only secondarily as the product of a particular winery.  Coro Mendocino reminds me of the better known and quite successful  Gimblett Gravels initiative in New Zealand, which is essentially a privately-sanctioned AVA within the Hawkes Bay region.

Too Much Information?  Or Too Little?

Appellations are controversial at every level of analysis.  In Europe, for example, the existence of hundreds of tiny regional subdivisions is seen by some as a roadblock to effective wine marketing.  The wine market is being rationalized by the new EU initiatives and simplicity is the order of the day.  Local winemakers are outraged, however, because they fear the consequence when their local appellation “brand” is merged into a less distinctive (but perhaps more marketable) regional appellation.

On a local level, I have heard many winegrowers grouse about whether a new AVA really has a distinctive  terroir or if it just had enough money and political clout to get its designation.  And of course the drawing of lines is controversial, since who is in and who is out can be pretty arbitrary at times.

From the consumer standpoint the existence of AVAs does potentially provide information.  Theorists say that information is any news or data that reduces uncertainty.  In wine, information would reduce the buyer’s uncertainty about what’s in the bottle and so increase confidence in the buying decision.  Sometimes AVA or AOC designations do this, but not always.  Buyers need to know what the appellations mean and this can be problematic if the regions are very large and diverse in a geographic sense and if the producers make wines in very different styles.

And, of course, too many AVAs can produce a sort of ungovernable confusion of the sort that De Gaulle bemoaned in France. Uncertainty increases with the number of AVAs at some point.

I will be interested to see how the reputation of the Snipe’s Mountain AVA develops.  It certainly is a distinct geologic feature of the Yakima Valley (check out this map), but the reports that I have read stress its historical importance more than its terroir. Snipe’s Mountain was the site of one of the first important plantings of vitis vinifera grapes in Washington State.

Wade Wolfe, who knows Yakima Valley maybe better than anyone, has made wine from Snipe’s Mountain fruit and thinks it could have a bright future with the additional attention the AVA designation draws.  If so, then one more AVA is will not be one too many.

Book Review: The Business of Wine

January 4, 2009 By in book reviews, Supply and Demand, wine brands, wine markets, wine research Leave a comment

The Business of Wine: A Global Perspective by Per V. Jenster, David E. Smith, Darryl J. Mitry and Lars V. Jenster.  Copenhagen Business School Press, 2008.

The Business of Wine is an ambitious little book.  It aims to provide a streamlined introduction to the global wine busness, which is a lot to try to cover in just 198 pages. The result is necessarily a bit uneven but still quite useful.

This is a useful introduction, especially good for students, but not a book to give to your Master of Wine colleagues. If you are an expert on the French wine industry or wine market, for example, you will probably bemoan the lack of depth found here. But if you know little or nothing about the topic, you will probably think this a good place to start.

A survey of the winegrowing sectors of the major world wine nations takes up about a quarter of the pages and this is probably the most uneven part of the book.  This is understandable, I think, because there is just so much information that could be included and so little space to hold it, so the choice of what to say and what to omit is very arbitrary. The result is necessarily a bit superficial, but still useful. Consult your Oxford Companion to Wine for fuller detail.

My favorite chapters were more narrowly focused and thus able to provide more depth. Chapter 6 on the History and Development of the Distribution System includes a very interesting analysis of the evolution of wine distribution channels within Europe and the shift of power from producers to distributors and then to supermarkets, which have exploited their position by building backward product chain linkag

Chapter 8 on wine company strategies is also noteworthy — this time for its effective use of brief but informative case studies to show how wine companies in different market segments have developed particular strategies. Company profiles include Gallo, LVMH, Foster’s, Freixenet and Chateau Margaux.  Some of the information is already a bit dated, which is understandable because the wine business is so dynamic, but the analytical points are still useful.

The Business of Wine is very readable overall, although it would benefit from more thorough copyediting, both to catch typographical errors and to make sure that the tables are all clearly explained. The lack of an index is unfortunate since this limits the book’s utilityas a reference volume, especially for students

Note:  Thanks to Francine Graf for bringing this book to my attention.

Asking the Right Questions about Wine

December 19, 2008 By in biodynamic wine, brands, Changyu, China wine, climate change, cork vs screwcap, wine auctions, wine brands, wine markets, wine price, wine research 3 Comments

It’s finals week at the University of Puget Sound, so I’m thinking about the question, what wine goes best with final exams and term papers?  A sweet wine, to capture the sweet taste of success?  Some bubbles to celebrate finishing one set of tasks and moving on?  Or maybe a bitter sweet wine, because moving on inevitably means leaving some people and relationships behind?  Hard to figure how best to match a wine with all these emotions. It’s a difficult question.

Dump Bucket Drills

But I know one wine that doesn’t match up very well.  My class on “The Idea of Wine” organized an informal tasting on Monday to celebrate finishing their term papers.  The main project was a blind tasting of inexpensive (some were very inexpensive) Merlots.  I was impressed with the students’ serious efforts to evaluate and score the wine and their recently acquired (and, for college students, somewhat unnatural) propensity to use the dump bucket.

We tasted other wines including a Chinese wine that Brian West personally hauled back from Beijing a few years ago.  It was a 1999 Changyu Cabernet Sauvignon.  Changyu is China’s oldest winery and a good example of a mid-market Chinese wine (I wrote about Changyu and the Chinese wine industry in The China Wine Syndrome).

I found a video review of this wine on the web (click here to view it, but be forewarned that there is some harsh language used by the reviewer) that described the wine as being all about ashtray and coffee ground flavors with aromas of urinal crust.  Hard to imagine.  Until you taste it, that is.  The description is right on the money.

I’ve read many optimistic reports on the Chinese wine industry, mostly based on high potential production volumes and not so much on quality.  The quality wasn’t there in 1999, based on this wine, but there is reason to believe that things are changing.  I sure hope they are! The dump bucket got good use on this one.

Hard Heads, Soft Hearts

I’m reading my students’ final papers now – they are quite good, by the way – and I thought you might be interested in their topics.  I gave them great freedom to choose topics that interested them or related to their academic majors.  You can find a list of the paper titles at the end of this post.

Most people think education is about learning the right answers, and this is certainly important, but I think the more valuable skill is learning to ask the right questions, and this is true about wine.  I was impressed by the creativity of the questions my students asked.

One student, a Finance major, asked why Treasury bill auctions and wine auctions have different structures and what the impacts might be? A very interesting theoretical treatment. Another student did fieldwork in three wine retailers to try to understand the actions and interactions of wine buyers and wine sellers. The result was a revealing first person account of wine consumer behavior.  An economics student who grew up in Napa Valley examined issues relating to migrant labor there, combining economic theory, empirical data and personal observation very effectively.

All the papers were very interesting. My favorite title: “How corks are being screwed over” (an analysis of the cork versus screw cap debate).  Imagine, I get paid to read this!

Looking at the list of paper titles, I’m struck by how many students were drawn to issues of sustainable or ethical production and consumption:  organic wine, climate change, biodynamic wine, fair trade wine and so forth.  In general their analysis was thorough, pointed and objective.  They have “soft hearts” and “hard heads,” as Princeton Economist Alan Blinder would say.  They care about social issues, but think about them critically.  Blinder says (and I agree) that’s better than the other possible combinations: soft head/hard heart, soft heart/soft head or hard head and heart.

  • Comparative analysis of changes in Treasury auctions versus global wine auctions
  • An ethnographic study of wine consumer trends
  • Hispanic workers in California’s wine industry
  • Climate Change: what it means for Spanish vineyards.
  • Climate change and the wine industry
  • TetraPaks and cans: the alternative packaging of wine
  • Movement from niche markets to mainstream: prospects and challenges for ethical consumption in the wine market
  • The terroir of equality: fair trade wine
  • Organic wine: the beginning of redefining fine wine
  • Oak in Wine: an exploration into differences.
  • Green wine: ideas and details of sustainable wine
  • Wine’s historical and modern role in religion
  • Of vines and witchcraft: biodynamic wine
  • India’s wine prospects
  • Old world crash: wine’s changing face in the globalized market
  • What makes that bottle so expensive?
  • How corks are being screwed over
  • Aging wines: from barrels to bottles
  • Drowning in the wine lake
  • Wine brands: friend or foe?
  • Wine tourism and economic development
  • Bordeaux versus Burgundy: why the rivalry matters
  • Transitioning wine industries: assessing development strategies in the wine industry

The Rise (and Fall?) of Celebrity Wine

November 8, 2008 By in brands, Gallo, Martha Stewart, wine brands, wine markets 2 Comments

We live in the age of Celebrity.  People are celebrated for their achievements in sports, politics and the arts.  Some people are even celebrated for their lack of achievement — famous for being famous, as the saying goes.  I won’t name names, but you know what I mean. Celebrities are everyone — in the news, on TV and all around us through ads and product endorsements.

People Magazine’s Wine

Lil Jon

Lil Jon, Celebrity Winemaker

So we shouldn’t be surprised that there are celebrity wines, too.  Some wines simply use a celebrity name as a marketing tool.  I think the Martha Stewart label falls into this category (the wine is made by Gallo). Other celebrity wines are more than just marketing projects (although having a famous name doesn’t hurt).  The Fess Parker and Francis Ford Coppola wines come to mind here.

Celebrity wines are hot, or at least that’s what the indicators say.  People magazine features an article on celebrity wines in their November 10, 2008 issue.  People asked Gary Vaynerchuck, a celebrity wine critic, to rate the wines of four celebrity wine makers.  Hip-hop artist Lil Jon’s Little Jonathan Winery Chardonnay ($15.99) scored a solid 89 points.  Sopranos star Lorraine Bracco’s Italian-made Pinot Grigio ($11.99) earned an 86+ rating.  Mötley Crüe rocker Vince Neil’s $9 Petite Sirah is an 88-point good buy, Gary says.  And the $20 Victory Rosé from Olympic figure skater Peggy Fleming’s winery, Fleming-Jenkins, received 87 points. (Fleming donates $2 to breast cancer research for each bottle of this pink wine she sells — a use of celebrity clout that is difficult to criticize.)

The Nielsen Report

Maybe you aren’t entirely comfortable taking wine recommendations (or wine market analysis) from the pages of People magazine. If so, then a study released by The Nielsen Company (market research experts) might interest you.

The Nielsen data, which do not reflect the impact of the current economic crisis, indicate that grocery store sales of celebrity wine grew by nearly 19 percent in 2007, albeit from a low base (the celebrity wine category is still a small market segment — less than one percent).

The average price of the celebrity wines, $8.50, is higher than the supermarket average of $5.75, according to Nielsen. Unsurprisingly, the Nielsen report focuses on marketing and distribution (not the quality of the wines themselves) as the key factors driving sales growth.

“Several factors are fueling the growth of celebrity wines,” said Hurst.  “First, existing brands are expanding and gaining new distribution through new line extensions.  Second, more celebrities have launched their own brands in the past year or have had suppliers launch products under their names.   As these brands have proven themselves, they’ve gained distribution in other retail outlets, which has further stimulated growth.   And third, savvy marketers leverage the ‘celebrity’ benefit into expanded marketing programs via in-store vehicles, outdoor events and traditional and online media.”

Celebrity Wine Myths

Like the “critter wines” that they superficially resemble, celebrity wines are associated with a number of myths that should be briefly considered.

Myth #1: Celebrity wines are an American phenomenon. Alas, no.  One of the most famous celebrity winemakers is the French actor Gerard Depardieu, who now owns vineyards in Bordeaux, Languedoc, Spain, Morocco and Argentina in partnership with wine tycoon Bernard Magrez. Ernie Els, the South African golfer, has a line of wines from his home country, following the example set by Australian Greg Norman. New Zealand actor Sam Neil has an estate in Central Otago.

Myth #2: Celebrity wines are bad wines. No again, although I admit I haven’t tried very many of them.  The studies I have found suggest that celebrity wines are just like wines generally, you can find examples that are good, bad and maybe even a few that are ugly (hey — good, bad, ugly — that would make a great name for a line of Clint Eastwood wines!).  Because celebrities have an incentive to protect their personal “brands,” I suspect they try to avoid associating their names with really foul products. At least some of the celebrity winemakers take a real personal interest in their products, which is likely to make a difference in quality.

Some celebrity wines are excellent, which is easy to understand. Celebrity is a powerful force in today’s world and celebrity winemakers can often leverage their fame through connections and associations that contribute to wine quality.  You know what I mean — privileged access to quality grapes, personal advice from talented professionals, and so forth.  Football hero Drew Bledsoe is opening a winery called Doubleback in Wallla Walla, his hometown. I think he is bound to make good wine because so many wine professionals have taken an interest in it.  Wine people, even prominent ones, are only human and like to be associated with heroes and to participate in their projects. The wine can’t help but benefit form this attention.

Myth #3: Celebrity wines are bad for the wine business. Celebrity brands draw attention away from “real wine,” this argument goes, and only cheapen and commodify the idea of wine.  There is obviously some truth to this, especially if we consider multi-product lifestyle brands that have expanded to include a wine component in their portfolios– Martha Stewart, for example, and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin empire. It seems to me that these associations diminish wine as a distinct product by reducing it to “just another” Martha S or Virgin label.

But most celebrity wines that I’ve seen don’t fit this mold and create a different kind of celebrity association.  These products may benefit the wine market by attracting new customers and encouraging wine drinkers to try new types of wine.  They also probably distort the market a bit, making it marginally more difficult for non-celebrity wines to get distribution in some market segments.  On balance, the influence of celebrities is probably positive since they draw public attention to wine.  Even the readers of People now know a little more about wine thanks to the Lil Jon piece.

The Future of Celebrity Wine

Prediction is difficult, economists like to say, especially about the future.  But I’ll hazard a guess about the future of celebrity wine.  As a category of wines I think celebrity wine will remain a small but vital niche.  Wine is part of society, so why should wine be excluded from the celebrity effect?

Some celebrity wines will thrive, but I don’t think it will be because of a famous name.  In the long run I believe that the quality of the wine is what matters.  I cite Fess Parker as evidence in this regard.  The wines are very good and speak for themselves.  The Fess Parker name and Davey Crockett association hardly matters after you’ve pulled the cork.

But most celebrity wines will rise and fall in sync with the notorious name on the label. Celebrity itself tends to be fleeting and I suspect that most celebrity wines will be here today and gone tomorrow, replaced by someone and something new. Fame’s famous quarter hour passes quickly these days as the media moves on to tomorrow’s headline and a new People profile appears.

[Note: Special thanks to Emily Gordon for bringing the People article to my attention.]

A Riesling Revival?

August 12, 2008 By in Chateau Ste. Michelle, Dr. Loosen, Riesling, Supply and Demand, wine brands Leave a comment

A hundred years ago the most treasured and expensive wines in the world were not the great reds from Burgundy and Bordeaux, they were wonderful Rieslings from Germany.  Since then Riesling has fallen on hard times in the market, although its status among wine critics and cult collectors has not wavered.  Now there is change in the air.  Have we entered a Riesling Renaissance?

Riesling Rendezvous

Woodinville, Washington was the center of the Riesling world for a few days in July when Chateau Ste Michelle and Dr. Loosen hosted a program called “Riesling Rendezvous” that brought together more than 200 producers, critics and industry representatives from around the world. (Chateau Ste Michelle let me attend to do research for my next book – thank you CSM for your support!).  This was the second Riesling Rendezvous conference and a third round is planned for 2010.

Chateau Ste Michelle is the largest Riesling producer in the United States – more than 700,000 cases of their Columbia Valley Riesling are released each year along with a number of other Riesling wines that range from a Dry Riesling all the way to a deliciously sticky Ice Wine.

Dr. Loosen is a famous Mosel producer that has a decade-long relationship with CSM – they jointly produce a Washington Riesling called Eroica and work together in other ways – so their Old World – New World partnership makes this event a natural.  Ernie Loosen (as everyone calls him) is a great ambassador for Riesling.  He reminds me of the glass artist Dale Chihuly – funny, flamboyant, affable and dead serious about his work.  We tasted a lot of wine at the event, including one that Ernie made in 1983 that still sings; quality Riesling is built to last.

The Curse of the Blue Nun

Riesling Rendezvous operated on at least two levels.  The top level was a celebration of Riesling in all its diverse forms.  The $50 ticket to the Grand Tasting on Sunday is one of the great values in the wine world, in my opinion, as dozens of producers poured their best wines on the Chateau grounds and the CSM chefs prepared finger foods to accompany them.  Each of the trade sessions I attended included tastings of great Rieslings brought from afar by the producers.  Honestly, no one could come away unimpressed with the state of Riesling wine today and the commitment that winemakers around the world have to this great varietal.

The state of the Riesling wine economy is another matter.  The Riesling market went all to hell in the 1970s when German producers pumped out lots of low quality wines to try to appeal to a mass market (a market defined here in the US, I suppose, by the big jugs of sweet California “Rhine” wine that filled the supermarket shelves).  They made the fatal mistake of devaluing their brand.  Riesling’s reputation suffered and it has been a long struggle to rebuild it.  Perhaps this is Riesling’s moment, now that everyone has grown tired by simple over-oaked Chardonnay and thin Pinot Grigio. Perhaps this is under-appreciated Riesling’s time to shine?  Certainly the sales numbers are trending up, although a relatively small segment of the market accounts for most of the sales.

But Riesling has an identity crisis and a lot of the discussions centered around this fact.  There is no one Riesling wine, as we learned through the tastings, because Riesling reflects it terroir so faithfully.  Wines from different vineyard areas (or subject to different cellar choices) taste very different.  This diversity is one of Riesling’s most appealing characteristics, but it makes it hard to sell to confused and uncertain buyers.

Consumers as a group tend to think of Rieslings in terms of a single characteristic: its sweetness. This is a shame because there is much more to wine than sweet versus dry, but it is Riesling’s particular burden, its  Blue Nun curse.

Rieslings are sweet, of course, but they also are dry.  I tasted wines that ranged from a few grams per liter of residual sugar (very dry) to perhaps fifty times that.  But the key to Riesling isn’t dry-sweet, as Pierre Trimbach said on the first day, it is balance – the balance of sugar and acid and the other critical elements of the wine.  The technical problem is to produce balanced wines of whatever degree of alcohol and residual sugar.  The economic problem is to communicate to consumers the characteristics of the wine so that they can buy it with confidence.  I would say that the Riesling Rendezvous showed that producers are closer to solving the technical problem than the economic one.

Riesling and Thai Food: How Many Stars?

Consumers want to know what’s inside the bottle and it is particularly hard to explain this with Riesling.  The nature of the wine isn’t as transparent to buyers as the glass bottle it comes in.  The German wine labeling rules classify wines by their sugar levels, which reveals something about the wine, but that isn’t as useful as you might think since two wines with similar residual sugar levels can have different tastes depending upon the acid balance, the type of sugar (some forms of sugar taste sweeter than others) and of course the myriad other factors associated with wine.  The German code gives some information, but it doesn’t solve the problem. In a way, in fact, it might define the problem because it defines Riesling by its sweetness.

New World labels aren’t much help either.  Only a few of them give technical data that would help a geek like me figure out what’s inside.  Some use vague descriptors (what does “off dry” mean and why is this one producer’s off dry so much sweeter than another’s?) but most just make you guess what style of wine you have before you.  Guess wrong three times in a row and I predict you will stop buying Riesling wine for a while.

A producer group, the International Riesling Foundation, is trying to address this problem by creating a clear and simple system that would tell consumers what to expect – something perhaps like the star system commonly used in Thai restaurants.  You know how it works: one star is mild, five stars is very very hot.  The star system makes people more comfortable ordering food at Asian restaurants, although there is obviously more to Thai food than just heat (and more to Riesling than residual sugar).  It’s worth a try, I suppose.  Even a trustworthy dry-to-sweet graphic index would probably help in the marketplace.  Sake producers (see below) are working on this problem, too, although I wouldn’t recommend their particular descriptors (a translation problem?).

This is how different styles of Sake are described on www.sake.com

This is how different styles of Sake are described on http://www.sake.com

I hope that Riesling producers can find a way to make the complex characteristics of their wines clearer and therefore more appealing to confused consumers.  Conferences like the Riesling Rendezvous are a useful way to get that conversation going. There is a natural tendency, however, for such gatherings to “preach to the choir” and focus on the well informed specialist market that already exists rather than the potential market of former Chardonnay drinkers looking for a more interesting wine, who could be drawn to Riesling if they understood it a bit better. I think this educational mission is the real challenge for Riesling Rendezvous III: thinking beyond today’s market to tomorrow’s.

I am hopeful that the International Riesling Foundation will make progress in this regard, but the collective action problem is significant here. It won’t be easy to get dozens of producers of differing size, style and market position to agree to standards and then implement them uniformly. It is more likely, I think, that a few of the big brands like CSM will lead the way and define the image of Riesling in consumer minds.  Others will follow or not and so the future of Riesling will unfold.

Australian Winequake

June 12, 2008 By in Ascentia, Australian wine, brands, Constellation Brands, Foster's, The Wine Group, wine brands, Yellow Tail Leave a comment

Market tremors seem to be felt everywhere — food, fuel, money, natural resources. And now in the wine world.

Wine Tremors

It has been hard to ignore the feeling of instability in the wine world for the last few months. There has been a lot of shifting around of brands and alliances, as if the big wine producers are feeling off balance and need to get recentered. In January, for example, Constellation Brands, the world’s largest wine company, sold off their high volume Almeden and Inglenook brands along with the Paul Masson winery to The Wine Group. The reported logic was that Constellation wanted to focus more on premium and superpremium wines. The Wine Group is a privately held San Francisco-based company that has its roots in Coca Cola’s old wine division. (See Note below.)  It makes and markets a variety of high volume brands, including Franzia, Concannon, Corbett Canyon, Glen Ellen, Mogen David and several international brands.. It is the third largest wine company in the United States, behind on Gallo and Constellation, with 44 million case sales in 2007.

I felt another tremor on Tuesday, when a Decanter.com story reported that Constellation had sold more of its wine brands, this time to a new Healdsburg, California-based group called Ascentia Wine Estates. The wineries are Geyser Peak Winery in Alexander Valley, Atlas Peak in Napa, Sonoma Valley’s Buena Vista Carneros, Gary Farrell Winery, Washington’s Columbia Winery and Covey Run, and Idaho’s Ste Chapelle. They produce about a million cases of wine a year between them. Vineyards in Napa and Sonoma county were included in the $209 million deal. The logic, the article said, was to allow Constellation to continue to sharpen its focus on key upmarket brands.

There are several interesting things about this sale. From the Constellation standpoint brands like Geyser Peak, Buena Vista Carneros and Columbia are a good deal more upscale than high-volume Almaden and Inglenook brands that were sold in January. Constellation sold 59 million cases of wine in the U.S. alone in 2007, so the loss of a million case capacity is less important, I think, than the sign that the company is very serious about reshaping itself to adapt to changing market conditions. Constellation says that they are going to focus on fewer brands at the top of the pyramid and I guess they really mean it.

Ascentia is clearly making a different bet. Ascentia is a private group that includes major investors GESD Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based private equity fund, wine distributor WJ Deutsch & Sons and Jim DeBonis, former chief operating officer of Beam Wine Estates (several of the brands included in this deal were part of the Beam Wine Estates portfolio when Constellation acquired that operation last year).

The involvement of the Deutsch family is significant. Deutsch is the masters of marketing and distribution of value-priced wines. They partnered with Australia’s Casella family to create [Yellow Tail], the best selling import wine in the U.S. (I have written about this in my [Yellow Tail] Tales article. They also import and distribute George DeBoeuf, J. Vidal Fluery and other important wine brands. They clearly see opportunity where Constellation does not. It will be interesting to see how this group adapts to the shifting wine landscape. I cannot believe that they are through assembling their new portfolio because I think there may be more wine brands on the market soon (see below).

Winequake

The news from California on Tuesday regarding the Constellation-Ascentia deal was interesting. But the news from Australia in yesterday’s Financial Times as stunning and represents the first of what might prove to be a series of significant winequakes.

Foster’s, the big Australian drinks group, announced major write-downs of its wine assets and the resignation of its CEO, Trevor O’Hoy. The FT’s Lex column summarized the situation like this:

We all know the feeling: a night of bacchanalian excess followed by regrets and a light wallet the next morning. Foster’s, after a 12-year bender in which it spent A$8bn in the wineries of Australia and the US, has a severe hangover. Australia’s biggest beer and winemaker on Tuesday announced A$1.2bn of write-offs, lowered profit forecasts and parted company with its chief executive.

Foster’s last big splurge, the A$3.7bn purchase of Southcorp, is partly responsible. Foster’s bought the Australian winemaker in 2005 for a generous 14 times enterprise value to forward earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, among the highest multiples for deals in the wine sector at the time. It even mocked Southcorp, as it attempted to defend itself against the hostile takeover, for being unduly conservative with respect to its own earnings forecasts.

Fast-forward three years and the hubris has been punished. Integration was botched, partly due to the ill-judged decision to blend sales forces into a single unit in Australia. In the US, distribution was poorly managed. External factors packed the final punch. Australia’s vineyards produced a glut of wine and prices plummeted. The Aussie dollar surged, from about 76 US cents at the time of the acquisition to 95 cents today. Foster’s reckons that every cent move lops A$3.2m off the wine business’ earnings before interest and tax – forecast to total A$1.2bn this year.

Fosters owns 22 wineries in five countries and 60 wine brands, including Beringer, Lindemans, Wolf Blass, Penfolds, Rosemont and Matua Valley. Among other things it is writing off A$ 70 million of bulk wine inventory. It will try to trim its US inventory by 1.4 million cases. (Fosters was the fifth largest wine seller in the U.S. in 2007 with 20 million cases, about the same as Bronco wines and its Two Buck Chuck brand). This is more than a tremor. What does it mean? It is a Foster’s problem, or does it have larger significance?

The assumption for the last few years has been that bigger is better in the global wine market and that big global firms like Constellation and Foster’s had an unbeatable advantage. Is this just a shakeout, or are these recent events a signal that the world of wine is experiencing a fundamental change? Watch this space for updates.

Note: Coke purchased Franzia some years ago and built its wine division from that foundation. The Franzia family now owns Bronco Wines, the Two Buck Chuck company.