Is October the Month You Finally Try Non-Alcoholic Wine?

Is October 2024 the month you finally try non-alcoholic (NA) wine? Maybe you’ve never sampled NA wine before or perhaps you have and were disappointed. In either case, this might be a good time to see what’s going on.

The Case for NA Wine

The NA wine market in the U.S. is growing, which is worth noting since the overall wine market continues to struggle. NA wine sales have grown by more than 25 percent over the last year, albeit from a relatively small base. On an anecdotal level, we have watched as the NA part of the wine wall at our local upscale supermarket has grown from one lonely bottom shelf to two shelves and now three. Given the competition for shelf space, that says a lot.

Sue and I got interested in non-alcoholic wine a few years ago when a good friend of ours was in a severe cycling accident. Recovery from the concussion she suffered was slow and the doctors said no alcohol, not even wine. But a glass of wine in the evening lifts the spirits, so the search was on for an alternative with the taste and feel of wine, but without the alcoholic kick.

Our initial research was a bit disappointing because NA wines were not always easy to find and the selection was generally limited. This was especially true in on-premise situations. There was almost always NA beer available, but NA wine? Not so much.

Since then the NA category has exploded, especially for NA beer and NA spirits. At one point, for example, U.S.-made Athletic NA beer was the best-selling brand of beer at Whole Foods stores. NA brews from Europe are popular, which makes sense because the combination of active anti-alcohol movements in Europe and strict drink-driving laws pushed up the demand for these products early on.

A recent shopping trip revealed three or four varieties of a single inexpensive California NA wine brand at the local Safeway store. But the Metropolitan Market across the street offered nearly 20 different NA wine SKUs ranging from about $10 to nearly $30. The wines came from the U.S. (Washington and California), Germany, New Zealand, and South Africa.

The Second Glass Test

Writing in The Wine Economist in December 2023, I proposed “The Second Glass” test for NA products. NA beer and wine ought to remind you of the regular product and not be, like the sparkling apple cider we used to serve non-drinkers at our parties, a liquid placeholder for wine. And it should be tasty enough that you’d want a second glass and not just nurse the first one until it is time to go home.

Good NA beers satisfy the Second Glass test, but so far we have not found many wines that do. Either they don’t remind us of the equivalent wine (a NA New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, for example, ought to remind you of a NZ Sauvignon Blanc) or they just don’t make you ask for that second glass. The growing interest in NA wines is such that the Second Glass test article is by far the most-read single article on Wine Economist so far this year!

The NA wine section at your local upscale supermarket probably isn’t as large as the equivalent NA beer space, but at least it exists (I still haven’t seen NA wine on a by-the-glass on-trade list), so maybe it is time you checked it out. October is just around the corner. Maybe that’s the time.

Why October?

October has sort of evolved into a month to think about how wine fits into your lifestyle. It started, I think, with the advent of something called Sober October, which is sort of an echo of Dry January. Why October? Because it rhymes with Sober, I suppose. Sober October provoked the creation of a movement called Come Over October (which only rhymes if you have a pretty bad head cold), which stresses the sort of social gatherings that are wine’s natural environment.

Water keeps us apart, I like to say, but wine brings us together. That’s the spirit of Come Over October to me and the program is receiving lots of support from wineries and retailers that are happy to remind consumers that wine is about people and sharing, not alcoholic content.

Since Come Over October is about bringing people together, alcohol is neither necessary nor sufficient to participate and it seems to me that this is your opportunity to give NA wine a test run if you haven’t tried it or a second chance if you have. I know some readers will object to bringing NA wine into the conversation, but if consumers are interested in NA products and if wineries can profitably make good ones, then it seems like we should embrace the opportunity. Imagine if cola makers rejected the idea of sugar-free colas or if coffee producers turned their backs on caffeine-free coffee. You’d think they were nuts.

Meet ZERONIMO and Dr. LO

Our most recent NA wine experiments have involved brands from ZERONIMO and Dr. LO. The ZERONIMO wines are imported from Austria. Although they are produced in relatively small quantities, they have found markets in both Europe and America. Production has expanded from 3000 bottles to 60,000 bottles of four different wines.

White wines and sparkling wines are the types of NA wines we most often see on store shelves, so we were interested to try the ZERONIMO Sparkling Select ($39.30), a blend of Pinot Blanc, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon Blanc. It was very dry and refreshing. It passed the second glass test for me, but Sue said it was on the edge for her because of the acidity.

We have not seen or tried many red NA wines. The highly-rated (98 points!) ZERONIMO Leonis Red Blend ($69.40) is a blend of Blaufränkisch, Zweigelt, and Cabernet Sauvignon that spends two years in oak. It is light-bodied, as you might expect from an Austrian red, and showed oak influence without tasting woody. It is the first red NA wine we’ve tried to pass the second glass test, but I wish I had been more successful in teasing out the fruit.

Dr. LO is a line of NA wines from Loosen Bros., the well-known producer of Mosel wines. There is both an alcohol-removed Riesling and an NA carbonated Riesling in the portfolio. Sue and I are predisposed to like Mosel Riesling wines in general and we admire Loosen wines in particular. And it seems like they might be a particularly good base for NA treatment since the regular wines start out with relatively low alcohol levels. The alcohol is removed using the vacuum distillation method which, Loosen argues, creates a more balanced NA wine, when combined with the low initial alcohol level.

We really wanted to like still Dr. L Riesling (and we did) but it didn’t fully pass our second glass test. It was tasty and refreshing, giving us the fruit we missed in the earlier tastings, so we’d happily have another glass, but to be honest it didn’t remind us of Riesling wine. That’s a subjective assessment, of course, but that’s our finding. Your mileage may vary.

Come on Over

If October is the month when we make a point to invite friends and family over to share wine, food, and fun, then it is not a bad time to try out some of these non-alcoholic wine products. There will be some folks who want to avoid or limit alcohol consumption for health or religious reasons or who have volunteered for the role of designated driver.

They are going to be looking for something tasty to drink while avoiding alcohol. Why shouldn’t it be wine?

Bordeaux Bloodbath? Grubbing Up Deja Vu

September 24, 2024 By Mike Veseth in economic crisis, wine, wine history, wine markets 1 Comment

You’ve probably seen the news from Europe. The headline on Politico read, “Bordeaux bloodbath! France pays winemakers to dig up vines.” The French government has allocated €120 million to subsidize the removal of as many as 30,000 hectares of grape vines in the Bordeaux region due to unfavorable market conditions, according to EuroNews. That’s about €4,000 per hectare. The Bordeaux program is part of a bigger plan to take as many as 100,000 hectares (out of a total of 800,000) out of production.

It seems to me that the numbers are both big (100,000 hectares removed?) and small (€4,000 per hectare). American growers will rue the fact that they generally don’t receive subsidies from anyone when they are forced to grub up vines. The French are both lucky and not.

Grubbing up is a hardy perennial. France isn’t the only country that has to pull out surplus vines today and this isn’t the first time, either. I looked back in The Wine Economist archives to see when the topic of grubbing up first appeared on these pages. Here is what I found. You’ll note that I was skeptical about the EU program when I wrote this back in 2008. New Zealand’s earlier vine-pull scheme turned out well, I noted, but ripping out vines is only a temporary fix unless there are associated policy and structural changes to alter the market balance. I expect the same holds true today.

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Grubbing Up / The Wine Economist / May 6, 2008

Grubbing up is one of my favorite wine economics terms. It means to pull the vines up by the roots and replace them with other agricultural crops. It is a harsh term, just as it sounds, because it is the opposite of wine — it is anti-wine. Grubbing up isn’t something that a wine lover contemplates with ease, but sometimes it is necessary. The European Union’s Council of Ministers has recently finalized a grubbing up scheme for the EU and it is probably a good idea, even if it may not work.

Watering Down the Wine Lake

The problem is that EU wine production vastly exceeds demand with the result that thousands of liters of wine must be bought up by the EU each year and distilled into alcohol to prevent prices from dropping through the floor. The distillation price support only encourages continued production, waste and expense. It is a mess — a wine lake, as people say — and it has to stop.

A fairly radical plan was introduced a few years ago, one that would have paid farmers to grub up thousands of hectare of vines and introduced market reforms to allow (by deregulating) and to encourage (through supporting programs) European winegrowers to compete more effectively with New World winemakers who are taking their markets.

The package that the Council of Ministers agreed last week is significant even if it is less radical than the original initiative (Decanter magazine called it “watered-down” — never a good thing when you are talking about wine). The program called for subsidies to encourage winegrowers to eliminate up to 175,000 hectares of vines (versus 400,000 hectares in the original proposal), limit chaptalisation (the addition of sugar in the wine-making process) rather than eliminating it, and market-based reforms that encourage and enable winegrowers to compete on world markets (through varietal labeling of wines) rather than hide behind protective barriers.

I’ve been reading up on the details of the final EU plan and it is pretty interesting. The program includes money for grubbing up, of course, and deregulation of wine labels, removal of some vine planting restrictions (so marketable grape varieties can replace uneconomic grubbed up varietals), funds for wine promotion abroad, and so forth. Like any EU program, it is a complicated balance of economic reality, fiscal feasibility and political necessity.

The idea is to help the European wine industry transition to a new market environment, where export markets are growing, domestic markets shrinking and competition is fierce. It is not unreasonable to think that policies like this could work. They worked in New Zealand in the 1980s, for example.

Lessons from Kiwi Wine History

New Zealand today is famous as one of the great success stories in the world wine market. A small nation in an unlikely location, it punches above its weight in the global wine market, holding the title as champion exporter. Not in quantity, obviously, but in price. New Zealand has the highest average export price of any wine producing country.

But such was not the case 25 years ago. New Zealand suffered from a surplus of mediocre wine that could only be sold domestically behind high protective barriers. The industry collapsed with many failed firms from a combination of bad wine and surplus production. The government paid to grub up vines and then opened the market to international competition. Cheap but better wines from Australia flooded in to fill the domestic bulk wine market, leaving New Zealand producers only one choice — make better wine for export. They have done so brilliantly. Their success inspires the EU reforms.

It would be a mistake to think that what worked so well in New Zealand in the 1980s will work equally well in Europe today. It is unlikely that the EU would be willing to let its wine sector reach the sort of crisis that New Zealand experienced and that motivated the dramatic reforms implemented there. If big change comes from big crisis, as I believe (I wrote a book on this theme), then Europe is unlikely to see big change. The social cost of crisis is just too great. The guiding principle of EU policy is to prevent crisis, which makes change that much harder to effect.

Comparing New Zealand to Europe is problematic in other ways, too. New Zealand’s wine production is tiny — a drop in the bucket, really — whereas European producers account for well more than half of all the wine in the world. New Zealand’s grubbing up program may have been difficult, but only 1500 hectares were uprooted rather than the “watered-down” 175,000 set for the EU.

Changing the Rules of the Game

The principle of the EU wine reform scheme is sound, yet many reports that I have read are pessimistic. I think this is mainly because the final reforms are so much more timid that the initial proposal. But there are other reasons for concern.

One thing that economists have learned over the past 25 years is that institutions matter. This is another way of saying that economic forces do not always produce the same results. If the “rules of the game” are different the laws of economics will produce different results. Institutions are the rules of the game in life. Dani Rodrik, my favorite development economist, makes this point in his recent book One Economics, Many Recipes. The nature of local institutions, public and private, formal and informal, shapes the economic landscape in important ways.

This idea applies to the EU reforms in particular. Take the grubbing up scheme, for example. An incentive to repurpose large but unprofitable vineyards in Australia, for example, might well meet with an enthusiastic response because the institutions of wine growing there are different, with large vineyards and a consolidated industry. But European vineyards are much different and represent a completely different model.

Many vineyards (where much of the inferior surplus wine originates) are tiny inherited plots of a hectare or so, frequently on sites with few viable alternative uses. The rules of the game here are much different. A hectare might produce 20-30 tons if badly overcropped and, at perhaps $500 per ton at the local cooperative, gross revenues are too small for a family to live on but too great (compared to alternative uses) to give up. It’s an institutional trap that might be solved by consolidation, but making large vineyards out of these scattered small plots is necessarily costly and difficult.

Under these circumstances growers are likely to hang on to their vines for years rather than accept a modest one-time payment. Grubbing up might need to be forced, not voluntary, to have much effect.

New regulations to allow wines to be labeled according to grape variety (rather than the traditional local geographic designation) might be attractive to a large and distinctly commercial wine producer, but much wine in Europe is still produced by cooperatives that have little to distinguish their wines from others apart form the local designation. What advantage would they have as simple varietals in a world awash with good varietal wine?

A Certain Vision of Wine

It is possible to envision a future where the reforms can work, where the marginal vineyards have gone out of production, where consolidation has increased efficiency and where branded varietals can compete with the world market. (I have even seen some early attempts at EU branded varietals in the discount bins of a local store — more about this in a future posting.) I think it is possible that this vision may be realized — eventually.

But oh, it is such a big jump. The institutions of the small family vineyard and the local wine cooperative seem to me to make these reforms much more difficult. New Zealand’s success will be difficult to repeat.

Wine Economics 101: the Three Vs of Wine

August 27, 2024 By Mike Veseth in cooperatives, economic crisis, wine, wine markets 3 Comments

We often talk about trends and problems in the wine industry, but I think we all know that wine isn’t a single business about which it is easy to generalize. Different countries or regions have different business characteristics, for example, and making and selling multi-million case brands like Gallo’s Barefoot differs greatly from much smaller and more local operations.

The wine industry doesn’t come in one size or shape that fits all and doesn’t run at a single speed. Significantly, while all or most parts of the “wine patch” face challenges from climate change and declining consumption of beverage alcohol, the specific conditions vary and can change quickly.

So when a journalist asks me about what’s happening in the wine industry, as happens frequently, I have to stop, pause, and think. Which wine industry are we talking about?

Wine and the Three Vs

The Financial Times recently published an interview with Stephen Cronk, co-founder of the Provençal Rosé producer Maison Mirabeau, about the perils and rewards of starting a wine business more or less from scratch. Mirabeau has achieved great success in just a few years. How did it happen? Here’s an excerpt of the Q&A.

Was there a seminal moment in your business? Probably when I met a British Master of Wine in the Languedoc in 2008. He told me about the three Vs: viticulture, vinification and vendre, farming vines, winemaking and selling. Up until then I thought I would focus on buying a vineyard. He said don’t buy a vineyard yet: build a brand. Looking back, it was absolutely the right advice.

The idea of the Three Vs is important. There is a romantic image of winemaking that looks like this. Lovingly hand-tended grapevines surrounding a modest winery, with a cozy tasting room next door where most of the wine is sold (often by the winemaker herself) to loyal customers. This is the idea of wine that defines the industry for many people. But, from an economic standpoint, it is a bit misleading because it suggests that wine is a single business when it is really, as the Financial Times story points out, it is really more like three.

Growing grapes is agriculture. It is a risky capital-intensive business that requires specialized equipment and knowledge. Growing wine grapes successfully and profitably is a considerable achievement. Making wine is also a risky capital-intensive business. It requires specialized equipment, some of which is only used once a year.

Finally selling wine is a risky capital-intensive business, too. It is risky because selling wine like selling anything else is affected by market forces beyond individual control. It is capital intensive because building a brand or establishing networks of personal or professional relationships to facilitate sales can consume a good deal of time and money. Many winery owners have told me that, going into the business, they thought that growing grapes or making wine would be their biggest challenge, but selling wine and tending to customers sometimes is the hardest part.

Specialization and Exchange

Because all three businesses are capital heavy and all three are risky, there is a strong incentive for specialization at the firm level and for the industry to take advantage of Adam Smith’s principle of the division of labor. Smith said that the division of labor was determined by the extent of the market and so it is not surprising that it is most fully realized in the wine business by very large wine companies that specialize in one or two but seldom all three wine industry segments.

Some of the largest winemaking facilities here in Washington, for example, are mainly engaged in contract wine production for other firms, which market the wines under their own brand names. And some large wine firms sell big volumes of wine with few direct employees, relying upon purchased grapes, contract production, and bulk wine purchases to feed their efficient marketing and distribution pipelines.

Specialization and exchange is Adam Smith’s recipe for efficient production, but the situation is never as simple as that (and nothing is ever very simple in the wine industry). Remember that each of the V-factors is risky and the risks are very different. Engaging in just one V-function means you only have to account for one set of risks, not all three, but from an industry viewpoint the risks are always there. And in some cases division of labor can magnify them.

Risky Business

All three wine industry functions are risky in part because they involve lags. The final market for wine is constantly evolving, for example, but firms that specialize in marketing have to make plans many months or even years in advance, so there is always the risk that the last quarter’s market plan is no longer relevant. That’s a problem.

Wine production involves lags, too, and they can be much longer. The wine that a producer can sell today is based on decisions made one, two, three, or more years in the past. Time lags mean that costly shortages and surpluses are more likely, creating instability. The viticulture V is also subject to lags and they are much longer than the previous ones just because of the time it takes to bring grape vines into production or to alter the product mix on existing vines.

One implication of this situation is that, while sometimes the Three Vs are in synch and tell the same story, sometimes they are not and you get a different reading on the health of the industry depending upon which V you consult. Arguably this is the case today, when the disruptions of the pandemic era and rapid inflation are working their way through the system at different speeds.

Market Dynamics

There is a certain degree of instability baked into each wine industry segment’s cake. What happens when we fit them all together? Under some circumstances, the result can be benign or even beneficial as cycles offset one another the way that the sound waves your noise-canceling headphones emit silence the racket around you. But it is also possible for cyclical factors to compound, making the overall wine industry riskier than its individual segments.

Is this one of those times when risks are compounded because instability in each segment feeds the others? Risky business(es).

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I recently discussed some of these wine economics themes and more with “Wine Behind the Scenes” podcast host Laurel Simmons. Click on this link to listen to our 30-minute conversation.

Is Wine a Good Value?

August 13, 2024 By Mike Veseth in economic crisis, Economic impact, wine, wine markets, wine price 4 Comments

These are challenging times for many (but not all) consumers. Rising housing and interest costs are squeezing budgets. Pandemic-era stimulus check bank balances are going or gone. Student loan payments, paused for a time, are back again.

Faced with tight budget constraints and rising debt costs, consumers are struggling to cut costs without sacrificing their standard of living, which means they are more and more focused on value for money. Perhaps the most obvious indicator of this trend is the surge in purchases of store-brand supermarket products at the expense of similar but more expensive name-brand products. But, as the financial news reports, the changes in buying patterns go far beyond that.

Do You Want Fries with That?

Two recent news reports suggest that consumers want value, not just lower prices. A Wall Street Journal story about casual dining restaurant chain Red Robin (see article link below), noted a two-prong strategy to get diners back. Step one was to improve food quality. Step two was to expand the number of “bottomless” offerings so that there is a sense of abundance and value, even when (like me) diners rarely ask for free extra servings. Menu prices have not declined, but business traffic is up. Value sells

The Economist newspaper’s “Schumpeter” business columnist recently compared fast-food king McDonald’s value strategy with casual Mexican chain Chipotle (see article link below). McDonald’s has struggled in the post-pandemic era and recently introduced $5 meal deals in an attempt to regain its lost reputation for good value. Chipotle, on the other hand, has actually raised its prices. Which strategy do you think would be more successful?

Chipotle wins, at least according to the Economist columnist, who argues that Chipotle is better value despite being more than twice as expensive as the McDonald’s meal deal. Maybe, as the column notes, the demographics of the two food chains are too different to make a comparison valid. But perhaps restaurant dinners look beyond price in calculating value. Schumpeter reports having two generous meals from his Chipotle order, but not wanting to even finish the salty McDonald’s $5 meal.

Price vs Value?

If value for money is a rising priority for many consumers it is fair to ask if wine provides good value? Or is wine’s value proposition one of the reasons the industry is facing headwinds these days?

This is an awkward question because different people have different ideas of what makes something a good value and also because wine comes in so many different price/quality combinations. When I asked my university students to do an economic analysis of the wine wall at a local Safeway store, for example, they found wines as cheap as about $2 per bottle equivalent and as expensive as about $225 per fancy glass bottle.

How can you generalize when there is such wide variation? One way is to look at average cost per serving of wine and other alcoholic beverages. Every study that I have seen suggests that wine is more expensive per serving than either beer or spirits using average price data. So there is reason to believe that consumers might see a value problem with wine.

The way that wine is packaged is a value problem, too. Many consumers hesitate to open a 750 ml wine bottle for only one or two glasses because they are afraid that what’s left will quickly go bad, making the bottle purchase an even worse deal than the per-serving averages suggest. (By comparison, beer comes in single-serving containers and spirits can keep for a long time, so they don’t suffer the same wasted money problem.)

Well, you might say, if this wine is too expensive, trade down to cheaper brands. Indeed, wine can be very cheap (per bottle or per serving) if that’s what you really want. But, good value isn’t the same as cheap price, as McDonald’s problems show.

And, indeed, consumers have for several years moved away from inexpensive wines, calculating perhaps that they are not worth even the low price charged. The premiumization trend has plateaued, too, suggesting that perhaps higher price doesn’t always mean better value.

It’s in the Bag?

If consumers are feeling the budget squeeze (and many are) and looking for value in wine as they are, apparently, in fast food and casual dining, where will they go? Some will abandon wine and indeed cut ties with beverage alcohol, generally. Some will drink less but focus on quality when they do. Others will try to find the spot on the wine wall with the best value proposition. Where is that?

NIQ market data reported in Wine Business Monthly finds only a few bright spots on the wine wall, one of them is for “premium” 3-liter bag-in-box wine selling at about $5 per bottle equivalent. Sales of wine in this format have held up pretty well while sales of glass bottle wine at about the same price point have fallen. Maybe that Red Robin sense of abundance applies here, too.

Clearly, the economic side of the wine market equation, with its focus on disposable income, consumer budget constraints, and value for money, is not the whole story when it comes to today’s challenging environment. But I am convinced that it is part of the story and one, perhaps, that should be taken more seriously. The people who are having trouble selling other consumer goods have got the message.

What is wine’s value proposition? Food (or maybe drink) for thought?

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Blake Gray’s recent Wine-Searcher.com column is one example of what a value-driven wine marketing strategy might look like.

Here are links to the articles referenced above.

Economist newspaper “What Chipotle and McDonald’s say about the consumer slowdown.”

Wall Street Journal “Bottomless Fries, Floats, and Broccoli. One restaurant chain’s bid to get diners.“

Collio DOC: Wine, Brand, & Identity in Italy

August 6, 2024 By Mike Veseth in Italian wine, wine, wine markets 2 Comments

[This is the third and final article in a series inspired by our recent visit to Collio DOC in north-east Italy. Click here to read the first report and click here to read the second.]

What does it take for a wine region to stand out in today’s crowded market? Excellent wine, of course, but good wine isn’t enough because there are lots of quality wines around the world; consumers need a reason to buy one instead of another.

Brand and Identity in Wine

What else does it take? There are many ways to think about it, but in my book Wine Wars II, I focus on two necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) factors: brand and identity. Brand is the image that distinguishes your wine from the competition. Identity is the quality that defines the brand. Many wines suffer from the lack of a memorable brand. Others may have a brand, but its power is limited because it doesn’t actually stand for anything. Put wine, brand, and identity together and much can be achieved.

Sometimes an iconic wine can define a region, giving it a brand and identity. The market for wines from Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast, for example, was shaped by Tenuta San Guido’s famous Sassicaia, Bolgheri, Sassicaia, Super-Tuscan.

Sometimes a singular event can provide the spark. Here in the United States, for example, the Oregon wine industry’s rise to prominence was at least partly due to success at the Wine Olympics of 1979. I wrote about this in the Wine Economist on the occasion of the Eyrie Vineyards’ fiftieth birthday:

The Wine Olympics was a competition, sponsored by the French food and wine magazine Gault Millau, that featured 330 wines from 33 countries tasted blind by 62 judges. The 1975 Eyrie Pinot Noir Reserve attracted attention by placing 10th among Pinots, a stunning achievement for a wine from a previously little-known wine region.

Robert Drouhin of Maison Joseph Drouhin, a Burgundy negociant and producer, was fascinated and sponsored a further competition where the Eyrie wine came close second behind Drouhin’s own 1959 Chambolle-Musigny. Thus was Eyrie’s reputation set (and Oregon’s, too). It wasn’t long before Domaine Drouhin Oregon (DDO) was built in the same Dundee Hills as Eyrie’s vineyards — a strong endorsement of the terroir and international recognition of the achievement.

Oregon wine was a thing, the Willamette Valley was the brand, and Pinot Noir was the identity. Oregon produces other good wines besides Pinot Noir. And Pinot Noir grows in other parts of Oregon. But the wine, brand, and identity were established anyway.

Building Brand Collio

Collio DOC, which hugs the Slovenian border in north-east Italy, has long been known for its excellent wines and it is home to many strong private wine brands. Sue and I visited Livon on our recent trip, for example, enjoying the delicious wines and the amazing view from the tasting room deck. The sleek wines are easily identified by the distinctive art nouveau-style label, which is just risqué enough to have been banned by authorities in at least one state in the American South!

A strong regional brand benefits all producers, so the Collio Consortium, which celebrates 60 years in 2024, has worked diligently to establish the image and reputation of the region and its wines.

Sue and I encountered the “SuperWhites” campaign about 20 years ago at an event in Portland, Oregon (not “Porland” as printed on the event poster shown at the top of this page). Sponsored by Slow Food Friuli and supported by a range of regional organizations, the promotion was inspired by the success of “Super Tuscan” red wines. The idea is that Friuli (and Collio) are to Italian white wines what the Super Tuscans are to Italian reds.

Although the Super Whites theme seems to have run its course, the commitment to collective effort persists, along with the color of the Collio wine region, bright yellow, is still very much alive. (I think of it as Tour de France Yellow Jersey yellow, but that’s just me). Yellow is Collio’s color, featured in all the promotional literature, the capsules found atop many of the wines, and even a bright yellow Vespa scooter that seems to show up in many photos of the region. If you are in Collio and you see yellow, you can’t help but think Collio wine.

More recently there has been an effort to promote a trademark Collio wine bottle shape, which is also shown in the photo above. The distinctive bottle actually requires a special cork to seal it properly. Adopting it is a serious decision from a practical standpoint.

The Collio bottle shape is instantly recognizable on store shelves and when you look around at what is on tables at a restaurant. Although its use is strictly voluntary, not mandated by consortium rules, we saw it almost everywhere and sensed a certain pride in the identity. It makes a strong statement about the Collio brand project.

Collio’s Identity Quest

If Collio has been purposeful and successful in building a regional brand, the road to a specific identity to back up the brand is less clear. Indeed one person we met told us he thought that Collio was still searching for an identity.

Thirty or forty years ago Collio was pretty much synonymous with a wine they called Tocai, made from the Tocai Friulano grape variety. The grape variety’s name is still the same, but the wine can’t be called Tocai anymore because of objections from Hungary’s Tokaji region. Now the wine is Friulano and if you ask for a glass of local white wine at a bar or restaurant, it’s what you’ll get (and happily drink, I think).

Having lost control of its signature wine’s name, some winemakers in Collio looked in a different direction for a regional identity. The result, we discovered when we visited in 2019, was an emphasis on white wine blends under the name Collio Bianco. The wines we tasted on that trip were terrific. White wine blends are under-appreciated. But aside from their high quality, the wines didn’t have enough in common to be the foundation of an identity. Some were blends of native grape varieties. Others were blends of traditional grape varieties like Chardonnay, Sauvignon, and Riesling. Others combined native and traditional grapes.

The Collio wine identity remains a work in progress and perhaps that’s how it always will be. What all the wines really share is not color or grape variety but sense of the place, shaped by the local ponca soils and hillside vines. If I had to pick a grape variety it would probably be Tocai Friulano, but why do that? It seems like it would exclude so many great wines and accomplish very little.

No, I think Collio isn’t any particular wine. As we suggested in the first two articles in this series, it is best to think of it as a particular place and a deep experience. You don’t just drink Collio DOC, you experience the place through the wine. I know that that’s inconvenient when it comes to marketing, but important indeed when it comes to the wine.

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Sue and I recently received a very thoughtful gift, a copy of The Food of Italy by Waverly Root (1971). We turned quickly to the section on Friuli and found this:

“Our wines,” laments a writer from Friuli, “are more exquisite than renowned.”

More than 50 years have passed and I think the wines are even more exquisite, if that’s possible. Renowned? Not as much, but the word is getting out there and Collio’s reputation is fast catching up to its reality.

Leveraging Wine & Tourism in Collio DOC

July 30, 2024 By Mike Veseth in Italian wine, wine, wine markets, wine tourism 1 Comment

[This is the second in a series of articles inspired by our recent visit to Collio DOC in north-east Italy. Click here to read last week’s introductory report.]

When Sue and I first visited Collio in 2000 we stayed in the newly opened agriturismo rooms at Venica & Venica and in a rustic cabin at La Subida. We dined well at several memorable restaurants including Trattoria al Cacciatore at La Subida and Trattoria al Giardinetto in Cormons.

Wine Tourism and Economic Development

Guided by articles in Gambero Rosso and La Cucina Italiana (and Ornella Venica’s wise personal recommendations), we found great food, wine, and many fun things to do. The foundations of today’s wine tourism industry were already in place. We returned to Collio in 2015, 2019, and now in 2024. We’ve discovered new hospitality and wine tourism opportunities each time.

A strategic focus on wine tourism makes good sense for Collio and the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region generally. The vineyard area is relatively small compared to the Veneto, for example. Yields are necessarily limited to protect quality. From an economic development standpoint, the two ways to grow for the region are to increase price (through rising reputation, for example) and to leverage the wine’s magnetic pull through tourism development. Both forces are powerful in Collio and they can work together to drive the region forward.

Casanova & Castle, Wine & Golf

More and more high-quality hotels and restaurants can be found today, which is necessary but not sufficient for the growth strategy. This time we stayed at the Relais Russiz Superiore, for example, adjacent to the famous winery (which is now owned by a partnership between Marco Felluga and the Veneto’s Tommasi Family). One of our favorite wineries, Gradis’ciutta, offers visitors the opportunity enjoy the hospitality of Borgo Gradis’ciutta, a cluster of buildings that date back to the 1500s with nine rooms and three apartments. Engaging visitors beyond the tasting room counter is clearly a priority today.

The most ambitious investment in tourism and hospitality is probably Castello di Spessa, where we stayed during our 2019 visit. The business combines the historic castle (famous for its connection to the notorious Casanova!), hotel rooms, dining and event facilities, well-kept vineyards, a substantial winery operation, and even a golf course. We ran into California winery owners in Collio on holiday, who said that they came for the golf and stayed for, well, everything else!

Collio was a great place to visit 20 years ago and it has grown in every way, but without losing the characteristics that drew us to it originally (and have kept us coming back). But this is just the beginning, according to Ornella Venica, who challenged us to consider how much more Collio and Friuli have to offer to visitors interested in food, wine, history, culture, and nature.

The Vine Academy

Our first stop on this trip to Collio was lunch at the recently opened restaurant at Accademia Vine Lodge. The food and wine were delicious and the setting beautiful, but what sticks in my mind is the fact that this attractive wine tourist destination is also an education institution. When wine tourists are not filling its rooms, groups of earnest students move in.

The Accademia Vine Lodge has a double personality. It is both an attractive venue for visitors like us and also the home of the famous Simonit&Sirch vine pruning institute. The restaurant’s wine list includes bottles from Collio and the region, of course, but also from some of the more than 150 Simonit&Sirch clients around the world.

The vine lodge fascinates me because it reminds us that wine tourism can spring up in many ways. It isn’t just wineries with food or rooms, for example. Here is a case where globally respected technical expertise in the science and art of vine pruning has grown into a venue that has broad appeal.

Collio & the Beach

A highlight of our visit was an evening event called Collio & the Beach, set on a broad shaded patio beside the beach at Baia di Sistiana near Trieste. Could a seaside party draw a different demographic profile than typical winery tasting rooms? This was a wine event, but not just a wine event. Bustling booths were pouring local wines, for example, but the longest lines were for delicious foods such as porchetta, frico, watermelon, and hand-carved local Prosciutto d’Osvaldo.

We sampled from the different wine stations, eventually focusing on Friulano because it is so popular in this region. We were surprised, however, that the longest line was for Pinot Grigio! In fact, the line never ended because some folks got their pour and moved directly to the back of the queue so that they could try another wine.

Pinot Grigio? Really? Here in America, Pinot Grigio is often made in unexceptional styles, designed more to avoid offending than to develop distinctive characteristics. But these Pinot Grigio wines were different because many of them were made in that traditional Ramato style, with lots of skin contact. These wines, which are both old-fashioned and cutting-edge in terms of style, had appeal that spanned the generations. And they matched up perfectly with the traditional food and festive venue.

The 70 Percent Solution

Sue and I keep returning to Collio because offers so much that we enjoy and appreciate in terms of food, wine, culture, and nature. It seems to us that Collio today is doubling down on the “Collio Experience” and not just the wine. That was the case at Collio & the Beach and Castello di Spessa. And the experience especially stood out at Subida di Monte in Cormons.

Once upon a time, this was a small family winery, but new owners saw the “experience” potential to leverage the winery with hospitality investments, including Locanda alle Vigne. The restaurant features traditional dishes in a fabulous setting. We were there on a late June Thursday night and the place was packed with guests of all ages.

The winery anchors the operation, of course, but the hospitality business generates 70 percent of the revenues, bringing more and different consumers to Collio and its wine.

Back to the Future?

Our Collio journey began at Venica & Venica and La Subida and both are still leading the way. The plans for a wine resort that Giampaolo Venica showed us in 2000 are now very much realized, for example. Very impressive!

La Subida has created a more casual restaurant called Osteria la Preda de la Subida that’s become one of our favorite places to eat. It is popular with tourists, but delights locals, too, with its celebration of the traditional food and wine of the region. It’s where we had our last meal (for this trip) before heading for our airport hotel near Venice.

Collio shows that wine and hospitality are two industries that can leverage each other to generate both happy visitors and also economic development opportunities. Other regions should take note!

Chilling Out: The Red & White of Austrian Wines

July 9, 2024 By Mike Veseth in wine, wine markets 5 Comments

Austria’s colors are red and white. Those are the colors of the national flag and the uniforms of the country’s football team, too. You can see them clearly on the bottles of many Austrian wines because a seal atop the bottle continues the red and white theme.

Blessings and Curses

Red and white. That’s Austria and its wines. But what do people think of when they think about Austrian wines? Not the red. Just the white. Riesling, of course, and increasingly Gruner Veltliner. Delicious wines that are Austria’s vinous ambassadors to the world.

That’s the blessing and the curse of “signature” grape varieties. They help define a region or country in a crowded wine market, but they also make it difficult for any other type or style of wine to break out. This is the wine variation of the economic principle of the “Dutch Disease,” which holds that, under some circumstances, great success in any one sector of the economy creates barriers to success elsewhere. Austrian red wines are victims of the Gruner Veltliner’s curse.

Cool Reds

The Austrian Wine organization aims to lift the curse by giving Austrian red wines a strong identity of their own. The theme is “chillable reds,” which is a category of wines that I see mentioned more and more (today’s email includes a note from California’s Ridge Vineyard is promoting its varietal Valdiguie as a “chillable red”).

You can chill any red wine, I suppose, and it is conventional wisdom among wine geeks that most red wines are served too warm (and most white wines too cold). But what makes a red wine particularly suitable to this category? Think light body, low alcohol, fruity, juicy, refreshing. What’s not to like?

Sue and I enjoyed many red wines of this type when we lived in Prague for a couple of summers (back in my professor days). The red wines (from Slovakia, Czechia, and Austria as I recall) were great with a bit of a chill at the end of a warm day.

Austrian’s “chillable red” category is quite diverse, beginning with wines made from the Zweigelt grape variety (which accounts for 45 percent of red vineyard plantings). Other winegrapes to look for include Sankt Laurent, Blaufrankisch (a.k.a. Lemberger here in Washington state), Pinot Noir, and Blau Portugieser. The wines differ in many respects, but share a common thread of light body and good acidity. You would not be a fool to spend the rest of the summer exploring these wines and others like them.

Austrian Wine sent us a couple of wines to sample and they showed the diversity of this category very well. The Sankt Laurent from Christina Wines was light and fresh, with sour cherry and cranberry flavors. Reminded me a bit of Beaujolais, which makes sense because of whole-berry fermentation. A fun wine and only 11% abv.

The second wine was a Pinot Noir “Langenlois” from Weingut Jurtschitsch. Pinot Noir is familiar territory, so it was interesting to see how this wine captured the essence of its cool climate terroir. Here in Washington state this is the type of wine we enjoy chilled down a bit with grilled sockeye salmon because it has structure but without weight. There are lots of situations where that’s just what we are looking for. I have to admit that the “chillable red” category includes some “swimming pool” wines, but they aren’t all so simple.

The Big Chill?

What does chilling do to red wine? I suppose it depends on the wine. I remember tasting one very popular wine with lots of tannins and residual sugar. I needed to chill it way down just to drink it. But with nice wines like those we tasted from Austria I most appreciate how chilling affects the texture and reinforces the juicy appeal.

What does chilling do for Austrian red wines in terms of their market appeal? I think the Austrian producers hope it will help their wines carve out a distinct identity and guide buyers interested in this style of wine to the part of the wine wall where the red and white bottle tops can be found.

Book Review: Exploring China (and Chinese Wine) One Banquet at a Time

June 25, 2024 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, China wine, popular culture, wine, wine markets 1 Comment

China in Seven Banquets: A Flavorful History by Thomas David DuBois (Reaktion Books, 2024).

It doesn’t always work, but sometimes you can learn something about wine by busting out of the wine box and looking back in to see what people think about wine in a different context.

This practice is always interesting but sometimes disappointing, too. For example, reading Andreas Viestad’s book about the world seen through the lens of a single meal in Rome was full of fun facts and great insights. But it made me sad when his chapter on wine missed all the cultural elements I was looking for and focused almost entirely on wine as alcohol. How sad! But I have to admit that’s how some people see wine. Good to remember that!

I was hopeful, therefore, but also cautious in approaching China in Seven Banquets. I quickly turned to the index when I received my review copy of Professor DuBois’s new book. There were references to wine throughout the book, which came as a pleasant surprise. I couldn’t wait to start reading.

China in Seven Banquets is a fascinating book. DuBois promises to provide scholarly insights without the dry prose or interminable footnotes that might stop you from turning to the next page. He succeeds very well in balancing depth and accessibility.

DuBois takes us through China’s history via the seven banquets promised by the title, but it is not as simple as that. As the book’s summary explains:

From the opulent Eight Treasures feast of ancient times to the Tang dynasty’s legendary “Tail-Burning” banquet, and the extravagant “complete Manchu-Han feast” of the Qing court, these iconic repasts offer glimpses into China’s rich food history. Delving further, the book invites us to partake of lavish banquets immortalized in literature and film, a New Year’s buffet from 1920s Shanghai, a modern delivery menu reflecting the hyperglobal present, and it even offers a peek at the tables of the not-so-distant future.

The text is liberally seasoned with recipes, which give a sense of not just what was prepared, but how, and with what ingredients. (Trigger warning: Sue says that some of the early recipes didn’t exactly make her hungry.) The food is the focus, of course, but not necessarily for its own sake. DuBois links changes in Chinese cuisine to broader themes. You end up learning a lot more about China (and the world) than you thought you would.

I was particularly struck by a short paragraph at the end of a chapter about halfway through the book. At this point, DuBois explains, banquet cuisine has evolved into what you recognize as the “Chinese food” of today as seen on restaurant menus around the world. What is striking, he points out, is that virtually none of these dishes began in China. They are all the results of foreign influences embraced and then shaped by the people of China.

Sue points out that China is far from the only country with a culture or cuisine that is more or less an amalgam of imported influences. Tyler Cowen’s book Creative Destruction traces these effects, and their unintended consequences, through case studies that range from rock and roll to Navajo rugs.

So what about all those references to wine in the index? Well, it seems that wine is a generic term for fermented (as opposed to distilled) beverages. Wine can be made from lots of things. Fruit. Rice. And even grapes (although I remember seeing only one reference specifically to grape wine). Wine is everywhere in Chinese cultural history. Grape wine not so much. Until recently.

I was disappointed, but what could I expect? Grape wine’s surprising 21st-century rise and then sudden recent fall is perhaps too much of a bump in the road to be featured in this account of Chinese cuisine’s long journey. Maybe it is too soon to know how the Chinese wine culture and market will develop in the future.

But then I remembered DuBois’s point about China’s propensity to assimilate foreign culinary influences and make them so much a part of the tapestry of Chinese cuisine that it is impossible to unravel them. Maybe, just maybe that’s what’s going on. If so, wine might have a bright future in China (and on Chinese food delivery menus, too). But don’t be surprised if the result isn’t exactly what you expected.

Thanks to Professor DuBois for a delicious and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

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If you are interested in learning more about Chinese drinking culture and how grape wine fits in, consider Li Zhengping, Chinese Wine 3/e (translated by Shanghai Ego — really!), Cambridge University Press, 2011. The Wine Economist review appeared in 2011. Grape wine is only part of the story, of course, but it is discussed in good depth both in terms of history and recent events. I especially appreciate the sections on Chinese drinking culture.

Cantina Tramin: Strength in (Small) Numbers in Alto Adige

June 18, 2024 By Mike Veseth in cooperatives, Italian wine, wine, wine history, wine markets Leave a comment

Your first impression when you arrive at Cantina Tramin is that you’ve entered some sort of space portal. Here in the lush Alto Adige hills, you expect to see a sturdy old building housing Cantina Tramin winery, but it’s not there. Or rather it is there, but it is hidden by a very modern addition that was completed only in 2010. Old and new.

The new Tramin is striking. You feel like you are approaching a space ship when you drive up. And you feel like you are peeking out among the vines when you look out from inside. It is quite an experience.

Quite a Surprise

The wines are quite an experience, too, especially the white wines. Bright, bold, complex. They fit the image of the winery perfectly. The surprise comes when you learn that this sleek, modern winery with its terrific wines is a cooperative, born from crisis more than 100 years ago.

Sue and I have visited the Alto Adige several times and we are always impressed by the great wines we taste and the tiny vineyards we encounter. The vineyards cling to the hills in this region with the valley floor given over in many places to the tree fruit for which the region is well known. There are about 5000 hectares of vineyards and about 5000 winegrowers tending them. Even if math isn’t your strong suit I think you can tell that the average holding is pretty small and the smallest of them are like grape-strewn postage stamps.

1898 and All That

The Cantina Tramin cooperative took flight during a crisis in 1898. The many small growers lacking market power relative to a few large buyers, facing ruinously low prices, and led by Tramin’s parish priest, pledged to work together rather than run a race to the bottom. This is how wine cooperatives spring up. But as anyone who has served on a committee can tell you, it isn’t always easy to make collective enterprises succeed.

Cantina Tramin followed the well-traveled road in its early days, producing bulk wines (mainly red wines from the Schiava grape) and selling them off at low prices to be bottled, marketed, and sold by others. Then in the 1980s came the realization that competition for basic wines in the bulk wine market might not be economically sustainable, especially for a region with such fragmented vineyard ownership.

So the decision was made to radically change the cooperative’s model, moving from quantity to quality, from bulk wine to branded wine, from red to white. It was an expensive decision because it meant replanting by individual cooperative members and cellar investment by the group. The fantastic new winery that opened in 2010 was the crowning touch, but it came after much hard work and investment by the 160 families and their 270 hectares of vines.

Bold DNA

Bold moves seem to be in Cantina Tramin’s institutional DNA. Creating and later expanding the cooperative was a risky decision, albeit one that was more or less forced upon the grower families at the start. Breaking away from the quantity-driven bulk wine model was a big step, too. I am sure there were doubts and second thoughts at the time, but that bet has paid off very well.

You get a sense of the strategic thinking at work here when you look at the winery’s Chardonnay program. Chardonnay does really well here and there is a lot planted, but it wasn’t suited to the kind of buttery Chardonnay that was in fashion 20 years ago. So rather than release a 100% Chardonnay, Tramin created “Stoan” (stone), a blend of Chardonnay, Sauvignon, Pinot Bianco, and Gewurtztraminer. Only some years later, when tastes had changed, did Tramin release “Troy” (trail), a pure Chardonnay that spends a year on the lees.

Big Bets Pay Off

Maybe the biggest bet of all is Tramin’s signature wine, the Nussbaumer Gewurtztraminer. Although it is difficult to know for sure, many think Gewurtz originally hails from this region. It sure does well here, whatever its origin. It is an easy wine to enjoy when done well, as it is at Tramin, but not necessarily an easy wine to sell. There’s the name, which some consumers are afraid to pronounce, and then there are the different styles of Gewurtz that you find, from austerely dry to sweetish and flowery.

The Nussbaumer is more about minerality than flowers. Made from very ripe grapes, which account for the surprisingly high 14.5 percent abv, it is all about balance. The winery’s food pairing recommendations are speck (the delicious smoked prosciutto product this region is known for) and saffron risotto with licorice powder.

Winebow represents Cantina Tramin in the United States and a look at its online catalog shows a surprisingly wide range of wines including other white wines like Pinot Grigio (an important export to the U.S.) and reds, too, including Lagrein, Schiava, and Pinot Noir.

Cantina Tramin is a great success. Could it be a model for other regions? Definitely yes if you are looking for a business model for cooperative success. In terms of organization, Cantina Tramin does everything right, especially in terms of creating strong incentives for winegrower members to produce the best possible grapes and no sacrifice of quality for quantity or collective reputation for individual gain.

It is never easy to get collective agreement for such systems and many cooperatives failed in the past precisely for this reason. One key, we were told, is that Cantina Tramin is not too big so the families know one another and the social contract that binds the members together is as tight as the legal contract. (Not for nothing are Italian cooperatives called cantine socialle). So there is strength in numbers … so long as the numbers are not too big!

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Here are the Cantina Traminb wines we tasted for this report:

Pinot Grigio Classico 2023

Unterebner Pinot Grigio 2022

Stoan Bianco (70% Chardonnay, 20% Sauvignon, 5% Pinot Bianco, 5% Gewurtztraminer) 2022

Troy Chardonnay 2020

Nussbaumer Gewürztraminer 2022

All of the wines were distinctive and delicious. The biggest surprises were the Chardonnay, which was complex with a long finish, and the two Pinot Grigio wines, which set a high standard for wines made from this grape variety.

Second Thoughts on Sustainability?

June 11, 2024 By Mike Veseth in sustainability, wine, wine markets 5 Comments

This is one of those annoying “devil’s advocate” columns. It seems like everyone I meet in the wine business is talking about sustainability and with good reason. Regional sustainability programs have had great success in bringing the industry together. Given all the attention, however, maybe it is no surprise that some people are starting to have second thoughts.

What Does This Mean?

Sue and I were at a meeting of winemakers and regional wine media when one of the most respected people at the table challenged the group. “I don’t know what ‘sustainable’ means,” he proclaimed.

He was trying to make a point. The “S” word gets thrown around so much and in so many contexts that it doesn’t seem to mean anything in particular anymore. It’s almost a belief or an “-ism” (sustainabl-ism?) in practice, whatever its formal definition.

Sustainability certifications like the Sustainable WA program here in Washington, have specific criteria, but the term “sustainable” itself is very flexible, a fact that one of my university students taught me in his senior thesis, which argued that “sustainable development” was a popular goal precisely because it was ambiguous in practice and could be used to justify all sorts of policies.

Sustainability claims are flexible in wine, too. Sue and I can’t forget a Chilean wine we bought a few years ago that claimed to be “sustainably dry-farmed.” Dry-farmed means no irrigation to me. But, doing a little research, I learned that “sustainably dry-farmed” in this particular case meant that they irrigated the vines, but only when they really needed to. So it could have been called “sustainably irrigated” too. That’s crazy!

Unbearable Heaviness?

I still had this conversation on my mind when I opened up the newest issue of the noteworthy Italian wine journal Civiltà del bere (the civilization of drinking). Alessandro Torcoli’s editorial addressed “The unbearable heaviness of sustainability” (L’insostenibile pesantezza della sostenibilità). Sustainable viticulture is critically important to the wine industry, Torcoli argues. But there is so much talk, talk, talk, talk, that it becomes a bit boring and unable to support expectations.

Although Torcoli is weary of long discussions about sustainability, he clearly appreciates its importance. He is concerned that wine’s sustainability conversations are so inwardly focused that they don’t make much of an impact on consumers. “It has never happened in the history of oenology,” he writes, “that there has been such a disconnect between the commitment of companies (because being sustainable involves an enormous bureaucratic, financial, organizational effort…) and consumers.”

Unnecessary Heaviness

It is easy to see how consumers could become confused about what sustainable wine means. Sometmes you only have to pick up the bottle to start to have doubts.

One of Sue’s pet peeves is wineries that broadcast their commitment to sustainability but then undermine the message by using heavy-weight glass bottles. It is not unusual to find bottles that weigh more than the wine itself (750 grams). One recent bottle (a Malbec from Argentina) weighed in at nearly a kilogram on Sue’s digital scale. That’s a lot of weight to haul around and an unnecessary addition to the wine’s carbon footprint. Wine critics are increasingly sensitive to bottle weight. Karen MacNeil will no longer review heavy-weight bottles, for example.

That extra weight just isn’t consistent with a sustainability message at our house. We recently enjoyed Domaine Bousquet’s Virgen Malbec, a USDA certified organic wine (organic grapes in the vineyard plus organic winemaking practices in the cellar). The bottle weighed in at just 402 grams. It is possible to go even lighter.

Theory vs Practice

Surveys say that wine consumers are willing to pay a premium for sustainable products, but when I tried to find a market link a few years ago, I came away empty-handed. If buyers are really paying more for sustainable wine (and not just giving “aspirational” answers to survey questions), I posited, then sustainably grown grapes should be worth more than conventionally grown grapes. I wasn’t able to find a sustainability premium. This is important for several reasons but perhaps especially because winegrape growers in many parts of the world currently receive economically unsustainable prices for their grapes. A sustainability premium could potentially bring a double benefit.

I couldn’t even verify that the average price of sustainable wine was higher than similar wines because “sustainable” is used in so many ways. There are many certified sustainable programs. Then there are wineries that act sustainably (and say so), but don’t go through certification. Then there is the widespread unregulated common use of the term (see “sustainably dry-farmed” above).

Worn-Out Words?

No wonder Torcoli sighs that “We are (almost) all convinced of the need to think about sustainability, but the word is wearing out.” He’s right. Maybe we need to unpack this term and explain what we are trying to sustain, how, and why. It might be unrealistic to expect a single word to hold all that information and to convey it persuasively to consumers.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, for example, reported that a UK supermarket chain sold more of its private label chocolate bars, despite raising the price, when it made a specific pledge. The cocoa for the bars only comes from sources that do not exploit child or slave labor, which is an issue in the cocoa supply chain. This made the more expensive ethically-sourced chocolate bars different from products that make more general sustainability claims or no claims at all.

According to one study cited in the WSJ article, 80 percent of survey takers said they cared about sustainability, but less than seven percent of them actually paid extra for sustainable products. That’s just one survey and the chocolate bars are just one product, but it gives us sonething to think about, doesn’t it?

So what is to be done? More talk? Torcoli concludes, “But the question remains: how can we sustain the unbearable heaviness of sustainability? Making it more rock or sexier, as the Americans would say? Unfortunately, another conference on the subject is needed.”

The wine industry has come a long way on the sustainability front. Now, what’s the next step? That’s the annoying but inevitable question.