When helping our clientèle choose wine, I typically suggest several options that seem appropriate — at different price points. What typically follows is a conversation about what qualities attend a more expensive candidate versus a less expensive one. Sometimes, a guest will decide to spend a bit more to get a bit more. At other times, the lower-priced wine seems like the better value.
It’s perfectly reasonable that said guest will be content to spend more only if convinced something appreciably more is in the offing. Exactly what more means in such a situation isn’t always predictable. In some cases, the balance will be tipped by increased weight, ripeness, or sheer presence on the palate — what I like to call drama.
I liken this to the experience of a person in an auto showroom who is considering upgrading from an economy car to a midrange one. Often pricier models will be built on the same chassis and with the same quality of engineering as lesser models, but with just enough stylistic or cosmetic enhancements to give an impression of additional money well-spent.
Wines can be built this way, too, since there are lots of ways of adding drama to fundamentally ordinary (or worse) wine. These include the use of darkening and thickening agents, techniques that mimic the effects of long maturation on tannins, and dubious oak enrichment regimes involving wood staves (rather than expensive barrels), oak beads, chips, or even — well, let’s not go there. I hope I don’t have to point out that here at FK we have no use for wine cooked up by such means.
But if wine quality isn’t determined by superficial dramatic flourishes of the kind I‘ve described, what kind of wine is worth paying more for? It’s not the easiest question to answer, but it helps to understand that there are really only a handful of precursive factors that can be relied on to build quality in wine. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that each of them means extra expense for the winemaker (and thus for you). For brevity’s sake, we’ll consider just four.
1. Vineyard character. Wine grapes don’t grow everywhere, and even where they thrive, some plots of ground will reliably produce more wine-worthy grapes. In prestige appellations, the cost of proven vineyard acreage can be very high indeed.
2. Competition for quality fruit. In many places there is a tradition of making wine with purchased grapes, and the variation in prices winemakers are willing to pay for a ton of grapes is a stark reminder of how differently fruit from different sources is valued. For example, E & J Gallo source most of their grapes from California’s Central Valley, where they may pay growers on the order of $350 per ton. Meanwhile, Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon fruit from good sites may sell for around $5,000 per ton, with top sites (per above) fetching more than $20,000 per ton.
3. Low yields. You might think that the best way to make money from an acre of vineyard would be to get as much fruit from it as possible. But this doesn’t work with wine grapes since quantity and quality tend to be inversely related.
For many growers, a first step in raising the quality of fruit is to reduce the amount each vine is asked to ripen. For this reason, appellation rules typically put an upper limit on the amount of juice that can be extracted from each acre (or hectare) of vineyard, and thus the amount of wine produced.
Generally, the more prestigious the designation, the lower the permitted yield. But the rules impose no lower limits, and conscientious vintners often operate at the lowest yields consistent with making a reasonable profit.
4. An artisanal approach. Commercial-scale winemaking is capital-intensive, risk-averse, and fiercely competitive. It is sharply focused on doing things as quickly and cheaply as possible. As an essentially industrial process, profitability it is dependent on (a) cheap raw materials and (b) yet more industrial processes. Thus, it prefers cheap fruit, machine rather than human labor wherever possible, and chemical treatments to maintain vineyard productivity. To succeed, it must operate at a certain scale; to achieve scale it must aim at, and capture, a mass market.
Compare small-to-modest scale artisanal winemaking to this sketch and you will find it at odds with it in every respect. Dedication to satisfying a relatively small number of consumers with products issuing from a facility operating more as a workshop than a factory, that are made with real care and reflect the personality of an individual craftperson, all mean that even modest economies of scale are hard to come by.
In the end, we may never know why a particular estate sets the price it does for a given wine. But it’s important to understand that every step taken by a grower or winemaker that is the result of a legitimate effort to build quality — and not just drama— into his or her wine, will reasonably, and justly, add to the price of the bottle.