In other words, does good wine cost more to make than bad wine? This seems to be a recurring question for nearly everyone but at the end of the day there is no precise and easy answer. And of course to even broach the subject requires that we define what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ wine, which can be exponentially more difficult, if we attempt to apply those definitions to anyone other than ourselves. Many things must culminate at the right times to make good wine and even more things must happen to make great wine. As the saying goes, ‘the fruit makes the wine’; everything begins in the vineyard and with poor fruit, human intervention can only do so much to make it better.Every vineyard has not only its own terroir (a sense of place defined by soil type, macroclimate mesoclimate and microclimate, acclimation to sunlight, wind, humidity and rainfall, to name a few) but also its own philosophy about viticulture. Large vineyards consisting of many hundreds of acres that grow grapes for wines of the masses, like jug wines or boxed wines, are usually mechanized to a very high degree because of the scale of the operation. Generally, these wines are considered to be of low quality and the costs for these wines are priced accordingly. In this case it tends to be volume over quality and certainly there is a place for this in the market.Conversely there are smaller vineyards that are tended to by hand, with some vineyards having year-around, full-time caretakers of two people per acre. The cost of labor adds up very quickly in this scenario, which of course gets passed on to us, the consumers. So what does this extra labor really buy? It provides constant monitoring of vine vigor, training of vines, pruning and yield monitoring, canopy management, pest management, and vine health monitoring, all with the goal of producing concentrated fruit in the highest quantity, without sacrificing quality. With good clones and good terroir, great things can happen in the vineyard under this scenario.Next up would be the winemaker’s ability and, like nearly every other field of expertise, you get what you pay for. There are a number of amazing winemakers and consultants in the world but the crème’ de la crème are worth their weight in gold. These are the men and women that decide when to harvest and how to take the grapes through selection, crush, maceration, extraction, yeast selection if not indigenous, fermentation, malolactic or secondary fermentation if applicable, blending if it is not a standalone varietal, racking, fining, filtering, aging, and bottling and so on. There are a myriad of crucial decisions made by winemakers that literally can create great wine from average fruit or completely ruin incredible fruit by making poor enology decisions. The enologists with track records are paid handsomely for making great wine, which of course gets passed on to us in the form of higher prices.Even buying oak barrels becomes quite expensive but if you’ve ever seen a cooper practice his craft (sorry – I’m not being sexist here but I’ve yet to see a woman working as a cooper), it seems like a bargain to me. These guys really know their stuff and it is remarkable to think they can put all of these wood pieces together seamlessly so the barrel doesn’t leak. Barrels are ordered by the wine estate to their own specifications, which translates into how ‘toasted’ the winemaker wants the inside to be. Different toasting levels (actually putting the oak to flame while bending the staves) produces drastically different results in the finished wine. The subject of oak barrels is much larger than this article will allow but it’s a really fascinating subject. Then let’s factor in the marketing and distribution costs. In some sense, distribution costs will be the same (transportation for example); it won’t matter to the refrigerated truck company if they’re hauling Château Lafite-Rothschild or Yellow Tail – the cost will be the same. But extra care is given during importing and shipping more expensive wine to ensure they’re not cooked during shipment, which again costs more. In France, the shipment of 2005 1st Growth Bordeaux required a convoy of security guards and vehicles because heisting even one truckload of this precious nectar would have yielded tens of millions of dollars for the would-be wine pirate. And looking at the path of say, Bordeaux, it’s easy to see why many of those wines are more expensive in general than our domestic counterparts. In this case we have a château, a nêgociant or courtier (French wine broker or exporter), a US importer, a US distributor and a US retailer. Wow! This adds up quickly because everyone takes a piece of the action. Everyone complains about the cost of French wine but it is all of the middle layers that are driving high prices, not necessarily the châteaux.This article just barely touches the tip of the iceberg and in fact an entire volume could be written on this subject alone. But to answer the question: YES (almost always)! In general, good wine costs more to make than bad wine and great wine costs more to make than good wine. There are fortuitous exceptions that surface occasionally but those are not the rule. Whether it’s good wine or great wine, there is a point of diminishing returns on cost vs quality - I would be happy to follow up with an article about that subject on Local Wine Events in the future. David Boyer classof1855.com
