Most wine produced, sold and consumed is pretty crappy

If this sounds like an inflammatory ranting headline, in reality its not. In 2000-01 by volume 56% of all wine sold was either in cask, flagon or bulk. Only 44% sold was in bottles. Of the bottled wine sold, by volume the majority of it costs below $12 a bottle, so if you mainly drink wine that costs more than $12 a bottle, you in a premium (bad choice of word) minority.

Very few people drink the quality of wines that many readers of this journal regard as average daily drinking wines, and that’s not just in Australia its all round the world. For example, 61% of bottled wine exported from Australia wholesaled for less than A$4.99 a bottle (no taxes included for obvious reasons.) At the other extreme, only 5% of the wine exported was over $10 a bottle wholesale. 

This is a very telling statistic. Even if you triple the price to allow for taxes, distribution and profit and then convert it into American dollars or pounds sterling, the retail price is still low and remember we are talking about bottled wine here, casks or bulk wine are not included in these export numbers.

The French consume about 60 litres of wine a year and its not all first growth Bordeaux or Premier Grand Cru Burgundy. The premier wines of France (and Australia) represent a tiny proportion of the wine production and that’s why the prices of these are so high by comparison to most other wines.

Take a trip around the countryside of France and in many restaurants you will see people drinking bulk wine and adding water to it. (I am not sure if the water is to improve the flavour – grin.)

In Australia we consume almost 20 litres a head per year and once again please consider the majority of it does not come out of a bottle. Drinkable much of it may be, but good wine by any standard its not. The majority of the bottled wine sold (by volume) is at the low cost end of the scale (below $12) and most of this wine is also not exactly great. Just think about how hard you have to search around to get a good wine at that price.

In Halliday Wine Companion its states “You will see that nearly all the wines reviewed in this book rate 84 points or better. This is not wanton generosity on my part. It simply reflects the fact that the 1000 or so wines selected for review are the tip of more than 5000 tasting notes accumulated over the past year.”

From this we can see about one bottled wine in five that Halliday reviews rates a write up and you have to take into account that he is only reviewing bottled wine which represents less than half the wine consumed.

The reality is that most people who drink wine enjoy it but it may not hold a great deal of importance to them (or they have budgetary constraints) and they are not prepared to pay a lot for it, hence the quantity of cask wine and low cost bottled wine sold.

Unfortunately we can’t drink Grd wine sold.

Unfortunately we can’t drink Grange quality wine for $2.50 a litre be we can drink ordinary wine even if it’s pretty crappy by comparison to the wines many of us are in the fortunate position to enjoy and appreciate.

Cheers

Ric