In a rapidly-growing wine region, new producers will always be at a bit of a disadvantage. Just letting the public know about their wine can be a bit of a challenge, and one with many different solutions. Yet, from my perspective as a writer and wine buyer, the most important area where many new wineries struggle is in their pricing.
Pretty regularly as a buyer, I’m approached by a somewhat new, local winery that wants me to stock their wine at my small retail shop. Now, I love supporting Northwest wineries, as a vital and thriving wine industry can only help to promote wine, regardless of its origin. However, there’s also a very simple question I have to ask myself whenever I order any bottle: can I sell this? That question folds in issues of quality, price and name recognition, and since a new winery will almost never have the latter, it has to make its bones on the former two.
Yet many new winemakers appear to be stuck on charging as much (or more) than long-established producers. Some of this is pure economics, of course, as making wine isn’t cheap—grapes, barrels, labor and even corks can be pricey. Furthermore, most new wineries are also trying to pay off the winemaking equipment they’ve purchased, and let me tell you, fermenters, crushers, destemmers and the like are not low-cost items. While I think it’s a bad idea to try to recoup those investments in just a couple of vintages, I understand the sentiment.
However, I think many newcomers charge what they charge more out of hubris than out of actual business necessity. Some winemakers look at a landscape dotted with boutique or cult wines that sell out annually and command serious prices, and want in. After all, there’s way less glamour in making perfectly good, reasonably-priced wines than in making 200 cases of something that only the uber-hip even know about.
Others decide that the market should pay a premium for their experimentation with less-popular grapes. This is a tricky subject, because a world where everyone only made Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon would undoubtedly be some off-brand version of Hell, but at the same time it’s a bit much to make a wine from what in Europe is an everyday grape and expect to get $25-$30 for it… I’m looking at you Ugni Blanc, Aligote, Cinsault and others. That’s not to say that those wines are bad, merely that it’s hard for them to compete (in a storefront setting at least) against equally good wines from Europe that cost half as much.
We’re a young industry. We’re still learning and experimenting, and that’s a wonderful thing. Yet at the same time, it’s important to remember that a wine without an audience is a wine without a purpose, and if your audience is only the super-rich or the super-geeky, well, you’re probably doing it wrong.
