This past August, when the economy started nose-diving in 
earnest, I published a column on WRO entitled, "Loving Wine on the Cheap" that provided seven tips on how to enjoy wine while minimizing expenses. Since the economy has dramatically worsened since August, and since there's no way in hell that we're going to stop enjoying our favorite drink, I've been at it again, thinking harder about how to continue enjoying wine while spending less money.
Off we'll go in a moment with three new points that will finish off my Top Ten Tip list. But first, I want to ask for your help. Obviously I am not the only one thinking about this issue these days, and I hope you'll give it some thought and send me an idea or two at mfranz@winereviewonline.com. I'll cobble the suggestions together and post them in the WRO Wine Blog space.
One of the most important truths in wine is that grape varieties produce the greatest wines in places where the vines are near the margin of the climate's ability to ripen the fruit. A cool, marginal climate translates into a longer growing season, which tends to produce more complex aromas and flavors in grapes and a more coherent structure in the resulting wines. If you want complex, coherent Pinot Noir, look to a relatively cool climate in Oregon rather than in California's Central Valley.
The only problem here is that a really good bottle of Pinot from Oregon is almost certain to cost $40 or more. This is not simply the result of Oregon Pinot being in fashion at the moment. The fact is that a vintner can only get grapes ripe in a cool climate by not asking the vines to ripen too many of them. Fully ripening grapes requires crop thinning, and reducing crop yields increase per-bottle costs and require a higher selling price for the wine.
So, if you are really bent on keeping your expenditures down by 
buying less expensive wines, you'd do well to look at warmer parts of the wine world for those relatively inexpensive bottles. For starters, you'd have a pretty tough time finding an Oregon Pinot for under $10, and if you were to find one, chances are strong that the fruit behind it wouldn't be fully ripe, or that it would be over-extracted or juked up with cheap oak chips. You'd do far better with your money by looking for a $10 wine from Argentina or Australia or south-central Spain, where vintners can ripen fairly large crops fully, making wines from Malbec or Shiraz or Monastrell that are extremely satisfying for their price level.
You may not be in a mood to hear advice from a stock market analyst right now--in fact, you might really wish to choke one of 
them. Nevertheless, one of the key verities for playing any market is to run counter to its trends, selling when others are buying and buying when others are selling. That also makes sense when it comes to dealing in a cost-sensitive way with the wine market.
If you buy the wine that everyone else wants to buy, chances are that you are going to get burned--or at least not do as well as you could with a more wily strategy. To be more specific, if you bought Merlot in the mid-1990s when it was booming in the wake of the famous "French Paradox" segment on "60 Minutes," you'd likely have gotten a watery, wimpy wine. Wineries could sell anything that said 'Merlot' on the label, so naturally they pushed out big crops by excessively irrigating and fertilizing their vineyards, and by rushing immature vines into production. Merlot is a potentially excellent variety, but no grape is a match for the diluting effects of a true boom in wine fashion.
More recently, the film 'Sideways' produced the double effect of 
pricking the Merlot bubble while inflating demand for Pinot Noir, and the lamentable results of the latter phenomenon continue to be experienced by almost anyone who tries to buy Pinot for less than $15. I taste lots of inexpensive Pinot every year, but lately it is only because I am professionally obliged to do so, and I now keep an airsickness bag next to my spit bucket.
It follows logically that the smart money looks not for wines that are booming but for ones that are undervalued at present. Which wines fit that description? My current list is headed by sherry, 
and I'll have more to say about this in my column next month. For the moment, though, I would assert that wine lovers who love to explore and experiment can find amazing bargains in all of the various types of sherry, which are remarkably under-priced in light of the time and expense involved in making them, as well as the durability of the wines once they are opened (many can be enjoyed in small quantities for weeks on end).
Port offers another important example. Although it is vintage 
ports from years like 2000 or 2003 that draw the lion's share of print in the wine press, more affordable port categories are full of delicious wines at very attractive prices. Reserve ports, 10 year-old tawnies, and late bottled vintage ports are unbelievably complex and satisfying for the money, and like sherries, their power and durability makes them enjoyable far longer than most table wines.
Additionally, if you venture beyond Portugal to try other port-style wines, you can find some amazing bargains from countries like Australia and South Africa. The fact that all wines in this entire category are out of fashion tilts the market in your favor, and perhaps you share my opinion that their un-fashionableness is actually endearing in its own right. I love an underdog, and I hate being a lemming, so I find it very agreeable to follow the zig-when-they-zag approach.
Maybe fortified wines like sherry and port just aren't your thing, which is fine. If you want to run counter to the market while hunting for high-value table wines, you'd be wise to look for grapes, countries and regions that are relatively unknown but now on the rise. Of course, since these countries and regions are not well known, many consumers will need to do some reading to learn about them. That shouldn't be a big problem, though, since many consumers now have more time and brains than money. Lots of information on developing wine regions is available free of charge, and a modest investment in a wine review resource can pay big dividends in terms of quality and savings.
Since the masses haven't gotten the word on wines like Carmenère from Chile, Jumilla from Spain, or Nero d'Avola from Sicily, producers and importers can't inflate their prices. There are plenty of other examples available from New World countries as well as Old World ones like Italy, and we profile them frequently here on WRO.
Finally, there are other wines that are no longer obscure, but that continue to offer excellent value due to special circumstances. For example, Malbec from Argentina continues to over-achieve on price, thanks to low production costs in the country and a 
wonderful synergy between grape and place in the dry, sunny heights of Mendoza. As a second example, Rioja is quite well known around the wine world, but its big bodegas work with great economies of scale that enable them to sell wines of impressive complexity and delicacy for $12 or less.
Given the current climate, you might be as strongly inclined to choke an economist as a stock advisor, but the fact is that reflecting on economics can really help you to get more value out of your wine budget. For instance, the Rioja example just addressed is straight out of Econ 101. A producer making lots and lots of wine can drive better bargains on production inputs (from tractors and tanks to bottles and corks), making it possible to run a generally more efficient and less costly process. Moreover, a producer with lots of wine to sell can take less profit from each individual bottle, making competitive pricing possible.
Many economic ideas are matters of common sense that can be understood without delving into complex equations. However, certain aspects of the wine trade aren't immediately apparent to all consumers, making it difficult to engage your common sense.
One example is provided by the bottle in which your wine comes to you. If that bottle is conspicuously large and heavy, with thick glass and a deep punt and a raised crest on the shoulder with a particular producer's seal, you can bet that it was something like twice as costly as a simple, light bottle with a flat bottom.
The difference between the two bottles and the difference between their cost is obvious, but what may be less obvious is that the costs imposed by that heavy bottle aren't finished once the producer has purchased it. This is because each agent in the commercial pipeline that brings the wine to your table will take a markup along the way, and that markup will be calculated in percentage terms.
As a result, it is not only the juice but also the bottle that is marked up as the wine is purchased by a broker in, say, Tuscany, passing then to an exporter based in Italy or an importer from Chicago who also tacks on 33%, who then sells it to a distributor in Missouri after tacking on 33%, who sells it to a retailer in St. Louis who marks it up another 50% before selling it to you.
If the heavy bottle initially cost 1 euro more than a lighter, simpler alternative used by a competing winery across the road in Tuscany, and that 1 euro gets marked up as it shifts to dollars and gets marked up again and again before you buy the wine, it will represent a sum much higher than the equivalent of 1 euro as a percentage of the selling price of the wine in a retail store
So you should ask yourself: Do I really want to pay an additional $3.50 to get my wine in a big bottle, as opposed to getting essentially the same wine that was made across the road for $3.50 less?
I understand, of course, that a wine may look more impressive in a big bottle, and maybe that really matters to you. If so, write to 
me and I'll steer you toward a couple of producers that sell passable wines in really nice bottles. But again, you should ask yourself: Are you as ready to pay for a really nice bottle as you were a year ago? If you are now buying wines in the $12 - $15 range, that big bottle may represent a shockingly large proportion of the selling price, making it wise for you to ask yourself one last question: Would I rather have a passable wine in a really nice bottle, or a really nice wine in a passable bottle?
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I hope that these three points will help--at least a little--with your efforts to keep your love affair with wine alive during these tough times. If you want to check on the seven points from the column published last August, this link will take you to it:
http://www.winereviewonline.com/Franz_on_Cheap_Wine_Love.cfm
If you have an idea or suggestion to share, please email it to me, and I'll hope to include it in a blog posting so that others can benefit as well. As always, you can send ideas and comments to me at mfranz@winereviewonline.com
