An English preacher has questioned the prices some people pay for wine, but does he have a point?
Several years ago, when I was settling into the role of assistant winemaker at a sizeable winery with a reputation for Chardonnay, I was called to said winery's restaurant to talk to a diner who wanted to buy a bottle of our golden nectar for her boss back in Australia. She'd heard we made some tidy wines and wanted to bring back an impressive gift. After a bit of to-and-fro-ing, we arrived at the obvious destination: the top cuvée.
"And how much is that?" She asked. I hesitated a fraction before saying: "$70 a bottle".
"Oh, no," she replied. "No. That's not expensive enough. He'll look it up. Do you have anything more expensive?"
The answer was no. We had reached what game theorists call a "strict Nash equilibrium", and the conversation disintegrated like bread in water. The exchange ended in the same way it does when you misidentify someone in the street. I walked away embarrassed; she was clearly put-out.
It was something I hadn't thought about for a few years until just recently I saw a poll on social media in which the "Tory socialist" rector of St. Mary Newington in London asked readers for the "morally acceptable upper limit to spend on a bottle of wine". There were four options: £10, £20, £50 or "no upper limit" and the vote went mainly two ways, being either "no upper limit" (presumably the Tories) and "£20" (most likely the socialists). The latter (at last count) pipped it.
The remaining votes were split between the£10 and £50 options either side of £20, which might also indicate that choosing the one option above the cheapest isn't solely a stratagem deployed by punters on a wine list.
Now morality of spend is going to be a bit tricky. Is it immoral to make a profit? Where does profit come from? Is it, as Marxists would argue, essentially appropriated from those who physically create the object? Or does it exist outside of the object's construction? Is it not tangible?
In any case, we know that the cost of production for a single bottle of top Grand Cru Bordeaux is around €25 ($30). You might want to strap a profit margin onto that, so nudge the price up to €35 and that's reasonably fair. You can double it if you want – let's say €50 (after all, Bordeaux has its own three-tier system in which negociants and brokers will be wanting a cut as the wines filter through La Place). But we're still talking top-level stuff, so if you hark back to £20, or €22, you have to admit that's a pretty reasonable price for a decent bottle of wine. The public has spoken.
But then the free market economists and Burgundophiles start flapping like deranged penguins and shouting about supply and demand. So we should look at that. Burgundy holdings are pretty small and it's sometimes hard to begrudge people making a just handful of barrels every year the right to charge enough to make a living from them alone.
Here, I have to admit, I don't have an answer. If I made one bottle of wine a year and charged a salary to do so (and someone paid for it), is that not a little unjustifiable? Art, maybe. Wine, maybe not. And if you are justified in demanding your chosen activity give you a sustainable income on its own, what of the winemakers and viticulturists of the Languedoc, who've been demanding this for decades? They happen to be unfashionable; the Burgundians happen to be minute.
Supply and demand
Which brings us to the consumer side of supply and demand: these high-priced bottles are coveted wines and there isn't much of them, so naturally the price goes up. But that's a natural equation only for an economist. High prices are a very crude (even unfair) method for apportioning things. Most wine lovers understand this – and it's the same in sports ("all the gear but no idea"): having the money to buy the best stuff doesn't mean you are the best placed to appreciate it, or are the most deserving of it.
Furthermore, while Burgundy is often trotted out as the prime example of the august nature of supply and demand, top Champagnes and Bordeaux Grands Crus are made in very high volumes. Furthermore, Beaujolais is very fashionable and prices, while they have gone up, have not gone berserk, even if I haven't been able to get on a Foillard waiting list for the last five years.
And another thing: in the case of France, and for anyone who regularly uses the line that wine is a cultural product (not a straightforward alcoholic beverage), I'd go so far as to argue that apportioning said cultural icon by price is utterly indefensible. I mean, I can hear it now: "These wines are markers of our civilization, they are interwoven with our heritage and with our identity. Our wines are a story of our place, our earth, our culture; they bring together our gastronomic history and savoir-faire. They represent our nation. So we only give them to the rich." Where's the egality and the fraternity in that?
Meanwhile, the great unwashed are forever being told X wine "over-delivers on the price-point" and so on. Some people still use the old "QPR", or Quality-Price-Ratio, acronym. "Great QPR," they say, with vomit-inducing earnestness. But what happened to the "poor QPR"s? Where are the under-deliverers? How did it suddenly become impossible to tell people what they are? Because once you go over that £20 a bottle spend, that’s the territory you’re in.
And this is the thing with the limitless value notion: if there is no limit to the value of something – even an object of craft (as opposed to an individual work of art) - then how can there be any complaint when the curtains are opened on the reality? Look at the example of wine fraud. Think of all those millionaires who claim that there is no upper limit on how much you pay for a Thomas Jefferson wine, or a unicorn DRC. They argue that the price goes beyond the value of the contents. But the moment there is any hint that forgery is at play is the moment that the content suddenly becomes the true value. Imagine, for instance, Rudi Kurniawan's fraud efforts actually tasted like the real thing; they are labeled, look and taste exactly as an early 20th Century wine. His 1945 DRC is identical to a 1945 DRC in every way, including taste, but it is not that wine. The only complaint you have to paying six or seven figures over, say, a few hundred, even a thousand, is a shift in your perception.
(Christies recently did a social media post in which they gave the story of Madame de Pompadour's attempt to buy the Romanée vineyard in the mid 1700s, and the Prince de Conti's gazumping of her offer. It evoked the supermarket checkout magazine covers of today – the regal soap opera of the monarchy, yet earnest and full of historical heft. And the post closed before the rabble of the French Revolution got their grubby mitts on the hallowed piece of Burgundian real-estate. There's an echo in there.)
No-one really likes fraud but there comes a point (as I've talked about before) where my sympathies lie elsewhere. People with all the gear and no idea getting the balloon of their own hubris popped is not a tragedy, shall we say, in my eyes.
So is it immoral to charge more than £20 for a bottle of wine? Morality's too loose a phenomenon to evoke, I think, but certainly anything over £50 is, I think, hard to justify. No-one buys CDs anymore but it was almost as if there was a maximum price on them. It's not an identical issue but I think we can do the same with wine. Furthermore, I think it's imperative to do it if we argue wine has some cultural value.
Going to a museum or a cathedral is not the preserve of the rich. And it's not enough to say there are plenty of other wines. There are plenty of Impressionists but you wouldn't reserve Monet's back catalogue solely for retired investment bankers and their mates while we contented ourselves with auction catalogue entries and genuflecting reviewers only adding to the painter’s mythic status.
In the meantime, as with the boss in the opening (true) story who drank his wines by price-point, we might have to content ourselves by saying that each wine gets the drinker it deserves.
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November 29, 2020 at 06:06AM
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The Morality of Buying Expensive Wine | Wine-Searcher News & Features - Wine-Searcher
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