This question comes from Tracy Dolan a mother of 4 from Fresno, CA. The question was posed by her 13 year old son.
This is a good question and a timely one since the record for the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction happened in 2010. According to the Wall Street Journal "Three bottles of Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild 1869 were just sold at a Hong Kong auction by Sotheby’s. The hammer price of $232,692 a bottle set a record for the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction. It may well be the most expensive bottle ever sold, though there are no records of private sales." The journal goes on to say, "At $232,692 a bottle, the Lafite 1869 works out to about $29,000 a glass, or more than $2,000 a sip."
I don't know many 13-year-olds who are interested in drinking wine at $2000/sip, I’m certainly not. In fact, I prefer wine that runs for about $10/bottle, about 8 cents/sip.
The question can be interpreted in another way which is, "why do some wines cost so much more than others? Is there really a difference in quality?"
Now this is something I know a little bit about. I'm not a wine maker but every year around late September I pretend to be one. For the past 4 years I have studied, picked, stomped, crushed, de-stemed, sorted, fermented, racked, barreled, bottled, and occasionally drank wine. My primary interest in wine making has been cultural. Being of Italian descent I have had an interest in the processes of my ancestors culture. Wine making is one of those things. Not because I am much of a wine drinker. In fact, I prefer beer on most occasions, though I really appreciate good wine.
So here is the answer. First of all price will never determine if you will like the wine. Every person has a different experience when it comes to taste and what is good to me may not be good to you. But there are some differences in the process of making wine. Gallo wine is good wine, lots of people drink Gallo wine. You can buy Gallo wine for a few bucks a gallon in most grocery stores. BevMo is advertising on their website Chateau Ausone Saint-Emilion Grand Cru Classe from France for $1,059.99 per bottle. I have no idea if this wine is good or not because I'm personally not going to buy it. But let's talk about something I might buy for a special occasion like a 2005 Silver Oak Cab at $90 (used to be more than $100, I think they cut the price because of recession).
What is the difference between the $2.00 Gallo wine and the $100 Silver Oak? Lots!
The Grapes: The first major difference is the grapes themselves. Most of the Gallo jug & box type wines are not specific wine varieties. They use whatever grapes are available at a good price such as the multi-purpose Thompson Seedless. They use a combination of many types of grapes to produce specific kinds of wine. Silver Oak, on the other hand, uses a specific grape variety, the Cabernet Sauvingnon.
Region: Wine growing regions, known as AVA's, have a major impact on the quality of the grapes. Napa valley is known as one of the worlds greatest wine grape regions. This has to do with the soil and the climate. Napa wines usually cost more than central valley wines. Generally if the wine label says "California" on it and does not specify a region, those grapes come from somewhere between Bakersfield and Sacramento.
Cultural Practices: How the grapes are grown has an impact on the wine. The process of growing grapes is about concentrating sugars and acids in the grapes themselves. Some grapes are grown for high production and some grapes are grown for high quality. The gallo grapes produce much higher yields per acre, whereas the Silver Oak grapes are thinned by hand and grown for low per acre production.
Harvesting: Some grapes are harvested by hand and others by machine. Machine harvesting is much cheaper than doing it by hand. Most expensive wines harvest by hand. Also the harvest timing has a lot to do with quality. There is a point in the life cycle of a grape when the sugars and acids are in perfect balance. Each wine maker has a different idea about what this balance is, but for the most part you can either pick the grapes with the right amount of sugar and acid, or you can try an fix it later. Fixing it means you have to either add sugar, tartaric acid (a natural acid found in grapes), or water. Large wineries that are buying thousands of tons of grapes each season don't have the luxury of picking them all in balance.
The Crush: When grapes come to the winery the first thing that happens is they get crushed and the stems removed. Many high end wineries have people sorting the bunches prior to crush to make sure no immature or rotten grapes get into the crusher. This is very expensive. Large scale wineries do not hand sort.
Fermentation: Smaller wineries generally ferment their wine is small batches where they have a reasonable amount of control over the process. Gallo literally ferments millions of gallons of grape juice each year.
Barreling: Wineries like Silver Oak store the wine for some time in oak barrels. These barrels are expensive and take up a lot of room. Gallo does not use barrels.
Racking: Racking is the process of cleaning up the wine. When wine is crushed and fermented lots of solids are left behind in the process. Pieces of grape skin, seeds, stems, and yeast left over from fermentation. Racking removes all that stuff by allowing those particles to settle to the bottom of the barrel. The clean wine is siphoned off the top and the stuff on the bottom is dumped. Every time the wine is racked some of the wine is lost, lowering your yield and profits. Gallo type wine is filtered so there is little volume lost but some of the good things in wine get lost too.
Aging: Many very good red wines are produced to be aged. They are high in tannins which take time to mellow enough to drink. The Silver Oak 2005 Cab was picked 5 years ago and is just now ready to drink. The gallo wine on the shelf is generally consumed within a few months of production. The cost of keeping the wine in temperature & humidity controlled storage for that time is very high.
There are some other factors such as the quality of the glass, the label, the cork, etc that contribute to the value of the wine but the 8 things listed above actually contribute to wine quality.
There is a saying in wine making, "It takes a lot of beer to produce great wine." I don't know all that much about making wine, but I do know that statement is true. Making wine is a fairly tedious process and having beer around helps a lot.
Posted via email from Dairy Dino
Great post Dino! And you’ve made me want some good wine with dinner!
Great post about another agricultural product.
I wonder if the particulate lost in the racking process could be used in a methane digester? Hmm… one way to merge the cowpies with the wine industry. Cheers!
Robin, that is a great question. I have never looked into it but my first reaction would be that the lees (the sludge on the bottom of the barrel) would most likely not convert to methane. I don’t completely understand the microbiological activity working in methane digesters but I know the pH of manure is much higher than the pH of wine. Wine pH is very low at 3.5. The reason wine is able to store for a long time is because the pH is low enough to prevent bacteria from growing. Methane digesters require bacteria to convert the manure into methane gas.
I’ll have to look into this issue deeper.
Thanks again.
One of the best explanations about wine I’ve read! Thanks. Hopefully, I can share some wine (or beer or Scotch) with you again.