It used to be conventional wisdom that if you live in California, you’ll get better value for your money if you buy domestic wine. This would make sense that if all other things were more or less equal, the French product must carry the additional cost of transport, import taxes, and so on.
But lately I’ve been finding several good French wines in the range of $8-$15 a bottle which seem far better than any California wine I could get for the same amount. How is this possible? In spite of all the hype, is California wine getting worse? Or are California vintners exporting their best stock?
I don’t know what the deal is, either, but I find the same thing. It’s not like stocks of good California wines are low, it’s just that they are priced higher than comparable French, Italian, or Australian wines. Heck, I’d love to have a nice Mondavi Cabernet or a Ravenswood Zinfandel with my meal, but I can’t plunk down $15 bucks for a typical weekday wine.
Living near many of the major wineries in Northern California I can get pretty good deals on local wines… but I too have noticed that French wines are becoming more reasonable at the same time that California wines are becoming more pricey. There are definitely some fairly similar wines from both France and California that are pretty closely priced… and in some cases the French wine is actually cheaper.
My WAG is that California vinters are charging more… because they can, and at the same time French wine companies are charging less to be more competitive and to eat into the local marketshare.
I tend to stick with particular wineries for only certain types of wine… so and so has a nice Merlot etc… I think that healthy competition will bring down prices in general (eventually) so Viva Le Competition!
Javaman, I live in the Northeast and I do not have the pleasure of living in or around Napa Valley or Sonoma, in California. The prices we pay for a good dinner wine, such as a Coppola Chard or a nice reisling tend to be pretty high anywhere from 12-18$. Thats Domestic Californian grapes too! Recently in a favorite restaurant my wife and I frequent we paid 24 dollars for a bottle of Chilian Chard called Casa L’Appistole (sp?) I have to say one of the best chard’s of this year (Buttery yet perfectly Oaky) that is up almost 4$ from six months ago. Also, most of the California vinters are certainly capitalizing on the abnormally good seasons they have had in the past 3-4 years. (this is hearsay, not a verified fact) and the french vinyards may be charging less to be more competitive but I tend to bend towards thinking that there are more vinyards in France and the older vinyards are forced to lower their prices to compensate for the low prices of their competitors.
As for the differences of the French wines to the Californian wines, I think that is a complete personal choice. of course this just in my humble opinion…
Yep, CA wines have steadily increased in price for the last several years. Part of it is simple payback; the CA wine industry has invested a lot of money over the last 2 decades in promoting their wines, and in modernizing plants, etc.
Part of it is the sheer monumental expense of producing wines in CA right now. Land is prohibitively expensive in Napa valley, so any new winery is going to be more expensive.
Part of it is a recent change. In order for a wine to bill itself as a Napa Valley wine, at least (I think) 80% of the grapes have to come from Napa Valley. This means that napa valley vintners can no longer cut the wines with less expensive central valley grapes.
Finally, about those central valley grapes…there is a pest called the glassy mumble sharpshooter (I forget if it is winged or eyed sharpshooter) that carries something called Pierces Disease. Pierces disease is death to grape vines. All of Temecula valley, and a good portion of the central coast have all been ripped up due to this pest. This limits the amount of less expensive wines on the market.
There are other factors, including the arrival of chilean and austrialian wines in a major way; the fact that oak is more expensive, suburbization of the central valley, but I think that the reasons I list above are amoung the bigger reasons.
I thought I’d jump in here with a view from the other side. I live in Paris and am absolutely astounded by the quality wines you can get for less than $10. Well, forget $10 even, we had a wine tasting with 15 wines (10 of which were over $20 but none more than $25). By popular vote, the second place winner was a bottle that cost only $4. Whoa! Part of that (pricewise) is due to the exchange rate with the dollar right now - basically, anything French is about 25% less expensive now than it was 2 years ago (used to be 5.7 francs to a dollar, now it is about 7.7). That has a lot to do with the cheaper French wine in the US right now.
You can find California wines here but forget about it. Expensive, expensive, and ridiculous. Every now and then it is fun to get one and compare, but I am usually disappointed - not that CA wine is not good, just that for the price I could have had 2, maybe 3 equivalent bottles of French wine. Next week I’m off to England and will be able to check out some of the Australian wines. Still, French wine seems to have the edge in quality/price…especially in France and even with a sales tax of 18%.
javaman: Now yer talking my language. Mr. Pug and I, too, have found that CA wines have become priced out of our market, and have happily turned to French wines. One of our favorite weekend hobbies is to bargain-hunt for French (and Italian) wines. Now, some folks get the idea that French wine is too “snobby,” but those people are full of overpriced California merlot. We think that French wine is much more complementary to food, because it is dry and complex, and big, woody, buttery California wines can overwhelm carefully prepared food.
And when you’re talking bargains in French wines, we find you can’t beat the southern French wines, which are Cote du Rhones, Rousillons, Languedocs, Gigondas, Vacqueyras, and even Chateauneuf-du-Papes. We just bought an assorted case of these wines and spent about $105, which works out to less than $10 per bottle. These wines are a bit more assertive and fruity than other French wines, so they go well with some of our bolder American cuisine, like BBQ, steaks, lamb chops and burgers. If you’re lucky enough to find southern French whites, those go wonderfully with lighter tomato-sauced items like a tomato-y fish soup or veal in tomato sauce.
The observations here about the exchange rate are valid. We just returned from Paris, where we went to the local McWine chain (Nicolas), and our case of assorted wines cost us even less there – $97 for 12 bottles of topnotch whites.
All in all, my advice is to scout about and find a local wine dealer who specializes in European wines and get on their newsletter. Here in the Bay Area of California, we are lucky to have “K&L Wines,” who are also online, but I’m not sure if they’d ship to anywhere in the U.S. Happy bargain hunting!!
Part of the reason is because CA wines, in recent years has simply become quite trendy. A larger part, especially over the past couple of years, is because of Pierce’s disease. A bug called a “glassy winged sharpshooter” is now carrying it and over the past couple of years, Napa Valley has been hit by around 40 million bucks worth of damage because of it. There is no “cure” for it, except full replantation and trapping the bugs. It’s the same disease that basically wiped out the CA wine industry twice in the past 100 years. So, when the CA wine industry is spending millions above what they expected, just to keep making wine, the consumer will feel it at the cash register.
Last year, France was actually quite excited by the news of a projected catastrophic melt-down of the CA wine industry, expecting to clean house in the market. (CNN even covered it when it happened, Feb-Mar time frame). It wasn’t as bad as it was thought though, which actually caused some riots in France due to investors losing their shirts.
Personally, I think there are some great German wines out there along with the Australian, Brazilian, Chilean, and Belgian wines.
