4 replies to this topic

[graperman]

About a year back, I made a Vintner's Reserve pinot noir kit. I guess many here might consider them lower end. I've had maybe 5 bottles from that batch and a year later it's doing well. I picked up a $5 bottle of Barefoot's Pinot Noir, which says on the bottle that it won a gold award for something. I thought to compare it to my VR wine. I had not had a bottle of it in 4 months.

My VR pinot noir was outstanding compared to the Barefoot. Now, admittedly, the Barefoot is a cheap store wine. It costs $5 compared to the $2+ my wine cost to make. The Barefoot had a metallic taste to it. It is the same metallic taste many store bought reds have had. Not sure where that metallic taste comes from in these wines. My homemade wines never have that taste. My pinot noir was smooth and mellow. No off taste anywhere there. Very fruity. It tasted like a wine where the wine components came together nicely. Even my wine aerator could not help that store bought wine much.

Kits are great. I try many store wines. I may purchase a wine exceeding $15, on rare occasion, but not often. My kits perform as well or better than the high end of my price range. I keep thinking about why my kits are better(and it is not just me saying this). Are kit companies sourcing different juices than these wineries? Maybe but how much different can they be? I swear it comes down to quality control. I baby these wines. My cleaning and sanitizing methods are spot on. I used double filtered water(regular household filter and then a brita filter). I keep the fermentation and aging at nearly perfect temps. My bottled wines do not sit in the sunshine, or in fluorescent light all day and night. Possibly all these factors.

[tim221]

I don't know for sure, but somehow I suspect that marketing, transportation, and mark-up has a lot to do with the price of wines. So my preferred price point for commercial wines is around $10-15 a bottle. Let's say $12 to make it easy. Assume the retailer has to stay in business so at least a 20% markup there, so that's $9.60/bottle. Truck it half way across the country (best case), let's say $1/bottle (high, but include various tariffs and taxes in that cost, since I'm sure it's not cheap to arrange for import from overseas and we're trying to average). Now we're at $8.60/bottle. Marketing, either to the public or to the distributors, isn't cheap, so another $2/bottle so now we're at $6.60/bottle. Winery needs to make a profit to stay in business so assume 20% for them, so another $1.30/bottle so now $5.30/bottle. So, if it costs the home winemaker around $5/bottle, that's because that's what it really costs to produce a "good" bottle of wine. One avoids all those markups because one doesn't need them but the raw materials and product still has costs--and one "eats" the labor costs because it is a fun and interesting hobby, eh?

And of course, a home winemaker can make less expensive wines that compete well with lower-price-point wines, but are still quite good wines ($8/bottle wines can be pretty decent).

Anyways, just some quick math-in-public thinking..
TIm

[Little Blind Guy]

Nothing really to add to the thread but I do have a funny story about Barefoot Cellar's Pinot Noir.

Our wine club will do blind tastings at our "meetings" quite often. Last October I hosted and did a blind tasting of Pinot Noirs ranging in price from the $3.99 Barefoot Cellar to a $60 bottle from Willamette Valley Vineyards which was Oregon's winery of the year. The other wines were in the $9 to $15 dollar range.

Most rated the BFC as DNPIM. (Do not put in mouth.) I thought it was very funny when the first person to taste the BFC simply said, "It's a $3.99 Pinot) How the hell that wine won an award is beyond me. (The fact that the bottle said it did when I bought it was why I chose to include it in the blind tasting.)

[tim221]

That's pretty good... I will try to remember the acronym ("DNPIM")! I guess I'm turning into a wine snob 'cause there's a number of wines in that category (oh and I don't discriminate, I'm a beer snob and booze (liquor) snob too).

Tim

[Noontime]

Nothing wrong with being selective and identifying what you enjoy...I think snobbery is having a preconceived requirment for something to be good, or allowing your knowledge of something to dictate your enjoyment.

And I think I'm going to make T-shirts that say DNPIM