Trader Joe’s $2 wine became a best-seller
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The price of wine is determined by price of grapes. To achieve low price of your input you need vineyards that are hugely productive (say 10 to 20 times of those used for quality production). Even vineyards used for high quality production need a lot of chemical inputs (compared to rest of agriculture), but here we need to go even higher due to high density of grapes and zero green management.
All of the vineyards are optimised for mechanical prunning, management and harvest. No problem with that and we are also seeing this trend in more and more premium wines due to rising cost of work and technological progress.
At the end of growing stage we are having grapes that are not that ripe: probably not a lot of sugar, harsh tanins, lots of acids (and also structure of various acids will be on harsh acid types) and probably some rot on wines (this is normal even in high quality wines).
No problem with any of those parameters: low sugars could be fixed by infusing sucrose, acid could be removed by using potasium bicarbonate, tanin structure could be improved by using artifical tanins (or tanins extracted from wood), color could be fixed by acetaldehyde (cause of headaches, together with high SO2 levels) and whole structure might be balanced by using reverse osmosis.
After use of ten or maybe 50 different additive you get your $2 bottle of wine-like drink. It might even taste good.
The details of the process are certainly interesting, it's just weird you framed them as "problem".
After reading that article and the above comment I think I'd rather just mix some grape juice and vodka than some of that really cheap wine.
Virtually no wine, no matter how expensive, is just grapes and yeast. All wine you can buy in a store contains at least some additives.
However, the vast majority of wines do contain at least a small amount of added SO2.
There are plenty of expensive wines out there with lots of manipulative additives (sucrose, acidification or deacidification, oak powder, etc) as has been outlined above, but it is much more common in less expensive wine.
There is a scale between wine as a mass produced industrial product and as an artisanal, site-specific hand crafted product, and there are wineries/brands/specific wines that fill in every conceivable spot on that spectrum.
Oftentimes, individual wineries will have different lines of products made in different ways or even in different facilities. Estate grown vs purchased fruit. Physical wineries vs "private labels" made at custom crush facilities. A little tangential perhaps...
Personally I would be worry of pesticide residues in wines. Not just those bottom cheap bottles, but from all mass and non-bio certified producers. Few years ago there was high level of arsenic found in two-buch Chunk, but it is very common across the board: "Together the 34 bottles of conventional wine contained 148 pesticide residues. All 34 bottles contained at least one pesticide, while the mean number of pesticides per bottle was more than four. The highest number of residues found in a single bottle was 10."[0].
Those traces are probably not going to kill you, but let just not see all wines as being created equal.
This results directly into degraded ecosystems because you basically use the land as a life-less substrate to produce your grapes and all the chemicals which are not degraded or bound to the grapes are ending in the soil.
That afterwards you do a lot a chemical work to convert the grapes into wine is another story.
Note that my salary is coming from both sides. I work as consultant to both the big agro companies and the ones doing food additives and fragrances.
Everybody on the line know very well the real cost of a $2 bottle of wine. But the buyers do not see that on the label only the money they have in the pocket or not.
A $2 bottle of wine is less wine and more creative engineering. And that's ok as long as the customers understand what they're getting.
The bar for entry at the high end is impossibly high. And those who are already up there have to offer something that cannot be cheaply obtained. A unique natural taste, the image (and protected brand), tradition, etc.
On the other end of the spectrum you have the cheap wines that have no choice but to try to replicate some of that by artificial means while competing with an almost literal flood of competition doing the exact same. The target there is to stay as cheap as humanly possible while minimally meeting regulation in the food sector, and offering wine-like taste.
See the wine like a battery. The cheapest and the most expensive ones look the same and might superficially act the same. And they'll certainly feel the same if you just test them with your tongue. They're on the same spectrum of products but there's a reason why they're at different ends.
“Don’t buy the $2 Trader Joe wine, buy our $20 wine not because it tastes better because we “we don’t use the land as a life-less substrate””
Externalities? Not necessarily. The organic, small farmer raised tomato probably has a much higher CO2 footprint than a corporate farm tomato from Mexico - efficiency at scale can be enormous.
This is the same as quality vs. quantity. Consume less but better. Buy less food, more expensive, but do not throw it away. Buy a good pair of shoes which you can get fixed and use for many years....
Same subject, more or less, which I really enjoyed reading:
"I’ve tracked every piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869464
I don't know if that's still the case, but it definitely used to be what they were doing.
Trader Joe's is really a different animal. It has a interesting rotating selection of specialty items, usually more global or seasonal in nature with biweekly or monthly "themes," along with a fairly consistent store brand selection of reasonable quality that doesn't just optimize for a low price. Most stores around the nation will have similar items around the same time, and they will be seasonally relevant, so they're not just stocking what was left over in that geographic region.
That’s something I could never comprehend. To me, it doesn’t taste any good.
But I haven't read it yet, so I am not sure if it is worth it.
A long article which ends at the default lie of all "premium" products: If the price of something is high it is because of better quality. And: We would never, ever put additives into our premium products like these cheap manufacturers.
And if you believe that .. it's bridge selling time.
This is process chemistry for formulated products. And the only difference between that and cooking is that process chemistry actually cares about quality and consistency of the final product.
Not to mention, whether talking about cheap wine or McDonald's burgers, chemical additives are a bit of a red herring - the goals of the process are achieved as much, if not more, by being in control of how ingredients are mixed, heated, vapourised, deposited or otherwise processed. That's what all this bulky equipment does. Vats that keep the oil within a fraction of degree of a set temperature. Presses and dryers that ensure specific granularity and surface area, combined with conveyors precisely timed to have the half-product lose exactly enough moisture. All other kinds of hardware that doesn't add new chemical compounds, just keeps natural reactions and phase transitions under control. All in a tight loop with automated and manual laboratory testing, that checks both for process parameters and presence of contaminants.
The whole thing is an exercise of minimizing variance in the process, so that the end result hits desired metrics. It carries the usual dangers of optimization systems - the choice of metrics and of things that are not optimized for. But it's not as simple as "more processed = more chemicals = more bad".
True, but in practice that is how it goes.
Because the McD patties and buns are optimized for shelf-life, for consistency, for being quick to cook, for "cheap taste". Hence high levels of sodium, stabilizers, etc
Yes, "more chemicals" is not necessarily bad, but it depends.
I think it's been some years since I could stomach a McD meal without feeling sorry afterwards.
Added sugar is a huge no-no for me. I wish wineries and spirit makers were forced to disclose in plain terms a lot of this stuff, especially after a price point.
It does not contain additives, it's just plain wine. I do not drink often so I use it mostly for cooking, but it would be definitely drinkable, and it's probably something that would cost 10 times as much on the other side of the ocean.
Also, wineries sell directly to customers, so if you are really keen into drinking a lot of wine you can just go there, fill several demijohns and then bottle it yourself. My father (and his father, and my mother's father, and everyone else over a certain age) has done this every year for their entire life.
Since moving to Israel I've noticed something very similar. A bottle of Red (yes, that's a brand) can be purchased in the corner store for the equivalent of $8 CDN. In Canada the same bottle was a little over $45.
This is all about protecting the local wine industry through tarriffs - nothing else.
Does the grapevine grow in Canada? That would be a surprising discovery.
Don't you think it has to do with culture and disincentivizing? Most countries tend to tax potentially harmful products a lot higher than other products. See tobacco for example. The astronomical price for a pack of smokes is not for protecting local industries.
And given these conditions, you want to drink juice, or the best available alternative, at any arbitrary moment during the year...
The solution? fermentation. Just ferment the hell out of everything and store it for years. Now you can drink juice anytime you want, it just tastes weird but it's better than nothing.
It also doesn't take an economist to figure out why this product sells well. The only other place I've seen wine this cheap is in Italy.
TL;DR Yes, it seems you're right about that.
This has been put to the test many times, usually with comical results. This page[0] has some stories, e.g. :
French researcher Frédéric Brochet "submitted a mid-range Bordeaux in two different bottles, one labeled as a cheap table wine, the other bearing a grand cru etiquette." Tasters described the supposed grand cru as "woody, complex, and round" and the supposed cheap wine as "short, light, and faulty." ...when Brochet served a white wine he received all the usual descriptions: "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively." Later he served the same wine dyed red and received the usual red terms: "intense, spicy, supple, deep."
...little correlation has been found between price and preference, even among wine experts, in tasting settings in which labels and prices have been concealed.
Robert Hodgson, a California vintner...noticed that the results of wine competitions were surprisingly inconsistent. ...[he] approached the organizers of the California State Fair wine competition in 2005 with a proposal. In the course of their routine duties, he would sometimes present the judges with samples from the same bottle three times without their knowledge. The judges were among the top experts in the American wine industry: winemakers, sommeliers, critics and buyers as well as wine consultants and academics. The results were "disturbing"... "Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine." ...Hodgson continued to analyze the results of wine competitions across the state and found that the medals awarded for wine excellence "were distributed at random".
In other words, if I were in a store with only unfamiliar wine, needing to buy something for a dinner party, I'd probably buy a step above normal.
For normal occasions, there are tons of options in the $10 to $15 price range that I know I like. A $10 bottle I like is always better than a $25 bottle I don't like.
For 2 dollars you get industrial mass production. Taste-wise it might be fine for some, but it is unlikely to be sustainable and you definitely miss the fun and artisanal part of wine.
It's similar to small local organic farming vs. industrial farming for a more difficult to produce product.
If wine is just a drink for you than there is huge amount of good wines for $10 - $15. Nicely done, good products.
For me, huge wine nerd (and also owner/winemaker of small organic winery) the wine is more like a postcard from faraway place and book of poetry at the same time. I am sure I am not going to be able to tell difference between cheap and expensive wines sometimes, but that is not a point. There is a more into wine than primary aromatics if you want to dig deep into into.
Now, as a wine professional, you do care about the price of the wine because it is an integral part of your business. However, when I taste to buy for my business, I try to evaluate the wine before knowing the price. Then I decide whether I like it and would like to sell it before going through the second evaluation phase based on price.
When I put my phone in the pocket I don't usually use, I feel it vibrate in the pock it's usually in. It's freaky-disturbing.
Historically, even some physics measurements show herd mentality biases, with scientists being reluctant to publish values too far from generally accepted values.
> The most important is that the subjects in this experiment were not, in fact ‘wine experts’. They were undergraduate enology students. They are probably more knowledgeable about wine than the average person, but they were not in any way ‘experts’, or even ‘professionals’.
> It’s simply not true that “Every single one, all 54, could not tell it was white.” as is frequently stated. Even Brochet doesn’t claim that, saying “About 2 or 3 per cent of people detect the white wine flavour”, and the paper that is frequently cited shows that indeed some people gave ‘white wine’ descriptions to the dyed-red wine.
> But even more important than those errors, the study never demonstrated that people can’t tell red wine from white.
And more important to me, if you're really misleading people, your results will be all over the place.
If you want to know if people can tell white from red wines (they can, but just in case), do a blind test, but don't mislead them.
Last time I checked most people weren't wine experts either, so someone who is maybe a bit more knowledgeable than most people but not so far removed that their experience is completely different sounds like good candidates.