Hacker News Reader

Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

The real problem here is that to get your raw materials to produce your wine as cheap as possible (think your BOM), you have only one option: high density, low manual work and very high levels of chemicals to compensate the high density.

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.

View on HN

I think the idea that the pressure to produce your wine as cheap as possible is only there for cheap wines is fiction. For expensive wines the same pressure is there, they want to make a profit. So while with expensive wines, potentially due to the high price they might have the resources to do better, you have no guarantee whatsoever that they actually will.

It depends. I am not that familiar with US, but in most of Europe you do have layered system. Basic table wine rules are quite relaxed, but then you have higher levels with more or less strict rules for farming practices, yield and vinification practices. Those practices are then checked by governing body or goverment.

The difference between cheap and expensive (luxury) products is the margin. Manufacturers of cheap wine have to sell a lot to make a profit because they can't afford to charge any premium. This means going as fast, cheap, and low quality with the ingredients as they legally can. This is how the race to the bottom looks like and it's almost universally applicable in just about every field.

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.

It is very hard to create luxury wine in the middle of nowhere so the price of land is big factor in cost of wines in premium and luxury segment. 1 hectare of good plot in top regions like Barolo, Bordeaux, Champagne or Burgundy starts around 1 to 2 millions of euros, but top plots goes much further than that, 10 millions of euros for hectare of Burgundy Grand Cru is not unheard of. You are making around 4000 litres of wine per year on 1 hectare.

I'm sure all that is true. That's exactly why competition is so strong in the low end and why it's a race to the bottom for quality and price. The most accessible ways of making a product cheaper are mass production, and replacing the expensive components with something you can mass produce cheaply.

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.

This sounds like some great marketing.

“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””

Isn't that the same for most products? One big difference between the super cheap mass produced product and the more expensive 'artisanal' product is that the more expensive product has less negative externalities . When I buy the more expensive local meat as opposed to the the super cheap imported meat, part of what I'm paying for isn't just a better product, but also supporting certain farming practices I prefer.

Farming practices? Sure.

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.

It is great marketing but also way of life.

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

How does that work with wine? A bottle of cheap wine doesn’t last longer than a bottle of expensive wine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com