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Comment by Bayart | Hacker News Reader

It's common wisdom in France. If you're paying more than 20 euros for a bottle, it's probably already too much. And it's very common for people to buy in bulk at the favour of seasonal discounts or from the producer. If you want to look smart at a dinner party, bring a bottle of something nobody's ever heard about that's remarkably cheap for what you get.

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Wine is far more expensive in the US than in France, for various reasons.

The thing that blew me away about France is you could buy a bottle of wine in the supermarket for less than a bottle of coca cola.

When I was 18, I went on a short exchange to a little town in the south of France, and the first day there our hosts took us to get lunch. To our great surprise they picked up a number of bottles of wine to drink in the middle of the school day. We asked them why. Their answer was "beer is too expensive".

When that happens, buy the coca cola !

You can find proper wine at 4-5€ at the producer, 3.5€ is probably the strict absolute minimum where you can find honest wine direct from producer. Any thing below is just fermented garbage, the grappes that otherwise would spoil the wine, it just happen to have sugar to be fermented, I don't know how the hell how they are pre-processed, just stay away from it.

Sigh. £6 a bottle of cheapest wine here in UK because of import tax and alcohol tax.

And I could buy British gin in Hong Kong cheaper than in UK

You can find cheaper than £6 but you probably don’t want to drink it

Eg £4 https://www.aldi.co.uk/kooliburra-australian-chardonnay/p/04...

Once you take into account duty, VAT, packaging, transport and supermarket markup a £5 bottle of wine leaves maybe 25p for the wine producer. That's why the quality/price relationship is so non-linear at the bottom end. 20% more on the bottle price is 400% more to the producer.

https://www.decanter.com/learn/tax-wine-much-pay-uk-ask-deca...

See also minimum alcohol pricing in Scotland.

Just checked, what a rubbish law. Doesn’t affect the rich who drink expensive stuff while screwing the poor. In the name of protecting people as well.

Yep. It also made unnecessary busy work for UK wide online retailers such as Majestic who had to add a special case for sales to folks in Scotland.

I can buy Jameson cheaper in pretty much all of Europe, relative to Ireland. It's very sad.

That would be cooking wine. Please don't drink it.

Cost of manufacture, and taxes...

"The natural advantages which one country has over another, in producing particular commodities, are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hot-beds, and hot-walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine, too, can be made of them, at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries."

-- Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

Curious — What are the reasons?

Frequently the wine seems hyper local - what I was there in a restaurant we often just ordered the house wine. If you talked to the waiters or owners it was frequently made locally and including by the owners grown in backyards of the hole in the wall places. I think it cuts out a lot of costs - and there was not a bad wine among them.

I always thought that "house wine" is just an euphemism for "whatever we could get our hands on" - a workaround for the restaurant so that they do not have to list a specific brand on the menu.

That is likely true from time to time, but most restaurants seems to keep it fairly consistent as far as I can tell. I think it’s more often a choice of taste on the part of the restaurant for a less expensive but decent wine.

High taxes, transportation cost, and, (for explaining why Californian wine in California is more expensive than French wine in France), economies of scale and subsidies in France.

If it's french wine, then import costs is the biggest...taxes and tariffs, but also transport costs and distribution in the US all taking a cut.

For wines in a top US region, you wind up paying a ton of money for the mortgage on the land, too.

I know lots of US states have egregious liquor taxes. Alabama is particularly bad: 58% shelf price + $.45/L

Part of that comes from having to pay tax on the barrel every year while it ages.

I don't think Alabama is aging a lot of wine relative to the US market as a whole. It's primarily a "sin" tax. One of the few taxes in the US that can gain popular support.

French wine is cheaper than California wine in California.

And Canada is 3-5x higher still.

This depends on the specific kind of wine you're looking for, surely? It would be hard to find icewine for 20 euros, I'd think.

According to Google Shopping, the typical price range is from 19€ to 50€.

Wagner Vineyards in upstate NY has ice wine for $30/375ml, $27 (12+) and $24 if you join their club (cult?). Depending on the exchange rate, that can be about 20 Euros.

This needs to account for bottle size. In US and Canada, at least, icewine is typically sold in smaller containers.

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You could get some really nice local red table wines in Baden-Württemberg for 3-4 Euro for a 750 ml bottle last time I was there.

German wine in the USA is just mass market Rieslings and maybe an ice wine and nothing else. We’d always joke that they save the good stuff for themselves.

And 8 euro wine at Monoprix is better than some >$20 I’ve had in the US. My guess is in France competition is so high and it’s easily sourced that prices don’t necessarily correlate as closely to quality as it does in some other markets.

The US also has very high taxes on wine compared to the wine-producing countries of Europe (which AFAIK subsidize it).

Similar to how a pack of cigarettes costs $15 in NYC and $6 in Raleigh, NC.

Interesting that it’s $6 there, when it can apparently be sold profitably for $1 elsewhere:

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

Yep, the economic cost of tobacco has no reason to be higher than any other plant.

Even in Raleigh, there are taxes on tobacco.

There are also 3.5€ spanish wines that are suprisingly really good. I am french btw.

Eventually, more often than not the temperature control and matching wine with what you eat matters more than anything.

That has also rung true to me in the Mediterranean. But it does make you wonder if the wine is actually so good, or it just tastes better on vacation.

Luckily France doesn't have to pay $1 million an acre like a Napa winery.

Just looked up, an hectare of (10,000 m^2, about 2.47 acre) is 1,102,000€ in the Champagne region

If what you’re saying is true, then an acre in the Napa valley is more than twice as expensive as its counterpart in the Champagne region. Which is weird, I’d expect the Champagne acre to still make you a lot more money

Champagne is one of the most expensive and luxurious wine in France.

Unless they are in Burgundy. 10million an acre for some nicer, but not top, parcels are not uncommon.

Napoleonic inheritance laws resulted in the continued subdivision of Burgundy landholdings, so that some wines come from tiny plots. There are lots of tiny wine producers in Burgundy. I'm surprised that plots appear on the market at all; I supposed that nearly all plots were kept in the family.

Inheritance tax force many to sell. Still it is not like a lot of plots hits the market.

I normally only drink beer but the guy at the bottle shop knows me. He recommended a wine to me the other day, $10. He was right. I grabbed a case for $8 a bottle.

I don't mean to sound patronising but my take on this is simply that he's a good salesman who levered up the personal relationship he's established with you

In all my years of shopping with them, he has only ever recommended me a wine on 1 or 2 occasions because I explicitly asked. I get discounts and tastings regularly. They have warned me from buying things more times then they recommend things. They are not trying to “sell” me anything.

I'm not saying the recommendations are bad, but... it's a shop! Of course they're trying to sell you something!

(Making good recommendations may well be more profitable than making bad recommendations, because if they make bad recommendations you'll stop coming back. But they absolutely are trying to sell you something).

So? “Knowing a guy” is always about buying stuff

It's common wisdom in France. If you're paying more than 20 euros for a bottle, it's probably already too much.

Works out to about $20 a bottle in California.

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