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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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".

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?

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.

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.

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.

French wine is cheaper than California wine in California.

And Canada is 3-5x higher still.

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