Fine wine is worth the extra cost. The vast majority of wine sold in Australia (and globally for that matter) around the $20 or under mark is made with industrial processes that strip away everything interesting about wine. The sense of people, places, history and complexity of flavour that a great wine can offer are nowhere to be seen in industrial wine. Is it even worthy of that name wine? Perhaps 'grape based alcoholic beverage' is better… The wine we import can be even more expensive than many domestic fine wine producers due to shipping costs (currently elevated due to the Red Sea being inaccessible), foreign exchange fluctuations (currently historically bad for the Aussie dollar), and the application of import duty and the Wine Equalisation Tax (known as WET - for which domestic producers receiving significant rebates). But that said, all fine wine has an extra level of cost, which this article addresses. Let’s dive into some of the critical decisions that can drag down quality along with prices.
1. Fine wine delivers quality, not volume
Starting all the way back at selecting the right clone of a grape variety. Did you know for the same variety there are sometimes dozens of clones a producer can choose to grow? Some clones will pump the yield of a vineyard way up and make them easier to manage disease, but it comes at the cost of structure of the wine and concentration of flavour. Double your yield, halve your cost - it’s an attractive outcome for the industrial winemakers who don’t need to worry about flavour from the fruit.
Site selection is important here too. Some of the world’s greatest wines are grown in marginal agricultural soils; on rocky slopes that wouldn’t support other crops, and are often many multiples (sometimes 100s) the price of more productive soils. It’s the struggle that produces excellent quality fruit. Industrial producers will go for sites that are not only cheaper, but make it easier for the vines to produce high volumes of fruit, and provide easier access to machinery rather than humans. You guessed it, all at the expense of lower quality.
Once the grapes are growing, a fine wine producer will often deliberately thin their crop to improve quality at the cost of volume. A green harvest (before the grapes are ripe) can enhance the ripening of the bunches that are left, increasing flavour concentration. Before harvest, careful removal of damaged fruit will increase the average quality of those that are left. This is particularly important in cooler climates where rot can impact some bunches or berries but not others. Industrial producers wouldn’t dream of deliberately reducing their yields in this way. It all gets taken, to the detriment of quality. Of course, these techniques are very labour intensive too - you can’t yet use machines for this kind of careful selection.
Irrigation is sometimes used in fine wine vineyards, where drought may lead to severe water stress or even death of the vine. But industrial producers will use it to excess to bump up volume. That leads to bigger berries, but it’s literally watering down the flavour intensity. Somehow it seems better to the end consumer than if they stuck a hose in the tanks in the winery (well actually they do that too), but the result is the same.
The final volume related topic is one dear to our hearts. We’ve written about old vines before and the wonderful impact they can have on the complexity of the final wine. But the older the vine, the lower the volume. Most industrial vineyards will tear up their vines once their volume starts dropping off, around 30-40 years from planting. Fine wine producers will continue to tend their best old vine vineyards despite becoming more difficult to manage and delivering much lower yields; because the result is worth it!
2. Fine wine prioritises complexity, not consistency
Consistency sounds like a good thing doesn’t it? Well, consistent quality; that’s great. Consistent flavour year in, year out? That’s a sign something has gone terribly wrong in the winemaking.
The vagaries of terroir and weather conspire to make fine wine different, every year. Not necessarily better or worse, but different. It’s one of the most fascinating elements of wine appreciation (and why we think vintage scores are mostly not worth the paper (or pixels) they are written on). But industrial producers, working with lower quality grapes, think the best thing they can do for their consumers is to make their wine taste the same every time. They do this by delivering most of the identifiable flavour and structure in their wines in the winery, not the vineyard. They’ll regularly adjust the acid, the alcohol (with water), the colour, and the sugar levels, to hit the same recipe every year. They’ll use oak, not to support the flavour and structure of the fruit, but to smother its personality (if it had any to begin with) in favour of creating something ‘smooth’ and ‘easy drinking’ where the identifiable flavours are mostly from the wood (e.g. vanilla).
Fertiliser, insecticides and herbicides are the friend of an industrial producer aiming to deliver a consistent harvest volume every year. They’ll often preventatively apply these to the vineyard to lower the need for labour intensive monitoring and selective applications. You’ll find it’s quite hard to find an organic producer making industrial wines.
Industrial producers will use commercial yeasts to kick off their fermentations. They give a predictable result, but many of our producers swear that native yeasts (found on the skins of the grapes in the vineyard), produce much more interesting and complex flavours, that change year by year. Native yeasts can be unreliable partners though, and rarely survive in enough quantities in vineyards where pesticides are in heavy rotation. That sort of uncertainty is too much for our industrial friends, so back to the corporate recipe they go.
The final topic we’ll touch on here will give you a headache. Sulphur. As we've written about before, we love a bit of sulphur in our wine; don’t shop with us if you are looking for natural wine. But, industrial producers tip it in at much higher levels. They don’t want to risk unpredictable impacts of nature at various stages of the winemaking process, and elevated levels of sulphur will give an industrial winemaker peace of mind. The downside is how you’ll feel the next day. Fine winemakers apply sulphur in as small volumes as they can, at precisely the times it is needed. But this is based on gut feel and experience; impossible to capture in a recipe.
3. Fine wine requires patience, not speed
Time is money - it’s as true in wine as any other commercial endeavour.
When you’re an industrial producer facing hundreds of hectares of vines ready for harvest, you need to get the grapes in as quickly as possible and with little ability to pick your timing. They’ll use machine harvesting (so no ability to carefully select quality fruit - though that wouldn’t make sense in low quality vineyards anyway), and will harvest regardless of the weather. With so many grapes to harvest and scheduled availability of machinery, they are not able to wait for the perfect window of ripeness and dry weather which is the game all of our fine wine producers play each year.
Another result of a speedy harvest? MOG. That stands for material other than grapes. Even with hand picking and sorting you might end up with some leaves or stems in the crush, but with machines you can end up with stones, insects, metal wires, and even the odd furry or scaly critter. MOG is allowed under most regulatory regimes up to a certain percentage, but, depending on the material, it can definitely add some less desirable flavours. A fine wine producer with a focus on quality will be doing the labour intensive work of picking and sorting for only the material they actually choose to be in the blend.
Finally, once the juice has fermented and transformed into wine, time plays a major factor in what is eventually released to market. Almost every wine spends some time ageing before release to market. Depending on the style, this might be in stainless steel tanks, concrete vats, oak barrels or any number of other traditional or experimental vessels. That time is critical to adjust the structure and flavour of the wine to suit the style being produced. But time in those vessels is costly, so industrial producers will look for ways to minimise it. Usually, the quality of the wine suffers as a result. For example, rather than transferring a red wine to oak barrels and letting it slowly breathe and take on desirable wood characteristics, and industrial producer will just dunk some planks into a tank (they use the word stave which makes it sound more traditional) and stir them around.
To be fair, when you’re working with lower quality grapes, you’re not going to get a lot of positive outcomes from additional ageing, whether that’s in an ageing vessel or in a bottle. So it makes some sense that industrial wines are shipped out to market as soon as is physically possible, to make room for the next batch and to minimise required space in the winery. For high quality grapes it’s a different story - time quietly waiting in the winery is critical to a high quality wine being released to the market. A great wine needs time for its components to integrate in a pleasing way, and with enough time, they can be released with a delightful mix of fresh fruit and aged characteristics. All of that time takes money, so with age-worthy wines (that’s most of our range), for every extra year between the vintage on the label and the time you are drinking it, you should expect to pay a little extra, and to be rewarded for it..
Support artisans, not wine factories
Ultimately, wine taste is a very subjective thing. If the significantly cheaper industrial style is your preference, then you should consider yourself very lucky indeed. Though you should also consider where your money is going. We love to support artisan, family run businesses rather than corporates looking to bump their quarterly earnings.