Wine quality and price have little connection and wise consumers will benefit by realising this simple truth. Improvements in the winery and the vineyard over the last few decades have largely eliminated dud bottles. Off corks still exist but these days if you reject a wine with a screw cap it says more about you than the wine itself.
Improvements in quality have now plateaued. The gap between the best and the ordinary has narrowed. But miniscule differences still result in massive price differences. Quality ratings and value ratings are quite out of kilter. Would any sensible drinker really think that a $1000 Penfolds Grange justifies being 10, 20, 30 or 40 times more expensive than any number of other Barossa shirazes?
Some people pay a huge premium for a perception of superior quality.
I wonder at times if wine resembles a placebo where you believe you are getting the real stuff but aren’t. Would you really know? And before answering do not forget those experts pointing hghly the expensive forgeries that did the rounds for a few decades in the 1980s and 1990s.
As we wrote in another recent note: What a wine costs is how a majority of drinkers judge quality. They drink the label and the price tag not what’s in the bottle.
And consider this. A restaurateur friend Peter Gill had his occasional financial woes yet retained a useful cellar. Being a raconteur, he was invited to many social occasions where wine was the drink of choice. They were the bring your best bottles to share – that sort of gathering.
Peter would pour an aged Penfolds Bin 389 into a two-litre wine cask and take this along, a show of poverty. When really, he did not wish to share a masterpiece. Yet when offered a glass, friends rejected the wine, remarking, ‘Gill, you have fallen on hard times’. This happens because the story overcomes the palate impression.
I have found that with the right build-up we can be fooled into believing anything with wine.
Now consider what Glug buys and bottles. I mention again that with over 2500 boutique wineries in Australia not all that is made sells for $50. Boutiques must closely regulate the supply and demand and Glug are regularly offered this surplus from barrel. We are fussy about what wines we add to our range and found the Mt Eagle Eden Valley Tempranillo 2021 and Village Belle Eden Valley Nero d’Avola 2021 irresistible.
