What price pricing
Whenever I hear the words natural wine, I reach for my wallet – and put it away.
There has been talk abroad of the cost of natural wine and how low can you (should you) sell a bottle for, and still make a wine that can be characterized as natural. Two questions come to mind. What constitutes a natural wine – is it the winemaking method or the overall ethos? And what is the real value of such winemaking endeavours? Are natural wines expensive? Why, they are almost a tenth the price of a cru classé Bordeaux. How dare they?
Let’s start at below ground level. Certain supermarkets may proclaim the natural credentials of a (tiny) handful of their wines. It is certainly wise to accommodate the needs of a certainly small percentage of a customer base that may care about how things are grown and made. These supermarkets will have the odd orange or no SO2 wine amongst their range. And yet these wines will often be sold at very low prices. How can that be?
The wines can be cheap, because they are made from cheaply sourced grapes and low-cost labour. And mass-produced. They may be natural in the loosest sense of the word. Technical interventions may have been used to clean up the wine, ferments are unlikely to be ambient and wild and may well be inoculated, the wines will have been filtered to look clean and customer-friendly. To make good natural wine, you need good grapes from vineyards that have been farmed well, carefully selected and healthy enough to start and complete their fermentations without additives or technical interventions. To make wine at a strict low price point, compromises are inevitable.
The wines can be cheap, because they are made from cheaply sourced grapes and low-cost labour. And mass-produced. They may be natural in the loosest sense of the word.
A small natural vigneron is prey to happenstance and market forces. They will have to account for a variety of inflationary pressures such as the ever-increasing costs of raw materials and equipment, rising gas and electricity prices and labour costs. It is a tricky balance – the grower needs to sell their wine whilst make a living at the same time, and certain of their markets may be less forgiving about any price increases. There are no economies of scale, only realities of cost when making a rigorous artisan product. Finally, taking all the above considerations into account, one is still at the mercy of climatic events that can virtually wipe out a year’s worth of work.
Should we then begrudge growers for charging what their blood, sweat, tears and toil are worth? It is not as if they are making money out of their efforts. And what price does one put on wine anyway? On the one hand, it is beverage to be consumed, on another (more rarefied level) it can kept and traded on the market as a commodity and on another it can provide aesthetic pleasure and satisfaction.
Speaking of bad vintages, in certain regions growers are having to buy grapes more and more often to supplement their own meagre production. They will have partnerships with local growers who farm according to the same organic or biodynamic philosophy; they may even go outside the appellation or the region itself to create Vin de France wines which are made in the same natural spirit. These may be sold under a negociant company label, or the wines may be integrated into the portfolio. Demand for grapes, organic grapes, in poor vintages, drives the costs up further.
In the end, whether we are talking about a single vineyard, a special cuvee, a blend of vineyards and sites, or even a multi-regional blend, the winemaking principles do not change. Although the vigneron may choose to make different styles of wine, they must be uncompromising in their approach to make the best wine they possibly can.
Should we then begrudge growers for charging what their blood, sweat, tears and toil are worth?
The cost of production is one thing, market pricing games are another and bear no relation to the real value of the wine per se. Anyone who has dealt with a supermarket knows that they are fixated with price point glass ceilings and often refuse to accept any necessary rises from the growers. Wines may also be sold as loss leaders, perhaps at cost – or below. The object here is to create the impression of offering unrivalled value for a commodity. Wine is no more than an undifferentiated brand. But just as an unfiltered craft cider made with apples is different to mass-produced drinks made with apple flavour; or freshly squeezed orange juice differs from orange-flavoured concentrate drink with added sugar, or unpasteurised cheese is cheese and chalk compared to cheese-flavoured spreads, so living natural wine made by a small artisan producers bears no relation to conventional wines made in industrial volumes.
The output of natural vignerons is highly impacted by demand. The middle end of the wine market in the UK, for example, is being squeezed. A £12 ex vat wine may end up on a restaurant wine list for £70. Consumers are understandably looking for cheaper, more accessible wines at the same time as costs are increasing for growers and importers. The natural vigneron can either stick to their guns and continue to supply their shrinking niche market or adapt and produce higher volumes of low margin wines to bring in a wider audience. It is not much of a choice.
We are increasingly being forced to confront our economic choices as consumers by rising costs. I have reached my particular tipping point and will not pay the mark-ups charged by restaurants for a bottle of wine. I understand why they do so, but punitive gross profit margins ultimately become a deterrent. Especially when the wine in question is mediocre. Yet I am more than happy to drink “higher up the list” if I perceive that the wine in question is interesting and offers relative value-for-money.
Value is a perception. Just because a wine isn’t cheap, doesn’t mean that it is necessarily expensive. The time and effort that goes into making something unique should be recognised on its merits. We know that when you strip out duty, vat and the cost of shipping, delivery, storage, and raw materials that a cheap bottle in a supermarket (say £5.00) may have less than €1 worth of wine in it, whereas a £20 bottle may have €12.00 worth of wine. You do the maths.
Value is a perception. Just because a wine isn’t cheap, doesn’t mean that it is necessarily expensive.
In the natural wine world, there are different business models. Those that make a success of their business are often viewed within the community as compromisers. The provenance of the grapes, and the methods in the winery may be questioned. If the grapes are sourced from other farmers, the legitimacy of the product will be under scrutiny. If the wines are crowd-pleasing, again that might arouse suspicion. There is undoubtedly a territorialism in the natural wine community and a desire to turf out those who are deemed to have hitched a lift on board the bandwagon.
Ultimately, by knowing (or speculating about) the price of everything, we end up not knowing the real value of anything. If a bottle of wine was a work of art, we would value an original far more than a facsimile, of course. That is a conversation for another time. If wine is merely a product and serves a functional purpose, then the market (bless it) will decide what succeeds and what doesn’t. For me, pricing should reflect the effort put into the farming and the craft of the winemaking and the final individual nature of the wine itself, a combination of what goes into an artisan wine to make it what it is and how it is received by an audience of its potential drinkers.