4 ms·
Wine is far more expensive in the US than in France, for various reasons.
by School-Cotton 4y ago
Wine is far more expensive in the US than in France, for various reasons.
- javiramos 4y agoCurious — What are the reasons?
- zaphod12 4y agoIf 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.
- dmonitor 4y agoI know lots of US states have egregious liquor taxes. Alabama is particularly bad: 58% shelf price + $.45/L
- jcims 4y agoPart of that comes from having to pay tax on the barrel every year while it ages.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- brewdad 4y agoI 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.
- School-Cotton 4y agoHigh 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.
- dv_dt 4y agoFrequently 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.
- 988747 4y agoI 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.
- dv_dt 4y agoThat 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.
- eloff 4y agoThe 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.
- water8 4y ago
- charlieyu1 4y agoSigh. £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
- switch007 4y agoYou 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/047963003899400 https://www.aldi.co.uk/kooliburra-australian-chardonnay/p/04...
- leoedin 4y agoOnce 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-decanter-357119/ https://www.decanter.com/learn/tax-wine-much-pay-uk-ask-deca...
- teh_klev 4y agoSee also minimum alcohol pricing in Scotland.
- charlieyu1 4y agoJust 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.
- voisin 4y agoAnd Canada is 3-5x higher still.
- alfiedotwtf 4y agoCost 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
- shaburn 4y agoFrench wine is cheaper than California wine in California.