4 ms·

> Never pay over say ~$30-40 USD for a bottle of wine if all you care about is taste. Change that to 30-40 EUR from Carrefour? Sure. In the US, not so much.

• OJFord 1y ago
  You've answered it yourself? 'imported from France'. It's more expensive in the UK too for example, but not to the extent it is over there.
  • bsder 1y ago
    > You've answered it yourself? 'imported from France'. This is no explanation at all. This does not explain why expensive bottles of wine imported from France aren't as good as basic bottles from Carrefour (even from before Sir Random-Tariffs-a-Lot). It also doesn't explain why US wine producers aren't producing basic wine as good as basic wine in France (in my opinion). US wine producers spend VAST amounts of money on the technology and knowledge to make wine. There is no "magic" in wine production knowledge that the US wine producers wouldn't have figured out by now. At this point the difference is either fundamental (Napa soil matches France but climate does not, for example) or market driven (French wine drinkers expect better wines so market forces cause sub-par wines to get driven out quicker). Neither of those explanations are very satisfying. You would expect that an ambitious US wine producer would someone solve anything fundamental. And "market forces" implies that somehow wine in France resists "cheapening forces" that affect every other foodstuff. My personal hypothesis is that the problem is fundamental and is about batch size (I'm extrapolating a bit from the craft brew scene). Large batch sizes are notoriously different in kinematics from small batch sizes in industrial processes. French wine producers are often making wines from, as seen in the US, very small grape plantations in very small batches. US producers tend toward much larger batches as it vastly increases the profitability, and US small batch producers tend not to have deep knowledge about winemaking.
    • nerdsniper 1y ago
      I find most countries which produce a range of a particular consumer food/beverage tend to export their lowest quality of that good in the largest quantities. Globally, it's relatively easy to find either Stella Artois, Heineken, Guinness, Corona, Fosters, Budweiser, Asahi, or Tsingtao wherever you go. They're not great. But each of their respective countries makes fantastic beer - they just drink it all domestically. Americans will say European beer is bad based on this, having never tasted proper Belgians. Europeans will say American cheese is shit, having never tasted Wisconsin's best cheeses. Because for the most part we don't export our best. Wine is a bit of a lemon market in the USA - there are some knowledgeable buyers but most buyers are laypeople who are faced with 200 options and no way to distinguish them other than price and country of origin. So if the only that that differentiates the wine at the time of purchase (not at the time of consumption), the optimal thing to do is to stock as much cheap wine as you can from each country but then price them all at different tiers. That way someone coming in for a $25 bottle of Spanish wine, finds a $25 bottle of Spanish wine to buy. Yes there are some discerning customers, but if you fail to cater to them you'll still sell a whole lot of wine to non-discerning customers.
    • jt2190 1y ago
      You’re mixing up the high-end and low-end markets. French wines exported to the U.S. don’t really address the low end of the market: Cheaper wines can be had from California’s Central Valley, Eastern Europe, or made domestically from imported grapes, etc. I assume the margins just aren’t high enough to make exporting low-end wines worth it. Meanwhile back in France the low end is served by French producers using a mix of domestic and imported wine grapes (used to be mainly from North Africa). These are not A.O.C. or even D.O.C, just bulk wine that’s made to be tasty.
• kimixa 1y ago
  I feel there will be a $30-40 bottle that will match your preferences, you just need to find it. Taste and availability can change on locality - California absolutely loves it's Cabernet Sauvignon, for example. Often to the detriment of other varieties and options IMHO. And this sort of thing also very much affects what's being imported too. People have an idea of what "French Wine" should be like, which may be very different to the taste preferences in regions of France.