A $45-$50 bottle of wine (retail value) would be $25-$35 a glass in a restaurant - would you pay that? That is the problem that most people are talking about - Yes, there is a ton of wine at bargain prices, you just RARELY see them poured by the glass - that is why the craft beer alternative is such a GREAT alternative - The average $12 glass of wine is usually a wine you can purchase at any local store for close to the same price - again, a horrible bargain compared to any quality beer for $5-$6 a bottle or glass. How can that argument not hold up?
I asked the owner of our LWS this question. His answer: Sales of under $15/bottle of wine is increasing while says of wine above that are decreasing significantly. This trend has been going on for several years. Sales of craft beer are exploding for him. He is actually putting max individual purchases on some of his crafts to keep more of his customers happy. Demand for some of the crafts exceed his availibility.
Restaurants in the U.S. offer unique challenges for wines. There is another issue that no one has mentioned–DUI laws.
If you live in NYC, SF or CHI, you have access to public transportation. In flyover country, not so much. Buy and drink an expensive bottle of 14.5% wine between two people at a restaurant, and you will not be driving home in my state. (Our standard is “impaired to the slightest degree”) You can sip on a single 5-8% beer all night if you are driving, and you end up with practically no BA. Sipping only 4 oz. of wine all night is a challenge. Higher alcohol levels in wine are not helping, either.
To a lesser degree, the same challenge exists at home. Many couples with children don’t want to be too buzzed, and they don’t want to spend $40 on a wine which won’t be as good the second day. In many households there is one partner who does not drink for reasons of health or appearance. This also makes beer a better option for the other than cracking an expensive bottle of wine. I have wondered why splits aren’t more popular.
We are seeing basically the same thing. We can bring in new wines, find room for them by moving some of the slower selling to either bargain racks or other displays, but not the main setup.
But we are essential out of space with craft beers. Almost 3-4 times a week we have customers asking for a special beer. In CT, there are some strange regulations. Out of the top 250 beers from Beer Advocate, we can only bring in about 25% of them - and that is not easy.
We cant move out the standards (Bud,Bush,Coors,etc) because the sell in volumes. So, a good portion of our cooler wall is filled with them. Its always a challenge to find a slot for a new beer , especially when we get 3 to 4 new ones weekly.
From the salesman point, the wine folks have it easier today (in our shop) mainly because they know what we carry, mostly re-stock specific items. Only some of the smaller companies come in with some new wines (not new grapes) from different regions.
On the other hand, our beer salesman come in with so many new samples, so many things to offer. We have to pick and choose what we want to carry.
That alone is a big change in the business
What I’m reading here is more than craft beer is selling well rather than that wine is out of favor. This is actually true among my friends. Tt is not necessarily a zero sum game where craft beer’s gain is wine’s loss. Many people who are into craft beer were never into high end wine and never will be. The market for higher end wine is also pretty small in the overall scheme of things. I don’t really think that blips in demand for these wines says a whole lot about the popularity of wine overall.
When I’m home, I drink wine to beer 80/20. When I’m out, I drink beer to wine 80/20 (unless I decide to bring my own wine to a restaurant for an upscale meal). Wine lists out there are terribly inconsistent and WAY overpriced. I’m looking to imbibe on a quality cocktail…regardless if that’s a beer, spirit or wine. Much has to do if and what I’m eating, the environment, the weather, the company, etc but I’ve been finding I’m leaning much more towards craft beer in casual environments. And summers at the beach…no question…it’s beer.
This.
But I also wonder if some people who typically move from beer to wine in their 30’s and 40’s will do that or if more of them will stick with beer because of the craft beer boom.
This is the second wave of the craft beer boom.
(I now know that I am getting old!!!)
When I was in grad school in the late-80s, craft beers were just taking off. Portland was king and San Francisco, Boston and parts of PA were just beginning to gain ground. Then craft beer and home brewing got HUGE! By the mid- to late-90s, the craft beer thing began to wane. In fact, sales were down, I believe. The .com boom led to a big rise in wine consumption and spirits made a bit of a comeback (as far as I remember). Craft beer was passe, it became cool to drink PBR (thanks Pearl Jam!)
When I was in my late-20s and 30s, almost no one drank hard liquor on a regular basis. That has clearly changed. (I still don’t touch the stuff, but that is because I become a raving lunatic!!) ![[diablo.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f627e009b8e3ab2f6a76c9424f1156a53afc0e3f.gif "diablo"){kind=small}
I was only a craft beer guy into my early/mid-30s. I am now a wine guy. I don’t like (and can’t stomach) crappy wines and supermarket plonk, but I love good and interesting wines (including interesting roses and other values).
My guess, Rachel, is that some percentage of those beer drinkers 25%-35% or so, will become wine drinkers. Of my closest sollege friends, 60% or so enjoy wine, 35% really enjoy wine, 20% are wine focused and 10% are obsessed (OK, just me and one other guy, but who’s counting?)
I am drinking more cocktails. San Francisco is the middle of a spirits revival.
I love craft beer but it messes with my gut. There is also the calorie consideration
I have that issue with beer now as well. It must be in the “Genes.”
I used to be into Single Malt, and I had quite a collection. The problem with those is you can’t drink very much, and the bottle hangs around forever. I’m not much on spirits these days.
The other rather fascinating thing about craft beers vs. wines, is the number of my friends for whom beer really is a craft. I’ve had a lot of home brew that was quite good. Wines…not so much.
Sharp!
Might have something to do with this (at least for beers containing wheat):
http://www.rodale.com/wheat-free-diet
“So what does all of this plant science have to do with what’s ailing us? Intense crossbreeding created significant changes in the amino acids in wheat’s gluten proteins, a potential cause for the 400 percent increase in celiac disease over the past 40 years. Wheat’s gliadin protein has also undergone changes, with what appears to be a dire consequence. “Compared to its pre-1960s predecessor, modern gliadin is a potent appetite stimulant,” explains Dr. Davis. “The new gliadin proteins may also account for the explosion in inflammatory diseases we’re seeing.””
I wonder what genetic changes have been made through cross breeding to other grains that might also be causing issues for some folks like us.
I find it odd that everyone on WB is so hypercritical of the noticeable presence of oak in wine, yet most of these craft beers (particularly the Pacific Northwest ones) taste like glass of carbonated 2 x 4 juice. Michel Rolland and Randy Lewis never dreamed of making something so woody and brawny tasting as most of these craft beers.
My uneducated guess is that the craft beer bubble will burst while wine will continue to sail along on its gradual upward trajectory. Or, better still, there will be some trend towards subtlety and elegance among craft beers.
Uh, probably because we never DRINK the stuff? This is a wine board after all.
Examples please. I am very oak intolerant and drink a hell of a lot of beer finished in oak and couldn’t disagree more.
Beer aged in bourbon barrels might make me forget about drinking wine altogether. That stuff is incredibly delicious!
Some great points here made by many. Wine is indeed way too expensive in this country. The good stuff sells for too much at restaurants, and the entry level stuff is just too brutal to stomach. As a contrast, it is truly amazing to see how inexpensive wine is in Europe in general. And the entry level wines are almost always WAY better than the entry level stuff that is poured in the US.
I just got back from Germany and Portugal in March, and I was blown away by how inexpensive wine was there. We ate several times at very nice restaurants in the Lisbon area, and I generally bought some of the most expensive bottles they had on their lists. Most of the wines ended up at around €20 per bottle. That is a fortune in Portugal for wine. In the supermarket, I bought very nice Alentejo reds for a maximum of €4-€5. In Germany, the situation was very similar.
As wine has skyrocketed in price over the last several years, and as the economy has spurred a new level of cost awareness, I have been told by those of my friends in the wine trade (quite a few) that the premium wine market is more or less dying slowly. I, for my part, have been buying quite a bit less wine, and what. Buy has been largely off the beaten path value stuff often from unrecognizable varieties and wine making regions.
Instead, I have found that I like a good beer every now and then and certainly a nice cocktail. There are few things I love doing as much as to prepare myself a genuine Old Fashioned with super high quality Rye Whiskey in a proper glass and with the proper ice cube/ball. It is the cocktail equivalent of pulling the cork on a great old bottle of wine to me.
While I think wine consumption is rising and will continue to rise, I believe that beer and spirit sales will grow much faster in the next decade as overall alcohol consumption will also grow faster than the growth of wine consumption.
A bunch of people on Twitter have just recently been linking articles that state the US has never consumed more wine, than in the past year. I haven’t read them, but they seem at odds with this.
Well, for one thing, the OP isn’t about wine markups in restaurants. There are plenty of posts about that. For one thing that seems to assume that most people do most of their drinking in restaurants, which I believe is demonstrably false. I noted that I agree re. wine markups, but I see that as only one facet of this issue. It certainly affects exposure, but the OP talks more about liquor stores than restaurants. Then look at the post I replied to. First line “wine is much more expensive to drink than good craft beer or liquor.” I think that this is wrong and a misconception. Your thesis appears to be “drinking wine by the glass at restaurants is more expensive than craft beer.” I can certainly agree with that. But for most people I think that the choice between a six pack of good beer (and note that Scott was not talking in his first point about restaurants, but rather six packs vs. bottles) and wine is roughly an even money prospect. Amongst my friends, quite often women drink wine and men drink good beer. Most will occasionally drink cocktails.
OK, I understand that this is just one area of the country, but in Portland six packs of craft beer are $7-10 in grocery stores. Oregon PN realistically starts at about $20 but most are really $25-30 or north. Yes, Oregon PN isn’t “typical” in pricing, but while there’s a sea of wine in the $7-10/bottle range, very little of it compares to the quality of the typical craft beer in that price range. Wine is more expensive as a general rule. I don’t see it as an even money prospect. For my example, I’m equating a bottle of wine to a six pack (six beers in a six pack = six 4 oz glasses in a bottle).
Also, it’s interesting that most of my friends, male and female, drink beer and not wine. OK, most are under 30 and maybe that’s not as atypical as I think. A couple of female friends prefer wine, but about three quarters of the rest of my female friends are pretty solidly in the beer camp and they’re not drinking macro lite beer. This could be because we live in a beer mecca, but there’s also a national trend where more women under 35 are drinking beer instead of wine. Typically (at least what I can ascertain here), people get more into wine as they get older (30’s-40’s), but if beer has overtaken wine in what was a wine centric population (18-34 year old women), I’m not sure as many of my friends will switch to wine as they get older. I’m sure some will, but my guess is not as many as would have 20 years ago.
Yes, Americans are drinking more wine, but are they drinking $20+ bottles or are they buying more $8 bottles in grocery stores? I have no idea, but I’d be curious to see what percentage of the wine market is increasing. My understanding of the craft market is that its sales are increasing across the board and macro beers are actually declining. Is the wine market doing similar or is the inverse happening (high end wines are dropping off and sub-$10 wines are increasing).
Beer is an affordable luxury for most of my friends. Their daily drinkers may be $1.25 to $1.75 a bottle, but they still splurge on $10 bombers (22 oz) pretty regularly. A $10 bomber equals a $32/six pack. I’m not sure how often the typical $8-10/bottle grocery store wine drinker springs for a $32 bottle.