It’s an old chestnut I know, but one that keeps cropping up; how much does a bottle of wine cost? When we are seduced by the supermarkets half-price offers or bottles of ‘estate grown’ wine for £3.99 or even £2.99 it’s good to remember how much of this price actually trickles down to the winemaker.
When you buy a £2.99 bottle of wine less than 50p goes to the wine maker and this includes the cost of bottling and labelling as well as the cost of growing the grapes and producing the wine. The final price you pay for a bottle of wine is made up of a number of factors; VAT at 17.5%; the supermarket margin of around 20%; import duty currently at £1.37 on each bottle; shipping to the UK at around 20p a bottle (if you ship by the container load).
Those of you who have visited a Vineyard will appreciate just how much work goes into producing a bottle of wine. The work in the vineyard; pruning, weed, pest and disease control, green harvesting and harvesting the grapes (often by hand); the work in the winery –reception and sorting of the grapes, fermentation, tank and barrel ageing, bottling, labelling and packaging.
There is risk at every stage for the winemaker. If you want to produce AOC wine (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée) the yield is restricted - 50 hectolitres per hectare for AOC Minervois and only 45 for Minervois La Livinière. A cold Spring can damage the bud and flower set, a warm and wet Spring promotes disease on the vines, or a dry growing season which restricts yields and can compromise quality (you are not allowed to irrigate AOC wines and therefore cannot irrigate to increase yields to compensate); a wet Autumn can promote rot on the vines or diluting of the grape juice. Bottling, labelling and packaging are essentially a fixed cost, so even if you are using the cheapest, lowest quality bottles you only save a few pence.
Therefore to hit the £2.99 and £3.99 price points you have to be able to produce on an industrial scale, to irrigate, to machine harvest, to use chemicals and fertilisers to control the crop. This does not mean that lower priced, branded wines are necessarily of low quality, in fact the economies of scale that large industrial producers employ allow for investment in temperature controlled stainless steel fermentation tanks and automated production lines. From a price point of view some of the lower priced, branded wines from Chile, South Africa, Australia, and indeed often from the Languedoc in France are a marvel. You get clean wines, with bags of fruit and extremely well made for the price. But, and here’s the rub, do not expect character, do not expect any surprises, you will not find any hidden gems, any unusual or challenging wines, and when you visit France, Italy, California and Australia you will not be lingering long in the vast, featureless, mechanised vineyards that produce the low cost branded wines that are beloved of our supermarkets.
So if you value the varied vineyard landscape of smaller scale wine production, often hugging the contours of the hills, usually with different varieties, growing in adjacent plots, if you want to see minimal chemical intervention, then this comes at a cost. Not a great one, but do not expect to pay £2.99 a bottle and save the environment.
If you want your wine to have some of the flavour and complexity that is imparted by oak, then the quality/cost ratio is further escalated. The 225 litre fût de chêne (the small oak barrel beloved of Burgundy and Bordeaux and used by Vineyard Partners Partner Wineries for many of their wines) cost around 500 Euros each and can be used for only 3 vintages before all the flavour and tannin is extracted from the oak. This immediately puts a premium on the cost of the wine for the winemaker of a minimum of 40p a bottle. Add to this the labour involved in transferring the wine to the barrels, in the care and attention that it requires and the risk involved in the wine spoiling, or not turning out as desired – remember that this is part science and craft and part experience and art - add the fact that you are tying capital up in the wine in barrels for between 6 and 18 months and you can reasonably add another £2 to the cost of a bottle wine.
One of the reasons that we love wine is that it continually presents us with challenges, to surprise and delight us …and occasionally to frustrate and disappoint as well. We enjoy the variations from vintage to vintage, the differences between oaked and un-oaked wines and the large differences in the taste that can be achieved from the same producer by small variations in the blending of the wine.
This is why we should be prepared to pay a couple of pounds extra for an artisanal wine. We know that with the high fixed costs associated with a wine shipped and sold through a UK outlet that an extra £2 in the retail price allows the winemaker to invest more care in the cultivation of the vines, more time, effort and attention in making the wine. So pay £2.99 a bottle and less than 50p goes to the wine maker, pay £5.99 and over £2.50 a bottle can be spent on producing the wine, which can make all the difference, and when you want that special bottle of wine for the weekend spend £8 to £10 a bottle and more than £5 goes to Vigneron for making the wine. You can then reasonably expect to be drinking a wine that has been hand harvested, has minimum chemical intervention, low yields, careful use of new oak and in short a hand crafted wine that will challenge and delight you.
