Reading over Dan Berger's excellent article about the constant locomotive that is wine aggregation today certainly gets the juices churning, which is what a good article should do. Interestingly, that article states that Constellation Brands’ global market share stands at only 5%, yet there has been an interesting and quiet shift in the way wine has been treated in the last 20 years. A shift that really constitutes a revolution—a revolution that has largely gone unnoticed by the public. Wine brokering has a long way to go until it gets to the sorry state that some industries like the wireless phone service, but there’s something inherently different about wine. No product that I can think of enjoys such vast differentiation in production and such multivarious production locations. It is literally impossible to centralize production in any way resembling any widget or gadget you might think of. Wine is inherently tied to place and we should be thankful for that. While that may have been the block that curiously kept modern-day conglomerates out of the wine business for so long, they have learned that you can snatch up small producers and keep the production dispersed and localized, but centralize the marketing and distribution. It is here again that the three tier system fails consumers (and this coming from a wine rep), but that may be a topic for another article.

This website is not, however, devoted to the complex machinations of global corporate wine aggregates, but devoted to you, the consumer. Having worked in and around the wine business for many years and wearing many different hats, I feel all too aware of the groundswell going on in the corporate wine world. I feel it is my duty to let customers in on these actions. Why? Because believe it or not, if you are a wine drinker, it affects you. Take the example of Barefoot Cellars that Berger describes above. Barefoot was a phenomenon in the value-tier wine section that seemingly came out of nowhere. During this time some very creative and driven people worked hard to get the label on any retail shelf anywhere and recognized by the public. One assumes that part of that popularity came from its perceived quality and value. Gallo then came along and bought it. Bought what, exactly? Nothing but the label and, as Berman points out, shelf spots. From that point on fruit sourcing totally changed, where and how the wine was produced totally changed, and production levels totally changed as well (shot way up in fact). This is important because if you drank that wine before and enjoyed its QPR (Quality Price Ratio as we say in the business) it’s also important to know that post-Gallo you began to drink a totally different wine that resembled the old wine in label alone. Maybe that was for the best, maybe for the worst—either way you should know about it if you’re passing on your hard-earned dollar to these people.

So what?

We should avoid being knee-jerk anti-corporate types here. After all the independent wine sector has certainly suffered from a vast population of lazy and unambitious winemakers that maybe did two or three things right or happened to inherit an estate they barely deserved. Many of these wineries did little for cost control, little to assure consistency of quality and very little to ensure the integrity of their public image. Corporate ownership surely can bring a lot to wineries like this. On the other hand, there have been an equal if not greater number of wineries that worked hard, made a great product that was well-received by the public, who then got wooed by a large dollar amount plopped outside their vineyard door. Commonly the new lords of that domain do their best to keep their new acquisition quiet so as not to alienate the well-developed consumer following. And they are often tinkering with vinification to either change the style to something they consider more palatable to a broader audience or simply to cut costs.

Likewise we should recognize that there are good aggregates and bad aggregates. Ste. Michelle Wine Estates (formerly Stimson Lane), the group that owns Columbia Crest and Ch Ste Michelle as well as many other very popular Washington Brands, seems to have found a formula that works, getting consistent high marks for quality while maintaining a very consumer-friendly price. But all this seems an overly complex picture for consumers who really just want a nice pleasant drink. How are they to untangle all of this? And how are they supposed to stay leery of the corporate hungry hungry hippos that pay big bucks to buy labels solely to control more of your retail wine shelf and restaurant wine list so it is thusly harder for small high-quality independent wineries to succeed?

The exercise

So what do regular wine browsers do? What authority can we appeal to? Simple. Let’s appeal to the unerring Sovereignty of our Senses. Let’s turn what looks like an academic labor into a joy for the senses. Let’s taste more. Only let’s bring an extra pound of care into our tasting. What I’m proposing is to organize a series of tastings with our friends, something many of you do already. During these tastings let’s do a small amount of homework and find out who’s behind the wine. After we talk about taste and aroma characteristics like we always do, let’s find out what the corporate history of the wine is. Was it once independently owned then bought by an aggregate? Was it originated by an aggregate? Is it still independent?

Critical back labels and fine print

No matter what you’re doing, you should always be reading back labels. If they are imported, you should get to know the importer. This is simply an exercise in quality appreciation and can be a gateway for you to explore and broaden your horizons or to avoid styles that you don’t like. Oftentimes (though not often enough) you can find the wine group name in small print somewhere on the back label as well. Becoming aware of what group controls your favorite wine serves much the same function as getting to know the importer. Importers have a varying amount of influence over the producers under their flag. They suggest (or demand) certain styles and processes of their winemakers. More importantly, importers tend to be going for a certain style or philosophy so whether they forge that style or select it, you can expect some consistency across the wines from any given importer. Wine groups can also be importers, but they tend to have a lot more control simply dictating what is made and how.

For now all you’re trying to do is to identify who it is that’s behind the wines and to draw your own conclusions. This is not always an easy task, so here’s a list of a few of the major wine groups and importers and the labels they control:

• Constellation Brands (PDF file. For an interesting insight into what Constellation Brands thinks is it's biggest market sector, check this link out--also a PDF.)
• E & J Gallo (They have their thumbs in a lot more pies than you’re probably aware of.)
• Ste. Michelle Wine Estates
• WJ Deutsch & Sons (Importers and domestic wine brokers with heavy ownership in many domestic and international wineries)
• Diageo (Notable for their very powerful liquor book which they very commonly use to leverage their wine portfolio.)
• Terlato (Used to be known as Paterno and was almost exclusively European. They have been doing a lot of moving and shaking in the last five years.)
• Winebow/Leonardo Locascio
• Kermit Lynch
• Robert Kacher
• Eric Soloman
• Foster’s
• Maisons Marques & Domaines (Their book isn’t huge, but they are very forceful with their high-end brands—Roederer Cristal et al—that they use to leverage their shittier brands onto shelves and wine lists.)

Spirits often drive the business

One of the more despicable practices by large importers/wine groups is the leveraging of extremely popular spirit brands into the wine world. Sadly I know this from first-hand experience, but for the wine groups that handle an appreciable spirit book, the spirits are usually what drive the business. Because spirits are such a brand loyal item (you rarely go into a liquor store looking for whiskey, you go in looking for Jack Daniels or Jim Beam etc.), distributors use that leverage to force often sub-par wines onto retail shelves and wine lists. This is only marginally legal if at all in most states, but it’s just one of those dirty little secrets. And believe me, in the spirit business the secrets get a lot dirtier than that—another topic for another day.

We don’t need to assume universal cynicism against houses that also handle spirits, but you should be leery. Once you’ve become savvy at this you’ll be able to walk into a store or restaurant and recognize a place that is totally locked down with wines that are tied to spirit houses. At that point you may want to ask yourself if the store, restaurant, or distributors have your best interests in mind.

So get to drinking already

Now that you’re armed with a little bit more knowledge about how the business works, go out and judge for yourselves. Using the guidelines I set out in the first installment of this series, get to know your neighborhood wine merchants on a personal level. They will no doubt be able to guide you around the larger houses, who often try their hardest to disguise who they really are. That being said, you shouldn’t avoid them, quite the opposite in fact. It would be a good idea to try to get a set of wines all within a certain price range and blind taste them against each other. Then, as I said, discuss all the things you would normally discuss about wines—flavor, aroma, body, etc. But now try to add another layer and discuss where this wine fits in the larger world of the wine business.

Topics for tasting discussions

When you get to this portion of your tastings, it’s really important to determine how good a wine is or how much you like it in the context of where it sits in the market. Your tastes are absolute. You are never wrong. Now note how you are responding to the wines on this primal level and then how that fits into how that wine found its way into your home. Try to find out if there was an estate there before that got bought out, or if it’s still an original independently owned estate. Note that many mass-produced wines are often made to look like homier independent wines when they are anything but. Why is this? Ask yourself how the label changes your attitude about the wine, but only after you’ve judged it blindly. Most importantly you should be judging a wine for quality first, then value vis-a-vis that quality second.

It is my sincere belief that in carrying out this little wine experiment that you will have a new found respect for both independent wineries that have to fight upstream against massive marketing budgets and aggressive salesforces and maybe even for massively produced wines that somehow maintain quality and friendly price. At the very least you will be a more savvy wine buyer, more immune to the “push tactics” of the market and more a slave to your own Sovereignty of the Senses than any other master.