Is natural wine too spenny or are we too cheap?
A rant on affording yummy and ethical wine in *this* economy
Hey nerds!
This is my first somewhat serious ramble on here so please go easy on me. Quick disclaimer: I am not an economist, wine market expert, winemaker, nor do I know everything there is to know about this topic. I am just a wine dweeb who sat down to write this when a winemaker friend disclaimed that she could barely afford to buy the wine she makes HERSELF at wine bars. What a perfect analogy for the capitalist sh*t show we live in. So, how is this happening? Where is all our money going? And what on earth do we do when we can’t afford to buy wine that’s made well?
I’m going to tackle this incredibly complex and intersectional topic bit by bit. First, I have enormous respect for the artisanal winemakers fighting an uphill battle to produce well-made and environmentally conscious wine at the price point our market demands. However, I also appreciate that most people do not have hundreds of pounds to spend on wine every month. Most of my friends happen to exist outside the wine world, so I am often grounded by their more financially realistic perspectives on wine. This is particularly useful when you enter wine circles where it’s perfectly normal to have thousands of pounds worth of bottles ageing in a cellar or a wine fridge somewhere. As I said, it’s a complete capatalist sh*t show out there, so here’s my attempt to make sense of it all…
Why is the cost of natural wine higher than the wine in my supermarket?
I remember one of my first experiences walking into wine shop and feeling rather shaken by the £20+ labels on nearly every bottle. Why were these wines so expensive when those in Tesco were around the £10 mark (even down to £5)? Aren’t the core ingredients (grapes?) and processes (fermenting it?) the same? Was I just paying for the prestige of the name on the label? Because that did not seem worth it to me…
The short answer is; no….. not necessarily. Like any product on supermarket shelves, mass market wine has become artificially cheaper due to mass production. The more you make of something, the more of a factory it becomes, the cheaper it becomes. Industrialisation, am I right? Before *that* revolution, wine was by necessity produced in smaller batches - relying on small yields, hand picking & pruning, and natural fermentations.
These days, wine that makes it to our supermarkets is more or less mass-produced - using mechanisation, additives, and chemical farming to keep production up and costs low. It’s common to think of all wine as a pretty harmless product. Big wine has done some pretty good marketing after all. The reality is that this is simply not true. I’ll try not to get too political here, but like fast fashion, fast wine has numerous harmful impacts on both environmental systems and winemaking communities.
The natural wine folks are pushing back against this commoditization of wine - attempting to produce bottles with care and consideration, which comes at a higher cost.
Supermarkets will also sell wines ‘at a loss’ because they’re betting on making a profit when you buy other stuff in their shop with a higher margin - like skin care products or a hoover or whatever. The issue with this tactic is that it leaves consumers with a false impression of how cheap wine should be. So when you see a bottle that’s priced ethically (£15+), giving the winemaker money to use on making decent wine and paying their mortgage, they think they’re being ripped off. This is why it can feel frustrating to hear well-intentioned individuals say natural wine is a scam. Yes, some natty wines are very spenny (looking at you £60+ new wave Burgundy 👀) but it’s simply unfair to pit these two types of wine against each other. Winemakers are putting in serious graft and barely scraping by to produce bottles that are made honestly and at a ‘fair’ price point. Now I’m not saying buying either artisanal or commercial wine is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, it’s just about where you want your money to end up, and knowing that the cheap stuff comes at an expense to others in the food chain.
Why is it more expensive to produce natural wine?
This is a biggie. Long story short, you need to do a LOT more stuff (often by hand) to make yummy and high-quality natural wine. Low intervention does not mean low effort.
Natural / artisanal winemakers value quality over quantity. That means they intentionally reduce their yields to produce fewer grapes with a higher concentration of yummy flavours. This ultimately leaves them with less wine to sell than your average Tesco’s finest wine producer. Next, natural winemakers practice (at the very least) organic farming - using only copper and sulfur to protect the grapes as compared to using other herbicides, pesticides and fungicides. They do this because of the damaging impact chemical farming has on soil health, the planet, and on the overall quality of grapes produced. Now, because natures a b*tch and vines are relatively fickle this means they loose a lot more grapes every year than farmers who opt for the chemical farming - which obviously has a cost. Sprays that appease the organic certification boards don’t come cheap either. A winemaker friend recently said that buying organic certified sprays to fight off the nasty pest phytoplasma costs 10 TIMES what the conventional sprays cost (10 times!). Plus, the whole reason they're having issues with phytoplasma is shifting temperatures, as this Mediterranean insect has been making its way north, compromising new pastures of grapes.
Source; Teschner & Orenstein (2021)
Next, when farming these grapes, they choose to do a lot more things by hand, which is more labour-intensive and costly. For example, pruning by hand protects the long-term health of the vines, as harsher machine-made cuts can cause disruption to sap flow and essentially kill it from the inside out. That’s pretty sad, especially for old vines (30+ years) that have lots of wisdom left to share. Natural winemakers also choose to pick their grapes by hand, so they don’t get bashed about by picking machines AND pickers can select out dodgy grapes that could hinder the quality of the wine. Winemakers, therefore, think it’s pretty crucial to spend weeks in the vines picking thousands(!) of vines bunch by bunch. Now, I know what you’re thinking - jesus christ that sounds like a lot of effort. And yes, it absolutely is. Ultimately, this effort is a non-negotiable for natural winemakers who are trying to produce the best fermented grape juice they can with what they have. So just know that your hard-earned dollars on that Biodynamic Slovakian Pinot Noir is supporting these guys to do the hard thing - making really nice wine whilst helping to protect the burning planet that we live on. :) :) :)
And my final point! When you’re working without (or with minimal) additives and sulphites, you have no synthetic backup plan or safety net. Conventional winemakers often use industrially produced yeast and sulphites (to eliminate unwanted bacteria and oxidation) as a precaution throughout the winemaking process. Although adding these things is a far safer bet to make sure you end up with a wine you can sell, these additives impact the wine’s microbial activity, resulting in a wine that’s often less; expressive, alive, and has a lot less to say about the place where it’s from. Now, I will refrain from getting deeper into the great SO₂ divide (see meme below), but by making wine without this chemical safety net, you have a much higher risk of your wine going wonky. Some winemakers make the argument that this wonkiness is a part of the natural winemaking process. Their logic is - as wine is a product of nature, and sometimes nature is a bit of a b*tch, wonky barrels are thereby a part of natual winemaking. Whilst that’s a romantic notion, the reality is a pretty hectic finanical loss when you have to chuck out a barrel of 600+ bottles because nature decides to an assh*le. Of course, there is a lot that skilled and educated winemakers can do to prevent this from happening, but sometimes nature will just have its way. And when it does, winemakers have to swallow the loss, shrug their shoulders, and try not to punch a barrel or something.
Source; winememes4teenz
Privilege is a thing in winemaking too
This may be a bit controversial, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that not all winemakers are born with the same privileges. Now, it can still be hard to make ends meet when you come from a family winery, and YES it is so important for young winemakers to carry on their families’ work (if they want to do with their lives). We salute you brave souls!! But if you’re not born into vines, a cellar, expensive winemaking equipment, and a liveable home near your grapes - you have to buy, borow, or rent these things yourself from scratch or with loans. Do you know how much a tractor costs? I’ll save you the time looking it up and just say it’s a sh*t ton. So if you’re running low on funds and your tractor suddenly gives out - you could be in some serious money trouble.
If you’re from a region where buying your own vines is too expensive or downright impossible, you might have to rent vines (and still do all the farming work yourself on them). Plus, you may also have to give them back after YEARS of tending to them carefully. You might also have to buy some grapes to produce more wine, which is yet another extra cost to you. Finally, if you don’t happen to have a big family house for your kind harvest interns to rest their weary heads in, there’s another extra bill to pay come harvest. Of course, these expenses are ultimately worth it as they allow winemakers to do what they love and put great bottles on your table. It’s just important to acknowledge how not all winemakers are born with equal financial privilege.*
*Although self-made winemakers often say this gives them more creative freedom as they don’t have their gran calling the shots or secretly dosing their barrels. Either way, it can be a good human thing to go down and buy some wine from self-made winemakers who are fighting a bit harder to survive. Like Kolonia52, Jas Swan and Sophie Evans.
Why is the wine cheaper when I’m in France/Italy/Germany (etc)?
Let’s start with the obvious - moving wine across borders costs money. Take this example from geordiewineguide in the UK - a £5 bottle of wine will cost £4.58 just to import (£0.83 on VAT, £2.70 on duty, £0.40 on shipping, £0.65 on packaging) leaving a mere £0.42 cents to pay the winemaker for their work and the production of the wine itself. This infographic from Gavin Quinney in 2023 also helps to visualise where our money is going when we buy a bottle in the UK…
Source; Gavin Quinney
And, it’s not only about shipping and taxes. The further the wine moves, the more hands are needed to pass it on - e.g. from winemaker TO importer TO distributor TO wine shop salesperson. Each of these hands will add cost to the bottle - they have businesses to run and mouths to feed too! Some people have suggested relying on more direct-to-consumer sales to cut costs, meaning the wine goes directly from the winemaker to you. At a surface level this seems sensible, but it completely diminishes the important work that importers and distributors do. They put a huge amount of effort into promoting and championing the work of these winemakers in their cities and countries. They make sure their producers end up on important winelists, in your local bottle shops, and do the nitty gritty selling, which winemakers simply don’t have time to do when they’ve got thousands of vines to hand prune.
Another solution people have proposed is drinking more local. Whilst I think this is sensible if you live in a wine-producing country, us sorry souls in the nordics or in places too tropical and hot for grape growing will sadly be left out of the fun. And maybe this is a privileged point, but one of the things that made me fall in love with wine is how it can transport you to a completely different place and urge you to learn from other people’s histories and stories. Like how a salty Grillo from Sicily can make you feel less like you want to jump off a rooftop in February. That’s important too right??
I want to buy yummy natural wine but I don’t have the money…
I’m afraid there’s no easy answer here either. However, I think this is an important question that gets lost in many of these discussions. Unfortunately, most people do not have hundreds of pounds to spend on wine every month. Say you buy two bottles of wine a week at £25 quid a pop (relatively low-cost bottles in natty wine world) - that’s still £200 a month. That is simply too much to spend on wine for many households or individuals. And I personally get a little frustrated when well-intentioned wine people pass judgment by saying things like ‘well good wine just costs this much to make' or ‘maybe just drink less but higher quality’. Whilst those sentiments aren’t false, it’s not always simply a matter of morals…
You can have the best morals and intentions in the world and still simply not be able to afford the £25 bottle for your Friday night reality TV binge. These bottles add up QUICK.
Source; winememes4teenz
NOW, not to be too doom and gloom, I do have some practical tips when it comes to getting more bang for your buck;
Don’t do your drinking in restaurants and check the mark up - I usually try to drink at wine bars that operate with a corkage policy like £10-£15 on any bottle (it ends up being cheaper than places that do a 2x or 3x markup where a £20 bottle quickly becomes a £60 one). Also, if you do wanna eat and drink out like the diva you are, finding a BYOB restaurant is a great shout.
Try to drink from ‘up and coming’ (not my words) regions - places like Hungary, the Roussillon, Catalunya, Slovakia, Slovenia (etc) make beautiful and high-quality wines for a fraction of the price when compared to places like Burgundy and Piemonte.
Ask your shopkeeper for the best bang for buck bottle - please don’t be embarrassed or shy to disclose your *lower* budget to us. We get it! We’re pretty poor too! (we work in wine after all…). It’s really helpful for us to understand your financial boundaries when finding a yum bottle that doesn’t send you into your overdraft.
I could go on and on as there’s oh so much I haven’t covered but I’ll leave it here. Once again, I don’t claim to know everything on this subject so PLEASE do leave your thoughts, hopes, and dreams in the comments.
What do you reckon are some solutions in this capitalist wine sh*t show?
How do you get the most bang for buck in your wine spending?
And where do you sit on the great So2 divide? (just kidding I really don’t care about this one, PLEASE for the love of god let’s not make this a discussion about SO2 OKAY!!!)
xoxo Kristiane
Gracias 🫶🫶🫶
Fantastic!!!!!