Mass-Produced Industrial Wines

  Those high-volume wines you see everywhere, please don't buy them.

  Would you prefer wine made this way?

  Or this way?

  Wines over a certain price, usually $15 or $20 are considered luxury goods. Much of it from well-known areas like Sonoma and Napa is over $40 making it definitely a luxury product. Wine is often used for celebrations, holidays, and other special occasions. It should be a product worthy of your hard-earned cash, but it isn't always.

   U.S. wine sales are billions annually, and it's mostly controlled by a few large companies. Gallo, Constellation, Treasury, The Wine Group, and others. Some you've heard of, some not. You usually won't even know if you are drinking one of their wines. Gallo, for instance, owns nearly 100 wine labels, such as Apothic, Barefoot, Black Box, and Franciscan.

  Gallo accounts for 30% of American wine sales; the top 30 wine companies own 900 wine labels and are responsible for 95% of the wine sold. Their wines are found on store shelves everywhere because they make zillions of bottles of them and can muscle their way onto into the retail market just because of their size. There are 50,000 alcohol brands that sell in the U.S. About 500 of those actually have market traction (quote from Brian Rosen, of BevStrat).

  While the vast majority of the wines you find in your local store are corporate wines, but the vast majority of wineries are actually family operations.

   Are these the best wines because there are so many of them? If you think mass-produced wines made in an industrial setting will give you the best product, then yes. If having a winemaker watch over all the grapes coming into their winery during harvest then tracking each wine by tank, cask, and barrel is better, then you want the small production wines.

  It's also about supporting corporations vs. families. I'm not saying the people who work for wine corporations don't have families. I am saying there are a lot of hard-working, sometimes stressed, families who make, market, and sell their own products, and they deserve a fair shake. Unfortunately, in the wine business, they don't get a fair shake. It's about marketing budgets and about retail shelf space. In most stores, it's the big guys who are in control of what's on the shelves, especially in retail businesses that aren't wine shops, but only carry it as a sideline. Some restaurants have the same problem.

  Seek out the smaller wineries. This is where you'll find the artists and craftsmen/women at work. They deserve your business. You deserve their product.