Wine prices increase by fits and starts

Mark Twain wisely said there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. The statistics about wine pricing and availability are indeed confusing and deceptive. Clearly, prices are going up, but in a most uneven fashion. Trophy wines made in California are fetching as much as $100 a bottle upon release - a feat once reserved for the likes of Petrus, but oddly, many wines refuse to budge from prices that prevailed three or four, or even six years ago.

"The French have got to like it when Caymus Special Select sells for $100 per bottle," observes Ron Loutherback, co-owner of the three Wine Club stores in California. "It validates their high prices by comparison, and they can say, 'See, we're not so expensive'."

The press is writing about price increases, grape shortfalls, and growing consumer demand for red wines. The Wine Institute, in its March 8, 1996 news release, commented on the price of grapes: "As many vintners scrambled to find scarce premium varietal grapes to meet soaring wine sales, growers reaped record prices."

Vintners from France and California are making deals in Chile in anticipation of a boom in sales from southern hemisphere wines, yet Chilean wines are not all bargain-basement products, and their better wines compete at prices well beyond the "fighting varietal" price range.

The supposed gap in wine availability is generally attributed to a combination of the increased interest in red wines thanks in large part to broadcasts on the television program "60 Minutes" - the expected shortfall of wines from the 1995 California harvest, and re-planting due to phylloxera. The widely-touted gap is not literally true, and is contradicted by the California Department of Food and Agriculture's preliminary report that the 1995 harvest, at 2.2 million tons, equals the average for the last four years.

Behind the raw numbers, however, is the reality that harvests were down in premium districts such as Napa and along the Central Coast. These losses are not directly offset, at least from a marketing point of view, by the gains in crops from the Sierra Foothills, the Central Valley, and Lodi/Woodbridge.

RETAIL PRICES AT THE WINE HOUSE, LOS ANGELES

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