Wine Is Actually Cheaper than Ever, Kind of
Inflation has been a big word in recent years, as the total at the supermarket seems so much higher these days, and the rent never seems to stop going up. And wine! If you, like me, love white Burgundy, inflation has been a disaster. Grand Crus that used to cost $200 now cost $1000. Village level Puligny is now hard to find for less than $100. I used to write about what a great value 1er Cru St. Aubin was – they have since doubled in price.
I’ve been grumbling about rising prices as much as anyone, and I especially don’t like the 15% tariff on my favorite European wines. But something has dawned on me recently: it has never been a better time to be a buyer of wine. I’ve noticed that what you get for $30 today is far better than what you got for $30 around 20 years ago, when I first started in the business. In other words, if you focus on the right parts of the wine world, wine has actually gotten cheaper.
My Beloved Cantemerle
If you’ve read enough of my stuff, you might remember that my epiphany wine was a 1989 Cantemerle, consumed in 1997. 1989 was a great vintage and the wine was not cheap, though nothing like a 1st Growth or famous Grand Cru Burgundy. You could buy it at Sherry Lehmann for around $80.
Today, if you were to look for a great Bordeaux vintage that is about eight to twelve years old, you would likely settle on 2016 – a top three vintage so far this century (together with 2005 and, most recently, 2022). Well, it just so happens that we sell the Cantemerle 2016. And our price is $52.99. The price of an “equivalent” vintage Cantemerle has actually gone down.
I put “equivalent” in quotes because, in fact, the vintages are equivalent only in the sense that both are considered grand vintages. The truth is that the 2016 is a much better wine. Since 1989, Cantemerle has been transformed. Back in the 1980s, the property was rundown and had a reputation for producing mediocre wine from a strangely high percentage (here on the Left Bank) of Cabernet Franc. Since then, they’ve increased Cabernet Sauvignon from 36% to 70% of plantings (at the expense of Cabernet Franc), completely modernized the cellars, and the vines, many of which were planted in the 1980s, have reached middle age. There’s a wonderful detail in the Cantemerle story: when they renovated, they kept six small traditional oak vats as a “link to the past,” only to discover that wines fermented in them were consistently superior. So for the 1990 harvest, they installed a full new oak vat room – possibly making Cantemerle the first property in Bordeaux to voluntarily return to traditional oak vat fermentation.
The results speak for themselves. Critic scores climbed from the low-to-mid 80s in the 1980s and ’90s to the low-to-mid 90s today. Philippe Dambrine, who directed the estate from 1993 to 2021, said the difference became “really apparent since the 2004 and 2005 vintages,” and that the estate was “probably rediscovering what Cantemerle tasted like in 1855” (when it was admitted into the prestigious list of Bordeaux that are considered “classified growths”).
In other words, Cantemerle is a much better wine today than it was in 1989. And it costs less. That sure doesn’t sound like inflation to me.
Now, I have picked the most extreme example available. French wine consumption has collapsed in recent decades – per capita consumption has dropped roughly 65% since the 1960s, from around 120 liters per person per year (!) to about 40 liters today. Only 11% of French adults now identify as regular wine consumers, down from 50% in 1980.
Bordeaux, the world’s most famous wine region, has barely adjusted to this new reality. The region has shrunk its vineyard area from 103,000 hectares to about 90,000 through government-funded vine-pulling programs, with another round planned for 2026 and 2027 – backed by €130 million in subsidies. But production still exceeds demand. Many growers are holding four unsold vintages in inventory. At an auction in the Blaye region last year, 90,000 cases of organic wine from a bankrupt estate sold for just 23 cents per case of wine!
What this means for us consumers is that Bordeaux has been forced to put their wines on sale in order to move the product. Their loss is our gain.
It’s Not Just Bordeaux
Surely Bordeaux is an exception, and not the rule? Actually, I see the same pattern in so many other categories of wines that I like. Mid-tier Brunello cost around $50 when I started in business. Today, you can still buy it for $50. And Brunello is so much better now than 20 years ago. In the mid 2000s, Brunello was in the midst of the “Brunellopoli”, when Italian authorities investigated at least 20 Brunello producers – including some of the biggest names in the region – for secretly blending Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot into what is, by law, a 100% Sangiovese wine. Critic Kerin O’Keefe had been sounding the alarm for years, writing in 2003 that many Brunellos she tasted “were so jammy it was hard to believe they were Brunello.” I, personally, found Brunellos pretty gross back then. Today, it is one of my favorite wines.
The same is true for next-door Vino Nobile di Montepulciano – $30 back then, and $30 today. I could also name Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Barbaresco, Amarone, Mosel Riesling, Vouvray, and others. In every case you can buy wines in the $30 to $60 range (the range shifts around a bit depending on the category) that are better than the same-priced wines from 20 years ago. Falling worldwide demand for wine has kept prices in check, even as quality has soared.
Wine Diversity and Our Golden Era
In recent years, however, wine disinflation has emerged from a different, more interesting source: wine diversity. Places like Crete, Mt. Etna, most of Portugal, much of Galicia and other corners of Spain, and even more obscure parts of France – Irouléguy, Auvergne – either made very little wine or made only poor-quality wine a generation ago. Today, a $30 red or white wine from any of these regions can be fantastic. Twenty years ago, those wines didn’t exist.
This aligns with another theme that I will write about some day: the fact that we are now in the midst of the greatest golden era for wine that the world has ever known.
Three fantastic forces have converged to create this golden era.
Producers decided to make better wine. Back in the day, when wine was mostly treated as a commodity, producers churned out bottles with quantity, not quality, at the top of mind. Yields were high, chemicals were applied, and winemaking was rote. Better-known wines could put AOC labels on their bottles, and that – rather than the wine’s intrinsic quality – was usually enough to sell the wine. As wine production became more competitive (that falling worldwide demand again), and as judgments about wine became more widespread – thanks to Robert Parker and many other critics and magazines, and thanks to the internet – this was no longer good enough. Wine production had to improve.
Winemaking actually improved. The movement towards organic and biodynamic farming, together with more natural winemaking, has had a massive impact. To put some numbers on this: the area of organic vineyards worldwide has more than tripled since 2008, from about 127,000 hectares to over 420,000. In France alone, organic vineyards have gone from about 1.4% of the national vineyard in 2002 to over 12% today. In the vines, techniques like green harvesting and canopy management were still in their infancy just 20 years ago, and they have improved considerably since then. The hot 2003 vintage was a disaster in Europe, and very few of the wines were good. Today, equally hot vintages like 2022 produce magnificent wines. More producers are paying attention to all the little details that go into producing the best possible wines from their vines, and it shows.
The trend towards homogenization reversed. For decades following World War II, the wine world tried to become more and more alike everywhere you go. Tuscany decided it needed to become the next Napa Valley. Indigenous varieties everywhere were grubbed up and replanted with so-called noble varieties. Commercial yeasts were solded to Sancerre and Albariño producers to make their wine taste more like New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. But at some point along the way, a switch flipped. Producers started to realize that homogenization was boring – and that it didn’t actually work. (Sancerre never really managed to taste like New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, thank God.) The wine world started to emphasize diversity: indigenous grape varieties in Campania, old-style winemaking techniques in the Jura, vineyard-specific wines from Champagne. The unveiling of the Brunellopoli scandal was, in its way, part of this same story – a moment when the wine world chose authenticity over international conformity.
The wine world is increasingly becoming a rich and diverse tapestry, filled with wines that are getting better and better. There has never been a better time to buy wine.
But What About Those White Burgundies?
Believe me, I’m as sad about white Burgundy prices as anybody. It’s a real problem, and it’s not just white Burgundy. It’s also Rayas, Poggio di Sotto Brunello, Burlotto Barolo, Krug Champagne. Even in Bordeaux, the 1st Growths have gone up in price – it was still possible to get bottles of off-vintage Mouton Rothschild for under $300 when I started out; now that number is more like $500.
There are, I think, two different things going on here. Luxury goods in all categories have gotten more expensive, and wine is no exception. The price of a luxury wine – a bottle of Krug, or of Mouton – has gone up. But even here, the inflation isn’t as bad as you might think. In the same period that Mouton has risen from $300 to $500, the median salary in the United States has more than doubled. As a percentage of a median American paycheck, Mouton has actually gotten cheaper, and a median worker today can actually afford one bottle of Mouton more per month than 20 years ago. (Unfortunately, this isn’t true of Krug!)
Separately, there is the phenomenon of the chase: through social media and the internet, the wine world seems to simultaneously decide that it all wants to drink the same wine. That wine is made in limited quantities, so the price shoots up. That’s why Overnoy is $500 a bottle, even though it would be hard to describe it as a luxury wine.
So you’re seeing in wine what you see in just about every other area of life: winner takes all. The winners keep raising their prices, and everyone else is just trying to stay afloat. As for us consumers, well, you don’t have to participate in the chase (it’s rarely worth it), and my Cantemerle 2016 truly tastes like a luxury.
The Big Brands
If you’ve read this far – or if you read just about anything that I write – then you, like me, occupy the tiny world of people that actually care about wine. I constantly have to remind myself that what I do in wine is not what most people do in wine.
The vast majority of wine – especially in the U.S. – is produced by a small number of giant corporations. E&J Gallo alone commands nearly a third of the American wine market, with almost 100 different brands (Barefoot, Apothic, Dark Horse, and many more – chances are you’ve drunk some Gallo wine without knowing it). Add in The Wine Group and Constellation Brands and the top three companies account for roughly half of all wine sold in America by volume. These wines bear labels with “brands” rather than producers and are sold in big-box stores, corner liquor stores, and supermarkets. This is a world where homogenization still reigns supreme, and where oligopolistic power pushes prices upwards.
Almost nothing that I’ve written about above applies to that world. Maybe the price of Barefoot Pinot Grigio has gone up. But I don’t care, and you probably don’t either. The kinds of wines that we want to drink – as long as we don’t chase, and as long as we are seeking enjoyment, not luxury – are better than ever in that sweet $20 to $60 price point.
I’m hopeful, by the way, that the big brands are slowly losing ground. The younger generations of wine-drinkers seem less interested in drinking the same wines over and over again, and more interested in exploring different corners of the wine world. If more wine drinkers seek out wines with identity and character, the world of wine is just going to keep getting better and better.
Jeff Patten is one of the founders of Flatiron Wines. He has been buying and selling wine, and exploring wine country, for over 20 years, and drinking and collecting it for far longer. He is WSET certified (level 2).
