Vine Wise

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The World Continues Going Crazy

Columnist

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Richard L. Thomas
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The world continues to go crazy, part 4. The first three were: Why do we have traffic reports on the 5 o’clock news when the people who need it are in their cars? Why do most of the young baseball players who are making millions have facial hair? Is it to prove to themselves they’re old enough to deserve all those millions? And why do so many Sonoma County wineries shun their heritage by not putting Sonoma County on the label in addition to their smaller appellation? Is it ego, stupidity or that they just don’t give a damn?

And now we have a new one, which proves the wine business has its own George Steinbrenner. Now we can officially exhibit how crazy we are.

Quoting from a Wine Business online article, Roy Estate says Helen Turley agreed to “assist Roy Estate in launching a luxury wine brand by overseeing the grapegrowing and winemaking process for Roy, selling Roy wine to her exclusive list of devoted customers and using her reputation and relationships with key wine critics to help establish Roy wine as among the best in the world.” (I thought all along that wine critics were totally impartial—was I wrong?)

Now comes the fun part. Roy agreed to invest large sums of money to develop the vineyard (17 acres) and build a winery. Turley and partner John Wetlaufer would get “$150,000 per year for year one, increasing to $550,000 in year seven after which they would receive a share of Roy’s earnings.” (I hope to God that’s gross earnings, because the way I have it figured, there’s very little net to be had.)

“Between 2001 and 2005, Roy paid them more than $800,000.” That is not a typo! Let’s do a little math just on the wine side to begin with. Using fair average numbers, 17 acres (if all planted) would yield maybe four tons per acre, but the winemaker will probably only want three anyway, which would give about 51 tons total. With 66 cases per ton, the total production would be about 3,000 cases. In year seven, with the “agreed” upon $550,000 consulting fee, the result would equal $183 per case or $15 per bottle, just for consulting fees. Now remember, there are no production costs or grape growing costs, no return on investment, etc. Also remember there’s very little production in the first three to four years, but the consulting fee keeps escalating to add to that total. This is beginning to sound more like George Steinbrenner and A. Rod all the time.

The wine industry portrays itself as either large conglomerates fighting it out for the mid-range market or struggling little backyard wineries run by mom, pop and the kids. Numbers like this keep reminding me why we need a fancy $35 Reidel glass for each different variety and a real cork that frequently taints the wine. Boy, if I could have found an ego and a sugar daddy like that I could have retired 30 years ago instead of just four. Gee, I wonder if all of the producers of $50 wines have deals like this. However, I need to remind you that price is not a function of quality but more of availability and the one-upsmanship it leads to with the big spenders. Every person has his or her own definition of quality—except those who read Robert Parker.

Grinding my axe

I hope all of you have been looking for the Sonoma County wineries that fail to put Sonoma County on their labels because they’re apparently ashamed of it. What other excuse could there be? I remind you that the wonderful wineries in the other valley next door seldom, if ever, fail to put Napa Valley on the labels when legally possible. Looking north, it appears our neighbors are proud to put Mendocino County on their labels. I know Anderson Valley frequently doesn’t, but they consider themselves another county anyway and don’t claim to be a part of Mendocino County.

Just for the heck of it here are a few more of our disloyal county wineries I’ve spotted: Field Stone, Stryker Sonoma (Sonoma is not on the label), Mazzocco, Amphora, Robert Rue, Pezzi King, Wilson, Trentadue, Raymond Burr, Hawley and Sausal. There are many more, and I need your help—I can only drink and read so many of them. (I usually try them just to see if maybe we don’t want them to use Sonoma County for fear of damaging our reputation—you know, the reputation the wineries don’t even think we have.)

Here come the judgings

I’m still looking at all the recent judging results from around the country. Seems like new wine judgings are popping up faster than small wineries in Dry Creek. Every week it seems another judging is taking place. This rapid proliferation is going to have some deep ramifications.

First, the pool of desirable judges is rapidly getting overworked. Besides, a person can only take so much time from their real job. Judges are only transported, fed and lodged with no monetary stipend, so a real job becomes a real necessity. Second, wineries can only afford to enter so many judgings. They need to pick and choose which ones are important to them and their marketing programs. Each competition costs from $50 to $100 per entry and four to six bottles of wine per entry. Top that off with shipping costs, which are like gas prices: left arm and firstborn are used for collateral.

So even if you had only four entries, it could still cost $400 and two cases of wine that need to be shipped. Just in the last few months, there’ve been four major contests in Sonoma County which include the North of the Gate in Petaluma, the San Francisco Chronicle in Cloverdale, the Grand Harvest Awards in Santa Rosa and the West Coast Wine Competition in Santa Rosa—and don’t forget the Harvest Fair coming up! And those are only the ones held here in Sonoma County. Don’t forget San Francisco, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, Placerville and about 20 more cities are holding them as well.

Now go out and find me more disloyal wineries, keep up your efforts for a bottle a day and we’ll talk more about judgings next month.