With winter hopefully behind us, I somehow feel nostalgic and am remembering my younger days. I’ve thought about what I knew about wine at the ripe old age of twentysomething. Along with those thoughts, I wondered if any of that inexpensive swill was still around. I’m sure many of you probably have some good stories about many of the products I’m going to refer to along the way. Who could forget their days with Ripple, Thunderbird, Mad Dog 20/20, Red Lady 21 and Night Train? I wondered how many of these still exist and, to my surprise, most still do. About the only two dead soldiers I found were Ripple and Silver Satin. Do they sound familiar?
The big boys in the industry don’t really advertise their products that helped establish the word “wino” with thoughts of Third and Howard streets in San Francisco—and don’t forget our own La Rose Hotel in Santa Rosa. Brown paper bags and screwtops were in vogue then. Maybe that’s how screwtops got the reputation that we’re still trying to live down. Don’t let anyone kid you about these products—they’re the bread and butter and/or gold mine for Gallo and Canandaigua.
New York-based Canandaigua has two giant moneymakers with Cisco and Richard’s Wild Irish Rose. I was once told, a few years ago, that it shipped four big truckloads to Washington, D.C., alone—per day! And it might be more today. Our friends at Gallo don’t bother to mention that Thunderbird and Night Train account for a significant amount of its bottom line. Mad Dog 20/20 from Mogen David is still a big seller, as is Prime Time from Florida.
Boone’s Farm was a giant fad that fed the cash cow. It was followed by Annie Bed Springs, oops, sorry, that’s Annie Green Springs, which was produced by Allied. The funny thing is, by the time Annie came out, the fad was nearly over. But that’s nothing new for Allied, it always seems to be a step behind everyone else. In truth, cooperatives are usually very good in a buyer’s market and suffer in a seller’s market. Its one big advantage is that a grower has a guaranteed home in tough selling times.
Looking at the list of these so-called beverage wines, pop wines or cheap drunks makes me wonder just how big that market is and, without too much exaggeration, the word “huge” comes to mind. We might call these products our own little industry secret. They’re wine by definition and statistics, but we “real” wine drinkers don’t claim them and their makers don’t stand up and proclaim they produce the finest rot gut in America. They only line their pockets with the green they generate for their bottom line.
Remember Red Mountain Burgundy in big letters and Carlo Rossi in small letters on the front label? It was the late 1960s and early 1970s and, if you were in high school, you undoubtedly will. It gained such a fast reputation as a wine for underage drinkers that Gallo had to change the name (and type size) to change the image. It and Hearty Burgundy are two wonderful cash cows and actually are very drinkable if your ego would let you drink from a big, screwtop bottle. It’s also interesting that if you Google “Gallo” and look at the list of Gallo products, it’s strangely missing Night Train and Thunderbird—must be an oversight of the marketing department.
Just how big are the big boys? Gallo has about 73 different wine labels (excluding the unclaimed Night Train and Thunderbird), Bronco Wine Co. has about 69 different labels, and Constellation has only 49, not including 30 to 40 different country labels. By the way, it sells about 2 million cases of the infamous Richard’s Wild Irish Rose annually, and you can have your choice of 13.9 percent or 18 percent alcohol, both with screwtops, obviously. Can you buy corkscrews when you get a paper bag for your wine? I’d bet anybody who drinks it wouldn’t even know what a corkscrew looks like. So that’s the big boys’ story: Promote yourselves as good guys making great wine while you line your pockets and feed the “wino” image. Is there not a middle of the road where we can get some really good wine at the $10 to $15 range? And if I could ask for the world, I’d also like to see some fair pricing at the restaurant level. So much for our own little secrets in the wine world.
While I’m praying for reasonable pricing, I’m reminded that baby boomers (just a little after me, I guess) were the driving force behind the 1990s great expansion, and now they’re retiring and are progressively less able to afford expensive wines. That’s particularly true with us retired teachers. I trained all of my students how to get rich but forgot to do it myself. Ain’t hindsight wonderful?
Meanwhile, the younger generations have other interests and are a driving force behind the resurgence of the spirits world. Flavored liquors are growing by leaps and bounds. Also the millennials are often burdened with greater debt and have less “fun” money to spend on luxury items. And yes, I do consider $30+ wine a luxury item. It was stated at a recent Wine Expo in Santa Rosa, by Rob McMillan of Silicon Valley Bank, that, “For us to see really strong growth rates, we have to get those middle-class consumers back as actively engaged.” If anybody has been to Healdsburg on a weekend, it appears they’ve come back. Too bad they don’t bring parking spaces with them when they come. Since parking spaces themselves don’t directly generate any tax dollars, it appears that our wonderful city council forgets about them.
If you really want some fun, watch the Healdsburg City Council grapple with how to get people and bikes across the river without a bridge. First, a one-way street that didn’t work, a roundabout across railroad tracks at a five-way intersection and a non-bridge crossing the river. What fun! Maybe watching this unfold is worth buying a $30 wine and sitting back and drinking it while the wheels continue to slowly turn.
Let’s enjoy the coming spring and check out some good rosés for homework.
