Julie Harrison - Quality and Price

Why are some wines so much more expensive than others?

Just how a wine is priced has a number of variables.  A wine may fetch a very high price based on the wines reputation and history.  Some French wines automatically reach extraordinary prices because of where they come from.   There are certainly some iconic New Zealand and Australian wines that are priced from $100 upwards.  

Unfortunately tasting some of these wines is not an everyday experience, so what justifies the extra cost between that $9 bottle of wine and $20 to $30 dollar bottle.
Marketing and hype can inflate the value of a wine but I want to look at some more objective reasons.

The quality of the grapes used to make wine has a huge impact of the finished product.  You cannot make a good wine from poor fruit.   One of my first jobs was with Penfolds.  Penfolds make the iconic Australian wine Grange Hermitage.  This wine sells for hundreds of dollars a bottle.  My job was to select parcels of high quality fruit within the vineyards Penfolds had in McLaren Vale in South Australia.  I was paid to roam the vineyards of McLaren Vale and select blocks of best quality fruit based on a number of criteria that had been developed over many years.  In other words a lot of labour went into the selection of these grapes, which once picked would be treated with extreme tenderness and care.   A huge amount of investment goes into the production of this wine from the vineyard and throughout the whole winemaking process.  Of course it is not just the cost of production that makes this wine so pricey, it is also  the legend and history of the wine and the fact that it will increase in value over time.

Lower priced wines will generally come from fruit that is grown as efficiently as possible.  It is often from large, flat vineyards that are easy to manage and drive your tractor around.   It may be from an irrigated vineyard which means the grapes are larger and more “juicy” but will have less concentrated flavours.   Most likely the grapes will be machine picked which is far less expensive than hand picking.   This makes a difference especially for white grapes which oxidise more easily than red varieties.  The grapes will typically be from an “easy” variety.  Pinot Noir is quite a difficult grape to deal with which is one the reasons it is often more expensive than other red wines.
 
Higher end wines will often come from a more challenging landscape.   The vineyard itself may be hilly and harder to drive your tractor around but with wonderful north facing (in the Southern Hemisphere) slopes that provide optimum ripening conditions.  Time consuming techniques are used in the vineyard to ensure maximum fruit quality. The grapes will often be smaller and produce a lot less juice but the juice will be much more intense in flavour.  The grower and winemaker will work together to make sure that only the best fruit goes into the wine.  Sometimes a winery will have a multi-tiered product range with the top fruit going into the pricier wine.  This can be confusing to the consumer especially when the labels do not vary significantly.  Often a restaurant will carry the high end product and you might wonder why the “same” wine from the supermarket was not nearly so good.

When a grape is crushed and pressed the first juice that comes out will be best.  The heavier the grapes are pressed the more the bitter components from the seeds or skin will taint the juice so a high quality producer will get less “juice per grape”.

Using oak barrels adds a huge cost to wine production.  Chardonnay for example can be oaked or unoaked.  The unoaked product which spends its life in stainless steel will be far less expensive to produce than a Chardonnay that has been barrel fermented in a new oak barrel.  Oak barrels cost hundreds of dollars and the labour involved in fermenting or storing the wine in oak is much more than if a wine is fermented and stored in a large stainless steel tank.  

Aging time can add a significant amount of cost to a wine.  The longer the wine is sitting in the winery the more it costs in terms of storage space, labour and postponement of financial return.  In Europe especially there are often strict rules about how long a wine should be stored in oak and how soon it can be sold after production.

Success in wine competitions (watch out for the gold stickers that are from some obscure country fair), good reviews from famous wine critics and scarcity are also things that might ramp up the price of a wine, which may or may not be justified. Having said that there are some very good reasons why spending an extra few dollars every now and then on a bottle of wine will be a rewarding experience.