Enjoying your $10 bottle of fine varietal French wine? This New York Times article reveals that the 750ml of wine inside cost 46 cents. This is a bit of a scandal because the French were supposed to supply a finer grade of pinot noir for closer to $1. Fortunately, apparently even none of the experts at the importer/packager could taste the difference. Regardless of the quality of wine, the federal government collects a 21 cent/bottle tax (source). In Massachusetts, we pay an additional tax of about 10 cents on 750 ml (source). So we thought that we were paying $10 for $1.30 worth of wine and taxes but it turns out that we received instead about 75 cents worth of wine and taxes.
[According to this BBC article, the fraud was discovered because the producers exported more pinot noir to Gallo than the entire region was capable of producing.]
Why drink french in the first place?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine)
All they need to do is to have their dealers relabel the wines in question to one of their “value” brands: Night Train Express. More at http://www.bumwine.com
as someone in ‘the wine industry’ — i assure you that some folks on the US end understood that much of the ‘Red Bicyclette’ was not Pinot Noir but were happy to play along with the deception.
Another big thing to understand is that a lot of the french dudes running this ‘scam’ probably felt they were doing the US drinkers a favor. The french find US marketers’ monomaniacal fixation on varietals absurd. The climate / land costs / labor costs in France mean that you simply cannot produce a decent Pinot cheaply.
Meanwhile, down in the Languedoc, they produce better-than-drinkable Syrah and Grenache for next to nothing. The US consumer gets a decent bottle (the wine in question *was* pretty good, in fact) and they make money.
Given the variety you cannot produce a cheap Pinot Noir period. No matter where is coming from you need perfect soil and climate condition (high thermal excursion but never too hot) right vines for the soil (the ones that make the pinot noir rose for sparkling are not right to make still wines for example) and a lot of labour both in the vineyards and in the cellar in order to make one as it is one of the most challenging wine to make. But then I am talking about making a pure wine here. Truth is that there are many even expensive ones where a lot of syrah gets into the wine… oops. What can I say winemakers get confused… and many consumers like to drink straightforward uni-dimensional wines often because they do not know better. Truth is that many are made in laboratories where adjustments are made by acidification spin cones and reverse osmosis, where the flavor profile is decided by the bag of yeast that they inoculate instead by the perfect balance achieved by healthy grapes in the vineyards. There is a wine for everyone in the end as long as you know what you are drinking. But do not complain after if that cheap wine gave you headache (and no is not the grape fault or the sulfites fault … usually is the is the histamine produced by those selected yeast that is responsible for that).
To me is interesting if not amusing that a company of the size of Gallo didn’t check what they were buying… (or they did?): a simple test would have find out that the grapes weren’t pinot noir…