[simias]

> The 'Miracle Machine' takes only three days and just a couple of dollars to make wine that would normally cost at least USD 20, its makers claim.

That sounds completely preposterous to me, unless wine is much more expensive in the US than it is here in France. Assuming that we are talking about the price of a single bottle of wine (which seems about right judging by the size of the device) 20$ would get you very high end wine. You can get good wine for a quarter of this price easily.

Brewing stuff at home is fun but this seems closer to kool aid than oenology. I'm not sure you would learn a great deal about wine making by using it. I'm not sure I see the appeal, unless as they seem to boast the wine ends up very good and much cheaper than simply buying it in a store.

[pedrocr]

>That sounds completely preposterous to me, unless wine is much more expensive in the US than it is here in France.

It is. I'm used to similar pricing as you are being in Portugal, but in California 15-20$ is usually entry level pricing for good wine.

[simias]

Oh. That makes sense then, I suppose this machine might have a market in the USA if it makes proper wine.

How come wine is so expensive over there anyway? They produce some don't they?

[bunderbunder]

There's very little culture of having table wine here in the US, and that allows pricing in the market to come a bit unhinged. And wine's heavy, and for most Americans it needs to be shipped in from far away. Even when it's domestic - I imagine the shipping cost to get a bottle of French wine to me is actually lower than the cost for a bottle of Californian.

Also, Carlo Rossi. I think a lot of us still haven't quite managed to banish the memory of that wine.

[pedrocr]

California produces some but it's probably way too low of a volume to allow for the cheap prices wine countries are used to. In Portugal and I assume in France as well wine is made in pretty much all of the country. In the US there's a bit of California and not a lot more. Demand and supply does the rest.

[redler]

In 2012, France produced 41.3 million hectoliters of wine, and the US produced 28.4 million hectoliters. 88 percent of US production was from California.

So it's true that US wine is primarily from California, and it's true that France produces significantly more. But it's also true that the US does produce quite a bit.

One might speculate that some of the price difference is due to the kind of market that evolves when, culturally, wine is not consumed as frequently as an everyday staple of the dinner table, but rather as something for special occasions.

References:

https://www.wineinstitute.org/resources/statistics/article83

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-27/french-bulk-wine-pr...

[pedrocr]

>So it's true that US wine is primarily from California, and it's true that France produces significantly more. But it's also true that the US does produce quite a bit.

By your numbers France produces 145% of what the US does while having 20% of the population. So per-capita it produces a lot more wine. On the other hand the French drink more wine. I found a table of consumption per capita[1] and looked up the populations of France and the USA on wolfram alpha. The end result is that France produces 142% of it's consumption, while the US produces 95% of its consumption.

So the French need to export their wine to find a market, and that's probably only easy for the high-end stuff. That should make entry-level but still good wine easy to buy. That's certainly our experience in Portugal as well. It's one of the barometers I use for the state of our wine industry. If I can still find good 2-5€ bottles of wine on the supermarket it means we're still not good enough at exporting it.

[1] http://www.wineinstitute.org/files/2010_Per_Capita_Wine_Cons...