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by pedrocr 4479 days ago
>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.
1 comments
simias 4479 days ago
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?

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bunderbunder 4479 days ago
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.

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pedrocr 4479 days ago
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.
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redler 4479 days ago
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...

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pedrocr 4479 days ago
>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...

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