As you browse the shelves of your local liquor store, you might be intrigued by how much the price tag can differ between one type of wine and another. It can be hard to process that two seemingly identical products can be worlds apart in how much they cost.
Surprisingly, several factors can influence the cost of a bottle of wine, and it can be about more than taste and popularity. Your wine might cost less or more than other varieties for any number of surprising reasons.
The Cost of the Vineyard
Purchasing a vineyard can be a multi-million-dollar venture, which means the initial investment might play a part in how much your wine costs. Then, of course, we must consider the fact that there’s more to most vineyards than the purchase price.
You also have to factor in machinery, the cost of maintenance, new grape harvester parts and servicing, tools and products used to produce healthy grape vines, and worker wages to ensure those grapes are successfully harvested.
Someone has to cover these costs while ensuring the vineyard remains profitable. So, these expenses are generally accounted for in the price tag of the wine.
Harvest Quantity
Weather can be fickle, and it’s not uncommon for some vineyards to experience poor harvests one year and bumper harvests the next. If a vineyard experiences a poor harvest, it must still recover the costs, and increasing the per-bottle price tag can be one of the only ways to do that. When they experience a good harvest, they may not need to increase the price and can produce more bottles with fewer associated costs.
The Winemaking Techniques
The significant price difference between a high-end and low-end bottle of wine has always been a topic of curiosity for many people. Often, winemaking techniques and whether or not wine is aged can be a core factor in the price tag of your favorite bottle.
While the winemaking process is fundamentally the same across all vineyards, techniques can differ based on a vineyard’s goals, such as mass production or quality. Some vineyards might bring in experts like specialized winemakers and chemical engineers, with the costs of these experts added to each bottle of wine.
If wine is aged, this process can increase the costs associated with winemaking. Vineyards have to hold onto their wine for longer and store it in barrels until it’s ready for sale. The fewer bottles of such wine they produce, the more expensive they are for consumers.
The Bottles
While wine bottles are standardized worldwide, there are still several options for vineyards to buy, and some can cost more than others. For example, a wine bottle without a punt generally costs less, so winemakers might increase the per-bottle cost to factor this into the equation.
Marketing
The winemaking industry is fierce, and consumers have endless options at their disposal. One of the best ways for a winemaker to ensure their product stands out from the crowd is by marketing it to the right people.
Marketing can be expensive, and research shows that many wineries spend an average of $4.15 per case on marketing for wholesale wine. These costs naturally have to be accounted for in the overall cost of each bottle.
You might have no qualms about paying as much as you do for your favorite bottle of wine, but if you’re like most people, you’ve always been curious about why it costs as much as it does. The next time you make a purchase, you’ll have a broader understanding of just how much hard work goes into producing the average bottle.
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