The Hustle of Two-Buck Chuck

Yesterday, I stopped by Whole Foods and had a chat with Darrel, whom you may remember from our last chat a month ago. We talked of the wines he was pouring, all 3 all right, but forgettable--I don't remember any of them now. I asked him for a vinho verde, and bought the only one he had, and it was fine: light, spritzy, very pale green tints, a perfect summer afternoon wine (Casal Garcia Vinho Verde). I paid $9.99, but apparently it is an excellent alternative to Two-Buck Chuck (or Chateau Cardboard, as those Aussies like to say), as you can pick it up for $4.99 with a case price of $59.88--which I would do in a second if I did not live in Hell, where it is hot and will get even hotter before the summer's through with us.

Darrel is a bit of a cynic. He freely expressed his beliefs that artists--and he includes winemakers in this category--must and do sell their souls in order to achieve success. We had been talking of Two Buck Chuck. I asked if he had read the article in The New Yorker, which E. had given me. When he said he hadn't, I hit the highlights for him. Fred Franzia is a real piece of work ("Take that and shove it, Napa.")

First, a little history. Charles Shaw wine came to the market introducing itself as a Napa wine. It's got Napa on the label. And then there were all the stories about why it could be so cheap, stories that turned out to be false. The reason is, of course, that the wine is made from cheap grapes--think $60-200 a ton, with Napa grapes coming in at $2000 a ton. You may be wondering WTF with the label? Franzia and his crew can put "Napa" on the label because they bottle the wines in Napa. Basically, these bargain wines really are Chateau Cardboard, really are the same as buying those jug wines favored by an alcoholic singer of my previous acquaintance, one for whom I actually went to 3 different stores in a small town in the South in order to find him some booze. Those jug wines that were all the rage in the 1960s, before Americans knew anything about wine.

Also, the labor is cheap. Except when a worker dies in the field:

Trader Joe's feel good atmosphere suffered a blow with the death of 17 year old illegal immigrant Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez. Maria collapsed after working 8 hours in the blistering heat tending vines for Merced Farm Labor, a independent contractor, who provided workers for West Coast Grape Farming co-owned by magnate Fred Franzia of Bronco Wine and "Two Buck Chuck " fame.

Frankly, it reminds me of that show You Know Who and I used to love to watch, Hustle, the one about the devastatingly handsome brilliant con artist and his lovable team of swindlers. The swindlers' justification for their way of life was the motto "You can't cheat an honest man." See, people think they are getting something for next to nothing when they buy Two Buck Chuck, but they forget that basic adage about no free lunches.

You know me, I love a bargain. But some bargains cost way too much. That's how I feel about Wal-Mart. With rare exceptions (once in the past 3 years), I don't shop there. Bronco Wines, the owner of Charles Shaw and the steamroller that is owned by Franzia and his family, buys up failing labels, sells what stock is left, and then pours whatever liquid crap they got into them and keeps selling them. The consumer is none the wiser. And then Franzia blows all this smoke about how other winemakers are simply charging too much, which taps into the consumer's fear of being conned and makes the consumer cling even more tightly to Two Buck Chuck.

Here is a list of the labels owned by Bronco:

Albertoni Vineyards Alexander and Fitch Almond Creek Bad Dog Ranch Bears' Lair Black Mountain CC Vineyards Cedar Brook Charles Shaw, AKA Two Buck Chuck Chateau California Coastal Ridge Coastal Vines Congress Springs Crane Lake Domaine Laurier Domaine Napa Dona Sol Douglass Hill Down Under

Estrella Fat Cat Forest Glen Forest Hill ForestVille Foxbrook FoxHollow Grand Cru Grove Ridge Hacienda Harlow Ridge JW Morris JFJ Winery Laurier Montpellier Napa Creek Napa Crossing Napa Landing Napa Ridge

Napa River Oak Vineyards Pacific Oasis Quail Creek Quail Ridge Raymond Hill Redwood Rock Brook Rutherford Vintners Salmon Creek Santa Barbara Crossing Santa Barbara Landing Sea Ridge Silver Ridge The California Winery Thousand Oaks Three Knights Vineyards Trellis

Darrel spoke volubly about the label issue, about Bronco (and other big wine distributors) buying up the little wineries and their labels. He says that Bronco doesn't just buy the failures; Bronco targets the ones that are struggling and wipes them out. I just don't want any of that in my glass.

P.S. Darrel also told me that some of the wineries in Napa and Sonoma are not really wineries. They nail up their little shack on some unused land rented or bought from a local vineyard, bottle similar liquid crap pressed from grapes sourced from God knows where, most likely the Central Valley, and pour it for the tourists, who, after drinking all day and not spitting, truly don't know the difference. I thought about the wineries we visited over the weekend. All were genuine: Trentadue (solid wines, reasonably priced, though the pouring staff mispronounced "Tempranillo" and didn't know which grapes made up their sparkling wine, nor which method was used to produce it); Truett Hurst (already raved about); Jordan, Lancaster (rewind); Unti, where the owner talked to us for a long time and we loved the Sangiovese and the Barbera and the Grenache. We also went to some tasting rooms: Rosenblum (we agreed we have NEVER met a Rosenblum wine we didn't like); Murphy Goode (solid, I bought a bottle of Petit Verdot, a varietal I never see all by itself); and La Crema (Darrel agrees completely that La Crema has priced itself out of its market for the value--he also said that their case production has gotten so high that he wonders where all those grapes come from). So the point of all that is caveat emptor, one just has to do one's research and not stop at every winery one sees on the highway.

UPDATE: Fixed a spelling error. It's Petit Verdot, not "Petite." I knew that.