Sometimes in Power Tasting we have used the term “mass producers” with a bit of a sneer. That’s unfortunate, both because it’s a bit snobby and because it’s not fair. There’s no definition as to what constitutes “mass”. Sure, a vineyard that grows enough for 5,000 cases or less is small (or perhaps the winemakers would prefer the term “petite”). But does mass start with 10,000 cases? 100,000? A million?
Yes, Gallo turns out 70 million or more cases of wine a year and they certainly are America’s largest producers. Most of the wines they make are intended for people who are not sophisticated wine drinkers. But Gallo also owns numerous labels and some of them make wine of a pretty high quality. One of these is J, producer of some pretty good sparkling wine that we have enjoyed. To be fair, these days we don’t buy wine under the Gallo label. But we sure did when we were younger.
But we do buy Moët & Chandon Champagne. They make 2.5 million cases annually and that’s still pretty massive. And that doesn’t include their Chandon bottlings from California and Argentina, which probably add up to the same number of cases. Of course, the best price we have seen for Moët & Chandon is around $45; there are Gallo wines that sell for less than five dollars.
The point is that quantity is not necessarily relevant to quality in judging wines. And for those of us who enjoy wine tasting, we should not avoid visiting the tasting rooms of the larger producers just as a matter of principle. There are several reasons for this.
One is that makers of lower priced wines often have higher-end lines as well. Perhaps there is no better example of this than Guigal in the Northern Rhône, that makes a Côtes du Rhône that sells for under twenty dollars and top-ends such as La Mouline, La Landonne, La Turque, and La Reynard that are among the most coveted wines in the world. In the US, Louis M. Martini (a Gallo label, by the way) sells a lot of their low-price Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon but are now making some quite respectable higher-end wines. And for that matter, the Sonoma Cab is a quite respectable wine for picnics and barbecues or Tuesdays.
Another reason to visit some of the bigger wineries is that even though they primarily sell inexpensive, lower quality wine, the owners often give their winemakers some latitude to choose the best grapes and make a more crafted wine that is sold only at the tasting room. We have had that experience once at Clos du Val in Napa Valley, which at that time was making 90,000 cases, surely enough to be called mass producers.
Finally, it might make sense to visit a tasting room of a mass producers because there are times that we might be looking for what we call “Tuesday wine”. Alas, we don’t open Mouton or Lafitte every night at our house; sometimes a simple red is just fine. And it helps to try them before we buy them.