Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/89494
MANAGEMENT MARKET WATCH ing as close attention to the alcohol levels of those products as most of us are. Respondents who say they want wines at 10.5% or less might not know that they're asking for wines that in most cases are not "normal," unadulterated wines. MARKET VARIANCES Stephanie Goss, sales and mar- keting manager for TFC Wines, a division of the de-alcoholization technology firm ConeTech based in Santa Rosa, Calif., acknowledges that the U.K. and U.S. wine mar- kets are different. "In the U.K.," Goss said, "there's been a massive push toward 5.5% alcohol wines because there's a tax break at that point, and producers are trying to take advantage of that. The cat- egory is growing at something like 36% a year and this year (2012) will reach 1 million cases in volume." E.U. tax and public policy with Quality Assurance Offering Quality Insurance Products and Services for Wineries and Vineyards Our congratulations to Dr. Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars 2012 "NY Governor's Cup Winner" and "Winery of the Year" featuring some of the oldest vinifera vines in the United States, which produce wines of outstanding quality and complexity. respect to alcohol is a major fac- tor in the growth of the category in Europe, and that doesn't necessar- ily translate to results in the U.S. Goss's analysis dovetails with another finding of the Wine Intelli- gence study, namely that wine con- sumers expect low-alcohol wines to be cheaper than other wines, unless there is some other stated benefit. TFC has produced some exploratory brands, but ultimately envisions itself as a strategic part- ner for other wine companies that need TFC's technical de-alcoholiz- ing know-how to help them produce palatable low-alcohol products. The U.K. is still one of the only places where wines are marketed as being low alcohol. Jeremy How- ard, executive officer of online U.K. retailer The Slurp Group, said, "Our customers are certainly inter- ested in low-alcohol wine and we are selling an increasing amount of it. Totally alcohol-free wine is still a struggle to sell, but moscatos and some of the 5%-ish German and Austrian wines we carry are increasingly popular." "People in the U.K. expect to pay very little for a good-quality wine," said Goss. "There's dis- counting, there's promotion, there's three-for-10 pounds, or buy-one- get-one-free. We don't really have that here. You go to Safeway and you buy six bottles, you get 10% off, but that's kind of the extent of it." Her point is that sales of low- alcohol wines are price-driven. The Wine Intelligence study indicates that 25% of wine drinkers believe that a low-alcohol wine is probably lower in quality, making perceived quality a major deal-breaker for typi- cal wine drinkers. People don't care as much about adulterated sweet wines as long as they're cheap, and the previously mentioned tax break keeps these very low-alcohol drinks very cheap FF 311b (1011) 28 VINEYARD & WINERY MANAGEMENT NOV - DEC 2012 www.farmfamily.com 1(800) The Farm WWW.VWM-ONLINE.COM