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Great things in store for 2010

There is certainly plenty of bad news about persistent unemployment and underemployment, the foreclosure crisis, the unwillingness of banks to make loans to small businesses, and the impending commercial real estate implosion. Add to this the slowdown in restaurant wine sales and the across-the-board retail phenomenon of “trading down” by the consumer. Finally, toss in a reluctance by wineries and importers to reduce their prices on existing inventories and a succession of several good vintages. Take it all together and what do you get?

One of the best opportunities for wine value buying in a decade.

You see, as long as the Earth continues to revolve around the Sun, grape vines will continue to produce fruit. Because the wineries have been sitting on their wines, hoping upon hope that the wine market would shape up (or perhaps for a bad vintage), they now have a prodigious glut of wines in their cellars. And I’m not talking about one vintage, but more like three or four, with the potential for another one (2010) right behind it.

If you are a wine buyer, prepare yourself for one of the best buyers’ markets in years. The best deals will probably be in bottles that would have been in the $30-$40 range on the shelf. These will see reductions of 30-50 percent. (Not silly “nickel” games played in some venues where the price gets raised just to show a bigger discount, but honest reductions.) As time goes by, we may even see items in the high tier ($50+ retail) start to slide, too. For now, the wineries are desperately defending their crown jewels, but with so much erosion coming in the mid-tier, the upper-tier cannot be that far behind.

Plus, the longer the producers wait, the worse the damage will be to their market position.

In the end, we will probably see a sad cascade of vineyard failures and winery closures. It’s likely as necessary as it is inevitable. But in the meantime, drink up! We will see great prices for the foreseeable future. After that, who knows?

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