Cheap Wine, or Why They Don’t Grow Apples in Manhattan
Philip Greenspun: “Wine down here in Chile ranges in price from $1 to $3 per bottle. I’ve been drinking these and some luxury ($7) Chilean wines and, to my uneducated palette, they compare favorably to wines tasted in California’s Napa Valley on a recent long weekend out there. The Napa wines were $30-50/bottle. So the question for the wine experts reading this is… why would anyone buy wine from Napa, where a small bit of land for a house is almost $1 million? One would naively suppose that grapes and wine produced on some of the world’s most expensive real estate would be a bad bargain. We don’t buy apples from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We don’t buy oranges from Beverly Hills. Why does it make sense to buy wine from what is now a Bay Area suburb? Couldn’t a winery in a place where real estate and labor are cheaper (e.g., Australia, Argentina, Chile, etc.) always produce a much better wine for any given price?”
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