Today I want to step away from the wine reviews and do a quick article about wine tasting fees. I want to talk about how in my opinion these wine tasting fees have gone completely INSANE. I first want to start off by stating what some winery's charge for you to taste their wines. Let's head on over to the most famous area in America to taste wines and that is the Napa valley. Before I get into the actual fees though, I think that I should break down just how many ounces the average wine bottle (750ml) bottle holds which is slightly over 25 ounces. There are also 5 glasses of wine per 750 ml bottle and the average pour is 1.5 oz. Now, keeping these things in mind and doing a little simple math I believe you will see that there is a major issue in the heart of the wine land.
To begin with I'll start off with my favorite Napa valley winery and that is Peju. I love a wonderful Peju Cabernet Sauvignon. As a matter of fact, the Peju winery produced the highest rated Cabernet Sauvignon that I have ever reviewed (
https://desertwineguy.blogspot.com/2014/05/2011-peju-cabernet-sauvignon.html) and that is the 2011 Peju Cabernet Sauvignon which I rated at 97 points. The fee to taste a wine at the Peju winery is $35. Yes, you read that right, $35. That is the basic fee because depending on the wines you choose to taste the fee goes up. Let's move to another one of my favorite Napa Valley wineries and that is Beaulieu Vineyards or simply BV for short. The basic wine tasting fee there is $25 for four wines. How about the Stags Leap winery where you will spend $65 per person for a 90 minute tour and tasting? Let's see about Black Stallion (
https://desertwineguy.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-desert-wine-guy-2011-black-stallion.html)
winery where you will pay $35 for two tastings and a cheese platter? The tastings go up to $60. How about Stags Leap Wine Cellars where the basic tasting (3 tastes) is $45. In order to get the tasting free each taster must buy two bottles each. Let's do one last one. How about going to Caymus Vineyards and paying $50 for a 5 wine tasting? Now, let;s wrap up this short but I think informative article and pit things into perspective a little.
For the sake of easy math, I will put a pour at 2 oz so that would mean that at Peju winery if three different wines were tasted at a total of $35 that would mean (again making it easy) you paid $10 for each tasting so you would be spending around $120 for a bottle of wine. That means that if the winery sells a bottle of wine for $50 at the store, they would be making not only the profit on the charge of $50 but they would be making $70 OVER that for a total of $120 and of which the majority is profit. I don't know about you but I am in the wrong line of work. Keep in mind that the average wine bottle in America costs just slightly more than $10 (
http://www.northbaybusinessjournal.com/events/6588305-181/us-wine-tops-10-a-bottle-average?artslide=0). If you use the math and figure the profit a winery would make if they could convince us (NOT) all to simply pay for tastings and not buy the bottle. The reason that I wrote this article is that I believe that anyone has a lot of nerve to charge you to try or taste their product in order for you to buy their product. The entire purpose of a business is to sell something (in this case wine) and the winery should be inviting you in with free samples in order to sell you a bottle of wine that they are making profit on anyway. I guess are probably going to be some of you out there who will disagree with me but for the life of me I can't understand why you would. The sample is supposed to be an introduction to a product so that you will hopefully like it and buy it. If you guys have strong feelings on this matter I would love to hear from you so don't be shy. Well I think I have made myself angry now :) so I will end this article having myself learned more than I really wanted to know about how much wineries really make. Remember that The Desert Wine Guy is all about wine for the average wine drinker and I myself have learned a lot today in doing the research for this article.
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Today I want to step away from the wine reviews and do a quick article about wine tasting fees. I want to talk about how in my opinion these wine tasting fees have gone completely INSANE. I first want to start off by stating what some winery's charge for you to taste their wines. Let's head on over to the most famous area in America to taste wines and that is the Napa valley. Before I get into the actual fees though, I think that I should break down just how many ounces the average wine bottle (750ml) bottle holds which is slightly over 25 ounces. There are also 5 glasses of wine per 750 ml bottle and the average pour is 1.5 oz. Now, keeping these things in mind and doing a little simple math I believe you will see that there is a major issue in the heart of the wine land.
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