Spotted in a bottle store in Humpty Doo in the Northern Territory: “clean skin” bottles of Marlborough Sauvigon Blanc for just $5.55.
If anyone makes any money from that I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be the people who grew the grapes and made the wine.
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A bit overpriced for cat’s pee, imho.
What did it taste like, not pmofnz’s allegation I hope.
Our back yard wine group’s wine, (made professionally at a vinyard) comes out at around $7 and that is from picking to bottle with no account of pruning, spraying (oh oh its organic isn’t it) picking, fruit and freight to and from the winery, but includes barrel hire, making, bottling and duty.
Backs up the hoary old one about the entrepreneur who applied to his Bank Manager for finance to set up a vinyard and was told, he the borrower could just pay the bank $100 000 a year and the manager would give him back $20 000 to buy any wine he liked as that was probably a better outcome than the investor could expect.
Could it have been a loss leader or perhaps it miraculously survived falling off the truck and the insurance company had paid out and the trader was looking for a bit more profit.
It will have been exported in bulk, like much of the vile pish that calls itself Marlborough sauvignon blanc. This is what happens when wineries decide to jump on a bandwagon – savvy is popular so everyone overplants and overcrops and they all work to a kind of template that ensures they make effectively the same wine. Suddenly there is too much wine and no one wants to pay for it, so they whack it in a stainless steel container and flog it off for $1 or $2 a litre.
Australia heavily subsidises its wine industry. The New Zealand wine industry, using the CER agreement, has been able to get the same subsidies on sales into Australia.
The Aussie vintners spit tacks about that, however, they reap the benefit of their subsidies enabling them to undercut NZ wine in the unsubsidised NZ market.
Labelled NZ wine is not as cheap as the pictured ones. Oyster Bay goes for $18 a bottle. Lesser known brands can be got for about $10 if you look hard enough.
Cartons of six bottles of unbranded Aussie wine from the same outfit in your pic go for $12 — yes, TWO DOLLARS a bottle.
Such are subsidies.
PM & GD – We didn’t buy any so I can’t tell you how it tasted.
BH – that’s the law of supply and demand.
Poneke – $Aus2 a bottle? The cheapest wine I’ve come across was $5 pesos (then about $NZ2.50) in Argentina but we were warned not to drink it.
Back in the day the Apple and Pear Board made some cats piss called Vivante or something like that. 50 cents a bottle for the worst hangover known to man woman or beast!
$Aus2 a bottle?
Yes,A$12 for a box of six. The ones you pictured were $30 for a carton of six, or A$5 a bottle when you buy six.
Both kinds (and others) are from the same supplier and are sold at Safeway bottle stores in Melbourne, which is where I saw them.
“Such are subsidies.”
The government gives subsidies to people who grow more grapes from which someone produces more wine than the market wants so it is sold cheap to people who get a bargain but pay more tax to the government which gives subsidies . . .
Thanks for reminding me why we don’t miss subsidies.
The point is the wine is already been made, so it is a sunk cost. Now you have a choice, sell it at $5.55 or throw it away, which do you do?
Good point Paul but it still leaves the question of why more wine was produced than the market would buy at viable prices.