2-Buck Up Chuck is now five years old.
Here’s hoping it dies soon.
I’ve drank a few bottles of the sludge so it would be with personal joy to see that horrendous excuse-for-wine disappear from the shelves of Trader Joe’s and, more importantly, from the dinner tables I sit down at.
Although I doubt that is going to happen any time soon.
Last year, Two Buck Chuck — available only in the Trader Joe’s grocery chain and priced at $1.99 in California, hence its nickname — accounted for at least 8 percent of California wine sold in-state, said Jon Fredrikson, who tracks wine shipments through his Woodland-based company, Fredrikson, Gomberg & Associates.
Let me get this out of the way: I’m a wine snob. Well, not a wine snob, but I refuse to drink wine that is cheaper than a gallon of gasoline. I’m sure the gasoline is more expensive because it tastes better.
2-Buck Chuck is no exception.
A bottle of decent wine can be found for $7. Don’t make your gut and your taste buds suffer because you’re too cheap to shell out the extra 5 bucks. Still, I’m not on an elitist rant against the Chuck because I think I’m too good to drink wine that costs $2.
Believe me, artofstarving is all about cheap wine. Even if it tasted better I would boycott the crap because of what the owner of Charles Shaw has done to the industry.
He tries to sound like a hero to the working class for making wine affordable for the masses.
“We’re not out to gouge people,” says Franzia. “What I would like to see is every consumer be able to afford to have wine on the table every day and not feel insecure about it.”
What he’s done is actually grossly destroy the art of wine making by using cheap grapes from wherever he can get them to make slop. Wine is supposed to be a pure reflection of the grape used to make it, which done right is a pure reflection of the land and conditions the grape was grown in.
He does it cheaply, too, because he owns every step of the operation.
Making wine is expensive from the ground up, but Franzia owns a lot of ground — 40,000 acres is the common estimate. He won’t say. His Ceres-based Bronco Wine Co. also owns the crushing and bottling plants and has its own distribution company.
Until now, another company has supplied the bottles. But Franzia is talking about building a glass container plant near his Napa Valley bottling facility.
Yes, more people are into wine, and that’s good for all the winemakers, but the harm he’s done on the industry is to force his competitors to seek to make a cheaper product as opposed to a better product. He is able to do it inexpensively because he owns every step of the operation and because he buys the cheapest grapes on the market.
From Wikipedia: Franzia’s marketing methods contrast with those of his higher priced competitors, although he is also credited with introducing new consumers to the wine market and ultimately to the premium brands. His business model is based on the surplus of grapes that followed the collapse of the dot com market.
He is a smart businessman, no doubt about that. But it comes with one hell of a hangover.
Think about it in terms of a hamburger. Say McDonald’s came out with a 50 cent hamburger five years ago that was made of low-quality meat and tasted like garbage but people bought it by the billions.
Would that be something worth celebrating?
