In 1996, two highly-regarded Californian winemakers took the first step towards creating a new category of wine. By blending Zinfandel, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon and branding it Ménage à Trois, Dr Richard Peterson and Scott Harvey had produced one of the first premium red blends in the US. Twenty-five years later, according to the latest Nielsen figures, red blends now account for nearly one in every seven dollars spent on wine in the US.
Clare Tooley, wine development director of Lionstone International, the US arm of the UK direct-selling giant Laithwaites, is fascinated by the phenomenon. Over the last six years, British-born Tooley has seen stores across the US introduce dedicated Red Blend sections – and fill them with bottles costing up to $100. These wines, she says “have caught the imagination with strong visual branding, as well as a taste profile that is immensely appealing to the US consumer palate.”
The beginnings
There was nothing new in blending grapes in California, where early winemakers made ‘field blends’ from a range of varieties. In the 1960s, Gallo created a popular blend called Hearty Burgundy, but it was sold in flagons and would always be seen as a cheap ‘jug wine’.
Ménage à Trois, by contrast, came at a premium price from a well-respected boutique winery, Folie à Deux, in Sonoma. In 2004, both winery and brand gained big-player distribution when they were bought by Trinchero Family Estates (TFE).
Meanwhile, Dave Phinney was quietly building sales of an innovative Napa wine he called ‘The Prisoner’ at his Orin Swift Cellars. He produced his first vintage of just 385 cases in 2000, blending Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Petite Sirah and Charbono – the only grapes he could source. For Tooley, Phinney got three things right. First, there was the ‘bold’ flavour, a term that refers to concentration of fruit, smooth tannins and high alcohol (over 15%), which contributed to apparent sweetness. Just as important was the label, which showed a chained-up wretch that, once seen, was never forgotten. Phinney also stuck a $25 price tag on it, despite it being an unknown wine with neither a grape nor a vineyard to its name. This, says Tooley, meant The Prisoner and the hundreds of blends that followed “have never had to suffer the ignoble fate of ‘entry level’ pricing”.
Over the decade after its launch, sales of Phinney’s wine leaped to an estimated 85,000 cases. In 2010, Huneeus Vintners bought it and second brand Saldo, for a reported $40m. In 2016, Constellation bought The Prisoner for $285m. Constellation went on to create a winery for The Prisoner, and has released a $100 bottle under its brand
Phinney went on to create another range of super premium red blends under his Orin Swift label, which he sold to Gallo for an undisclosed sum in 2016. Between Gallo’s distribution of the Orin Swift Wines, which also include $100 examples, and Constellation’s high-end Prisoner, red blends now have a credibility and a price range that lets them compete with top Napa Cabernets.
Breakout red blends
Red blends became an affordable luxury in 2010, when Gallo launched Apothic, a wine that retails for $10 to $12. It has more than 16 grams per litre of residual sugar, plus an oaky flavour, and has been a commercial success. “It tastes a little like coffee, and Americans love coffee,” suggested Tooley.
Liz Thach MW, the distinguished professor of wine and management at Sonoma State University believes Apothic began a red blend trend that “attracted a lot of men to the category, perhaps because many of the label designs are darker and a bit edgy.” After talking to brand managers, Thach found that some “deliberately introduced it to men at BBQ cook-offs in the South to show how it could match barbequed foods just as well as beer, if not better.”
In 2013, Danny Brager, senior vice president of beverage alcohol at Nielsen reported that red blends were also appealing to “younger consumers, who are probably less concerned with what’s in the bottle” and also “bringing in demographics that aren’t typically large wine buyers,” such as younger drinkers, Hispanics and African-Americans.
A year later, Nielsen reported that that 41% of all new wines launched over the previous two years were red blends, compared to a combined 17.7% for Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, the two best-selling varietals. In 2018 Nielsen reported the segment was worth nearly $2bn.
Yet red blends have largely been overlooked by wine professionals, perhaps because wines with no clear provenance or grape variety lack what former Wine Spectator columnist Matt Kramer famously called “somewhereness”. For Tooley, it isn’t that “the American wine drinker isn’t interested in provenance. Television advertising for Constellation’s Meiomi brand is all about people and place. But Americans are very ‘taste’ driven – overt flavours are important and brands are king.”
Tooley also wonders if the mixed-up flavours of red blends may be related to a US “propensity for fusion and mix-and-match food, from ‘surf and turf’ to salads so crammed full of different components they’re like everything but the kitchen sink.” Just as US chefs are free to experiment wildly, “the US bulk market is huge, source material is plentiful and even mediocre parcels of wine can be vastly improved by blending and in many cases an addition of residual sweetness,” Tooley explains. “There is a store cupboard of offcuts, premium parcels and volumes of all-variety wine available to winemakers and companies at any given time that allow clever winemakers to create blends.”
Styles are evolving too. In a short time, the concept has already evolved beyond what is often unfairly seen as the Zinfandel/ oak/alcohol/sweetness stereotype. These styles still prevail, but there are now lighter, dry GSM models and ‘Bordeaux varietals with a twist’. Blends that reverse the trend, by naming at least some of the grapes from which they are made, such as the Petite Petit (Petite Sirah/Petit Verdot) from the Michael David winery, might also, Tooley suggests, “take the stage next as a category extension”.
Fad or fixture?
International producers are now also selling red blends to the US market; Spain’s Gonzalez Byass and Felix Solis respectively launched Ace Kicker and FYI, while and Portugal’s Sogrape offers Silk & Spice. Others are following the advice of US distributors to add the words ‘Red Blend’ to labels that previously relied on a region.
Some industry observers, including Rob McMillan, author of the annual Silicon Valley Bank Report, see red blends as an ‘entry-level category’, while others believe them to be a short-lived fashion, like White Zinfandel and fruit-flavoured coolers. Thach, however, believes that they are “a category in their own right which fills an ongoing need with their easy-to-understand, recognisable styles”.
If consumers find the simplicity of red blends attractive, their appeal to producers – and the incentive to maintain and to build the category – quickly becomes obvious. Cabernet Sauvignon is by far the most popular red grape variety in the US and this is reflected in prices of around $7,000 per ton its grapes command in Napa, or the $1,500 per ton from the broader California AVA. Merlot, Syrah and Zinfandel from both designations cost roughly half as much.
According to recent Nielsen figures, red blends command an average retail price of $9.27 in the US market – one cent more than Cabernet. So while a blend can be made relatively cheaply, with different grapes swapped in or out depending on price fluctuations, it can be sold for the same price as the much pricier Cabernet. It’s no surprise that red blends are proliferating.
The red blend trend hasn’t maintained its early explosive rate of growth – Nielsen reports that the increase in the year ending March 2020 was 1.2%, compared to the 8.5% of year end March 2017. But the general market had flattened and red blends still attracted a 13.8% share of every US dollar spent on table wine over that period.
Given their profitability, branded blends are unlikely to disappear. The big question is whether they might ever do as well outside the US. Tooley believes they could, as Laithwaites’ UK customers already enjoy Californian blends labelled as ‘The Future is Red’ and ‘The Prospector’ as well as an Australian blend called ‘The Full Fifteen”.
Ménage à Trois was born in a winery started by a couple of psychiatrists. Maybe it has simply taken a while for the wine industry to take a leaf out of their book by showing a deeper interest in the way wine drinkers actually think.
Robert Joseph
This article first appeared in Issue 2, 2020 of Meininger's Wine Business International magazine, available online or in print by subscription.
