I was in Australia and New Zealand over Christmas. It was mainly a vacation, with only one winery visit in three weeks rather than the usual three or four in a day. December was more about surfing than sniffing and swirling, and keeping a careful watch on the sky from the beach.
Oh, there was a steady presence of wine, but I confined my spitting to the reverse variety -- that is, more swallowing than spitting.
But if my exposure to wineries was limited, I kept my eye on the retail side of things. Both Australia and New Zealand have private retail systems, with wine readily available in supermarkets, hotel bottle shops and dedicated wine stores.
In both countries, though, the market is now dominated by supermarkets (as it is in Britain) and the results are not always positive.
While I was there, Woolworths, one of the two big supermarket wine retailers in Australia, was fined AUS$7 million for restrictive practices that prevented some smaller competing wine stores from selling some brands.
Because of their market position, the supermarkets have enormous clout. They can negotiate low prices for large volumes of wine, and they sometimes sell below cost. You'll sometimes find wines selling in supermarkets for less than the winery price.
That sounds good for consumers, but it puts a lot of pressure on smaller retailers and many have gone out of business. That might sound fine, too: It's the market at work, right? Problem is, supermarkets tend to stock mainstream brands, leaving it that much more difficult for wine lovers to find wines from smaller wineries.
The smaller retailers try (often very successfully) to cater to local customers and develop an inventory that you can't find in the supermarkets. Nirvana Wines, just off Bondi Beach in Australia (I spent a fair amount of time in both places) carries a good range of mainstream wines for people looking for familiar labels, but also had a great range of wines from small wineries and less-known regions.
I tasted my way through a terrific range, and often took them to BYO restaurants in Sydney.
But clearly there are dangers to a virtually unregulated liquor retail system. As in other sectors (think of books), big chains can gradually squeeze the smaller competition and effectively limit the range available to consumers -- just the opposite of what advocates of a private retail system want.
But so what? There's no protection from this in the market for clocks or socks, is there? The thing is, many wine lovers, unlike aficionados of clocks and connoisseurs of socks, value variety, look for less-known producers and like to try the unknown. And they buy wine more often than people buy socks or clocks.
The question, then, is how to square the circle of allowing a more open system while ensuring the widest range of wines to consumers. If a total monopoly is too restrictive, an unregulated system can produce a result that's not much better -- and might well be worse for consumers outside major urban centres.
Four good-value wines today.