Now and forever a fan of Catalan bulk wine

There’s nothing sophisticated about it. You walk in to a winery like Empordàlia and go straight to the back of the place. There, you will find the massive 10,000 or 25,000 liter stainless steel tanks. At the bottom, a spigot. Nearby, your selection of large or small plastic bottles if you forgot your own.

In Spanish and Catalan it ‘a granel’ or ‘bulk’ wine. There is no big secret to it here though. You can find it anywhere in Europe where they make wine, although I’m of the opinion that the best versions of it are in countries along the Mediterranean. In 2007 I stayed with a Croat who owned a pension in Dubrovnik and every week he would lug in a 10L bottle of bulk Plavac Mali that he bought.

Naturally the assumption is that if you’re paying €1 a liter instead of €10 for a 750ml bottle, then the quality is going to be less. In some wineries this may be the case, but for everything I’ve ever tasted that was bought in bulk, such as the wines I just picked up yesterday from Empordàlia, I taste no difference. Their bulk Criança and what you buy in the properly bottled and corked version are the exact same, although there may be a scratch less alcohol in the bulk version. Naturally the big difference is the staying power down the line as air is both your best friend and your worst enemy with wine.

If you buy the bulk wine and plan to keep it for more than a day or two, you need to a) put it in a glass container and b) keep as much air out of there as possible. Otherwise, it will oxidize quite fast and while this is desirable while one is drinking the wine, when one is storing it, it’s going to produce something squalid. Given the difficultly in this, it’s not a surprise that during the summer, the main bulk customers are fat Germans and French stocking up on cheap booze for the beach as Empordàlia is on the way to one of the closest beaches to the French border.

But all of this is a painful reminder as to how out of control the fancification of wine has become in California. If you can actually find wine to buy in bulk, it’s typically of very low quality, which is most likely that way to keep people buying the bottles. I mean, even a wine like the namesake Rubicon from Coppola’s winery has a cost-of-goods that is less than $4 per bottle, which includes the grapes, labor, bottle, label, and cork (one of the more expensive elements in wine production.) The wine retails for $110. It’s ridiculous. I’m assuming that per liter, if one doesn’t bottle the wine, the cost much be somewhere around $0.50 given what bulk sells for here in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, which is about €1 a liter. A 100% markup is pretty typical in business. So why is it not possible to get a bulk wine in California for even $4 a liter? That would be a massive markup, yet it just isn’t done. And of course it isn’t because of the same reason why we don’t use the Metric system or have soccer as our national sport (like the rest of the world on both counts) in that wine, Metric, soccer, and hell, even cheese are seen as European and thus fancy. They’re either to be avoided or priced to cost a great deal for the allure of being fancy.

I must now shrug this off and return to living up my cheap, delicious wines and weighing myself in kilograms, thank you.