It would be nice if price was just about the quality, but in reality, more often it comes down to what people are willing to pay for that bottle, or more often, that case of wine. The reason why the big Bordeaux style wines are the largest, expensive group is that they age well and still go with the main course of a meal. So, you can invest in them for the future and consume them when they can do the most good.
But why does one brand go for five hundred dollars and another for one hundred? Marketing! The company works hard to establish the brand. When the Harlan team put together their Bond brand they pulled their grapes from a select collection of relatively small, diverse vineyards and then blended. The naming of the brand was obvious; after all, many people invest in Bonds.
Yet when they rate the top wines of Napa Shafer, Pride Mountain, Harlan Bond and Screaming Eagle are among the top wines, yet the prices vary from $140 a bottle to several thousand. Yet, the variations in quality are irrelevant, they are all well made, the differences are due to the flavor of the land and the taste of the vineyard. If you tasted the wines without the labels the differences would be due to your personal preferences based on your individual physiology.
There is nothing like tasting the wine with its maker among their vineyards to get a sense of its nature. It’s well known that the wine always tastes better at the winery, but I spend some much time at diverse wineries and walking in vineyards that to me it’s just the neighborhood, but I can still be impressed. I’ve tasted many of Napa’s great wines, but some of the best wines I've tasted cost fifty to one hundred dollars.
I can think of two that just really impress me, one of them is so good that it practically brings tears to my eyes when I taste it, Marita's Vineyard. In both cases the person who grows the grapes makes the wine. The size of the lots are very small, and at Marita's Vineyard all of the work on the vines is done by the two brothers who also make the wine. They also have been making some of the best wines in the valley for other people for more than thirty years.
The prices are not just about the wine, and even the wine is not just about the wine, it's about the place and the people and the stories. Which is not surprising since wine is an endlessly complicated. but delightful subject.
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