When I think about the tastings that we have experienced in class, I don't remember any wine being a sub $10 bottle. (With the exception of Maker Wine, and even they're per bottle pro rated price would have been over $10).
This dynamic makes sense - guest speakers want to treat us and bring us something special, limited or extra tasty from their collection, and that usually means a more pricey bottle. Plus there's also the inevitable social pressure? Being a guest lecturer for a class at Stanford, you don't want to bring the cheap stuff.
I would be super curious to hear more about the cheapest bottle of wine that our guest speakers either make, sell or drink themselves. I think this is actually a trend in millennial preferences that would be interesting to explore further.
We've covered in our class readings that story of Charles Shaw, and how his products ended up being distributed at Trader Joe's. What is more iconically millennial than the Two Buck Chuck?
However, it's not just Trader Joe's that's getting excited about this category. Based on this article, discount grocery chain Aldi is also making moves in the cheap wine segment.
It's known across consumer spending that millennials value experiences more than material goods, and also are embracing brands that "feel" more transparent and authentic to the millennial identity. Some examples that come to mind are Away luggage, selling a nicely designed but relatively standard suitcase through the bigger brand of travel lifestyle.
Even though millennials are supposedly drinking less wine, I'd be curious to see how the trends break down among price segments.
Cong, I think you're absolutely right to ask that question. GSB students are not a representative segment of the Millennial population and while some of the expensive wines that are brought to class are well-suited to our tastes, they probably aren't suited to those of the majority of our generation, given that the disposable income of an average millennial is likely not enough to afford $100+ bottles of wine regularly.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it makes a ton of sense for our guests to have us taste expensive bottles. As we've mentioned multiple times, a very common way in which consumers decide what to buy is based on what they've tried in the past and have liked. If our guests make us fall in love with an expensive bottle, they stand to profit much more than if they made us buy their $5 bottle.
Also, I think one of the reasons why this is the case is that being based in California means that a lot of our guests operate wineries at a relatively high cost in Napa or Sonoma which makes it hard for them to produce a lot of very cheap wines. I bet that if a business school of similar standing in Europe had an equivalent class, the price breakdown of the wines that they would drink would be slightly different given the market dynamics there.