Filling The Missing Niche Of California Wines

As wine enjoys the greatest popularity it has probably ever had in this country, there is actually a troubling trend that is keeping a lot of the best new wines off of the shelves. Ironically, it is because of wines popularity that this is happening.

<a></a> Many states now allow for grocery stores to sell beer and wine. With hundreds of locations and a desire to offer the same products in all of them, this means that the predominant <a href="http://www.wineclubworld.com">wine suppliers</a> are companies that can produce hundreds of thousands of cases of wine a year. Naturally there are only a few winemakers that function on this size, so they are the ones who most benefit from this change.

Independently owned wine and beer stores, in an effort to compete with this, realize they have to find their own niche in the market. The most popular and successful option for these stores is to focus on locally produces wines and beers. The growth of microbreweries over the last few decades has allowed these stores to develop a reputation in their region. Now that every state has at least commercial winery, these stores are looking to these wineries first, and then those in the surrounding states, to fill their shelves and further burnish their reputation.

This leaves a large part of the market underrepresented. It is certainly a great sign of the healthy state of the wine business that wine is made all across the country, but it is important to remember one sobering fact: California wines account for 89 percent of all wines made in the country. To put that in perspective, New York, the second largest wine producing state, made 26.4 million gallons of wine in 2012. California? 667.5 million.

Golfers go to Florida, surfers go to Hawaii and winemakers go to California, because that is where you can be the best at what you do. Some of the most iconic names in the history of winemaking in the United States now oversee wineries that produce less than a thousand cases of year. These small batch wineries do not have the resources or the product to make it on the big store shelves, and are too far from many states for those store owners to be interested.

Thankfully, this is where wine clubs fit in. Many wine clubs feature wines and wineries of California that are only available at the wineries themselves. These membership clubs give people the opportunity to buy wines they have read good things about or come from a winemaker they may be familiar with. They also enable these small batch wineries to go forward with their dream, because now there is an accessible target audience. The best wine you may ever drink may never see a shelf in a store, but thanks to a wine of the month club, it can be found on a shelf in your wine rack.