When I was 18, I went on a short exchange to a little town in the south of France, and the first day there our hosts took us to get lunch. To our great surprise they picked up a number of bottles of wine to drink in the middle of the school day. We asked them why. Their answer was "beer is too expensive".
You can find proper wine at 4-5€ at the producer, 3.5€ is probably the strict absolute minimum where you can find honest wine direct from producer. Any thing below is just fermented garbage, the grappes that otherwise would spoil the wine, it just happen to have sugar to be fermented, I don't know how the hell how they are pre-processed, just stay away from it.
Once you take into account duty, VAT, packaging, transport and supermarket markup a £5 bottle of wine leaves maybe 25p for the wine producer. That's why the quality/price relationship is so non-linear at the bottom end. 20% more on the bottle price is 400% more to the producer.
"The natural advantages which one country has over another, in producing particular commodities, are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hot-beds, and hot-walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine, too, can be made of them, at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries."
Frequently the wine seems hyper local - what I was there in a restaurant we often just ordered the house wine. If you talked to the waiters or owners it was frequently made locally and including by the owners grown in backyards of the hole in the wall places. I think it cuts out a lot of costs - and there was not a bad wine among them.
I always thought that "house wine" is just an euphemism for "whatever we could get our hands on" - a workaround for the restaurant so that they do not have to list a specific brand on the menu.
That is likely true from time to time, but most restaurants seems to keep it fairly consistent as far as I can tell. I think it’s more often a choice of taste on the part of the restaurant for a less expensive but decent wine.
High taxes, transportation cost, and, (for explaining why Californian wine in California is more expensive than French wine in France), economies of scale and subsidies in France.
I don't think Alabama is aging a lot of wine relative to the US market as a whole. It's primarily a "sin" tax. One of the few taxes in the US that can gain popular support.
