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Claim: Charles Shaw wine is being sold cheaply because airlines can no longer use corkscrews and have therefore dumped their stocks of wine.
Origins: We tend to equate quality with cost, so the appearance of an underpriced wine of surprising virtue is bound to spark its share of interesting backstories. We view wine as a luxury item, and since we reject the intellectual construct that such an item can be both good and inexpensive, we instead seize upon plausible-sounding (but apocryphal) tales to explain the disparity between cheapness and quality. Good wine must be expensive, and if a good wine is being vended at a bargain price, there must be a calamitous reason for this fortuity. From this springboard are born rumor of airlines dumping their Merlot, and the like. As the Los Angeles Times noted in a recent article about the burgeoning sales of Charles Shaw label wines:
The morning after a friend served Anna McNeal a glass of Charles Shaw Merlot, she made a beeline to the
Why is such a popular wine (Charles Shaw is one of the top Since it was introduced in February, Charles Shaw wine has gained a cult-like following in Southern California, with wine drinkers backing their cars up to the loading dock of the Los Angeles-based discounter to lay in a supply of the Trader Joe's exclusive. "It's selling like crazy," said Jon Fredrikson, a wine consultant based in San Mateo County. "A great story for consumers."
as usual, the real explanation why Charles Shaw wine (as well as other brands) can be had so cheaply right now is a mundane one: we're experiencing a wine glut. The wine boom of the 1990s led vineyards to increase production, but a downturn in the The Charles Shaw label (known in local slang as "Two-Buck Chuck") has likely been the focus of the "cheap wine" rumors because it bears a prestigious Napa label, even though it sells for less than $2 per bottle. The catch is that it's almost certainly made with cheaper grapes from California's Central Valley rather than more desirable grapes from the
[W]ine industry experts say that despite the classy Napa label, there probably isn't a hint of those pricey grapes in a bottle of Charles Shaw Melot, Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon.
But what about this mysterious "Charles Shaw"? Was he a real person?
Even with the depressed market, grapes from Napa sell for around $2,000 a ton, said Brian Sudano of Beverage Marketing Corp. To make money on a This summer the market price for those grapes hit a low of "Franzia was able to take advantage of distress sales by other vineyards, said [wine consultant Jon] Fredrikson. "And he's got the high-speed production lines to do it and still make money." Indeed he was. Shaw, a Stanford Business School graduate, bought a Napa winery with his wife, Lucy, in 1974 and began to produce Charles Shaw Beaujolais. However, after the Shaws divorced in 1991, they sold the winery. The Charles Shaw label possessed a good reputation, though, and Bronco Wine Co., a mass-market wine conglomerate (currently the eighth biggest wine producer in California) located in the Central Valley's Stanislaus County, bought it up and revived it in 2002 for sales of a line of inexpensive wines through the The Bronco Wine Co. produces a variety of low-cost wines, and its president, Fred Franzia, has earned the enmity of plenty of other Wine Country citizens. Franzia was forced to step down as Bronco's president for five years after Bronco was fined Additional information:  Charles Shaw (Interbrand)
Last updated: 18 February 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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