Selling cheap is coming back to bite us

If I had a dollar for every time I've said "it would be better for us to tip our excess wine down the drain and take the short-term pain rather than selling it cheap overseas because that will inevitably bite us on the bum and destroy our hard-won reputation as a specialist producer of high-quality, premium-priced wines", then I'd be at least a grand better off.
My heart sank as I read Victoria Moore's column at Telegraph.co.uk
She began by saying her mother had been given a bottle of Marlborough sauvignon blanc that she thought "looked rather impressive". It was a brand called Wairau Cove which a friend of Victoria's managed to buy from Tesco's "for a fiver, reduced from £10".
She was not impressed. "This wasn't auspicious. Wine sold at 'half price' is rarely worth any more than you pay for it, and sometimes not even that".
What really worried her was the New Zealand connection. "This country isn't known for discounting heavily. Instead it forged a reputation based on quality, persuading us to spend a bit more to buy a mouthful of its clean, green land, as the slogan goes.
"New Zealand wines commanded a higher average bottle price here than any other country's wine and the premium worked in our favour, too - we paid for good wine, we got good wine, a state of affairs more unusual than you might think."
She went on "because it hadn't rushed to supply supermarkets with low-priced, undrinkable tat, [New Zealand] was a brand you could trust".
I'd never normally quote so much of someone else's wine column - but Victoria Moore has hundreds of thousands of readers in Britain, making her a major influence in one of our major export markets.
"The erosion began in 2008," she said, "when a huge harvest led to a grape glut. Wine, much of it still good, was sold off cheap.
"Problem: once you introduce people to cheap, they start expecting it.
"Result: that's what they get, often at the expense of quality."
So was the Wairau Cove any good? Moore didn't think so and said "it smelt tired, had lost its fresh zing and had the starchy, watery taste of slices of raw old potatoes ... If you can't rely on the name of New Zealand to guarantee the quality of your wine, you end up having to play detective and here, besides the [price], there were two big clues that all might not be well."
Moore then revealed that Wairau Cove isn't a winery or a place and that Tesco's couldn't actually prove that all the grapes had even come from the Wairau sub-region in Marlborough.
Also, the back-label fine print indicated the wine had been bottled in Britain. "Together these two clues point in one direction: bulk wine."
She went on to explain that bulk wine is often sold off by wineries that don't want the expense of bottling it themselves or maybe the wine isn't good enough for them to sell under their own label. She was very positive about the 2010 vintage though, saying the wines she'd tried so far were looking great. She went on to say: "The hope is that as the balance between supply and demand steadies, New Zealand will decide that the short-term gain of bulk wine sales isn't worth the long-term damage to our faith in its wine ... As my mother said, 'It didn't taste quite like I expected a New Zealand sauvignon blanc to taste. I didn't really like it'.
"It would be a shame if the magic disappeared."
Yes, indeed it would.