Trader Joe’s:  Wine Marauder or Consumer Fraud?

Trader Joe’s has earned a national reputation as a food and wine marauder, pillaging the culinary corners of the world to deliver top value to consumers.  Their foodstuffs are reliably good, and this makes the store a good bet for low-risk experimentation. Dried hibiscus flower?  Yup, it’s good.  Arrabbiata sauce. Yup, that’s good, too. When I’ve found something I didn’t like at Trader Joe’s I assumed it was my taste buds and not the product itself.  Yet, there seems to be a certain nefarious underbelly to the well-earned Trader Joe’s reputation when it comes to the wine aisle.

Recently, I lamented many of the Trader Joe’s private label wines as being deficient in at least one way – acid was soft, tannins were hard, fruit was muted, finish was short, etc.  I suggested that consumers conduct their own kitchen sink blending experiment because many Trader Joe wines are one component away from being a fantastic bargain for the dollar.  That Napa Cab for $13 could actually approximate a $45 dollar bottle if it had some heft in the mid-palate.  And, as I noted in that column, this sensibility isn’t really too far from the Trader Joe’s ethos where everything looks like a bargain individually, even if it takes six other things to accompany the Thai green curry simmer sauce to make a whole dish.

Despite disappointment in Trader Joe’s wine aisle, I recently found three of my favorite—and usually very expensive— Italian varietals all priced under $17 I picked up a bottle of each, curious what a $17 Barolo, a $15 Barbaresco and a $14 Amarone tasted like—particularly given these Wine-Searcher averages by state:

2005 Barolo
California price average:  $90
New York price average: $76
Indiana price average: $77
Coast-to-coast three state average: $81

2005 Barbaresco
California price average: $154
New York price average: $126
Indiana price average: $61
Coast-to-coast three state average: $114

2006 Amarone
California price average: $37
New York price average: $46
Indiana price average: $33
Coast-to-coast three state average: $39

How bad could the wines be especially when enjoying savings of $64 for the Barolo, $99 for the Barbaresco, and $25 for the Amarone?

Without further ado, here are my tasting notes for the Trader Joe’s wines:

2005 La Loggia Barolo:  Flat cherry coke with acid and oak – tastes like Ned Beatty feels in Deliverance.

2005 La Loggia Barbaresco: Flip a coin: it’s either like cherry Vick’s cough syrup or strawberry balsamic vinegar.  I can’t tell which, and I don’t want to take another sip to make the right call.

2006 Conte Di Bregonzo Amarone: Spilled Welch’s grape juice on the concrete floor of a basement after a kegger. 

Each of these wines was seriously dreadful.  Barely potable.  “Sip, scrunch up your nose, let loose a whole body shake and dump down the drain” types of wine. And, that’s precisely the problem I have with them … and the majority of the Trader Joe’s private label wine aisle.

By any empirical measure, these wines are neither well-made nor representative of what a Barolo, Barbaresco, or Amarone should taste like—not by a long shot.

I can overlook the hundreds of thousands of cases of Charles Shaw Trader Joe’s sells every year because it is a wine without technical flaws and presumably those wine drinkers will move onto other, more expensive (and more expressive) wines. But what happens if said budding wine drinker tries a Barolo from Trader Joe’s without understanding what a Barolo (a normal, good Barolo) tastes like?  They’re probably ruined for the varietal forever, or at least a good many years—particularly when a bottle of the good stuff costs at least 4X as much.

And, that’s a shame.

Sometimes a knockoff of the real thing is only that – a cheap, bad knockoff.  And like that New York City sidewalk Rolex that looked good (and worked) for three weeks, a knockoff is sometimes a bitter lesson learned.

Trader Joe’s founder Joe Coloumbe once told writer Paul Franson, “We built Trader Joe’s on wine first … I tasted 100,000 wines, and most weren’t wonderful. They were submitted to us by desperate vintners.”

Unfortunately, it would seem, not much has changed. When it comes to the Trader Joe’s wine aisle, Caveat emptor.  Or, as an Italian might say, “Rischio del compratore.”