The real reasons Trader Joe's wine is so cheap

pulse

May 6, 2017 4:57 PM

There's a reason it's called "Two Buck Chuck."

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Trader Joe's wine is remarkably cheap.

A bottle of the grocery store's most popular wine brand, Charles Shaw, sells for less than $3.

The wine's low price has attracted some criticism. Critics have called it undrinkable and "sugar water

Despite the criticism, the wine is wildly popular. It's one of the best-selling products ever sold at Trader Joe's, exceeding 800 million bottles since the wine debuted at $1.99 in 2002, according to CNBC.

So how does the company keep its prices so low, while still delivering a taste that people love? And is there really animal matter in the wine?

Here's what we found.

1. Bronco Wine has cheap real-estate costs.

A Toast to Bargain Wines: How Innovators, Iconoclasts, and Winemaking Revolutionaries Are Changing the Way the World Drinks.

Higher average temperatures in San Joaquin Valley can over-ripen grapes, which is a main contributor to the price difference between the regions.

2. The company ferments wine with oak chips, which are cheaper than barrels, according to Taber, who interviewed Bronco Wine owner Fred Franzia for his book.

Most fine wine is fermented in oak barrels. "Oak improves the taste of wine, but also the price tag," Taber writes. "Bronco continues aging wines in oak, but uses less expensive forms of it, for example chips rather than barrels. American oak is also less expensive than French."

3. The company uses "one of the cheapest forms of natural cork," according to a 2012 report by KALW Public Radio.

It's a mold of cork pieces glued together with a "real cork veneer at the bottom," the report says.

Franzia believed a plastic cork would affect the taste of the wine and potentially cheapen customers' perception of Charles Shaw, so he used low-cost natural cork products instead.

4. Making wine in huge quantities keeps production costs low.

Bronco makes an impressive 90 million gallons of wine a year, according to Taber.

"If you worry about things like that, you shouldn't eat anything; you shouldn't drink anything," Bronco owner Franzia told CNBC. "When the wine's fermenting, they're going to eliminate anything that's possibly there."

Here's one of the company's winemaking facilities.

Here's how the cartons looked before the change.

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