This Winemaker Is Pulling Back the Curtain on the Price of Wine
An Oregon vintner turns to price transparency on a pinot noir, side-stepping distributors.
In the fall of 2015, after all his grapes had been grown, picked, and bled into big oak barrels, Mark Tarlov started doing math. Like any good vintner, he tallied his costs—for labor, equipment, even packaging—and broke it all down by the bottle. Finally, he calculated a price, with a 45 percent profit margin, and set about building a website he'd use to sell it.
This small batch of pinot noir from Oregon’s soggy Willamette Valley, called Alit, sells for $27.45 a bottle, and Tarlov may be the only vintner in the world telling drinkers exactly why it costs what it does.