The solution is simple sell them to supermarkets and make them a special offer
I don’t mid to drink champagne instead of beer with a steak or a pizza.
In reality isn’t so simple: because the supply chain for supermarkets is different in respect the one for restaurants. A lot of wine bottles that are sold in specialized channels don’t have a EAN barcode.
During lockdown I had phone a wholesale seller of wine for restaurants and was more than happy to sell me 24 bottles of fine wine.- have to ask if it has some champagne to sell me
Don’t count on me to save your luxury industry, monsieurs. My region has locally produced sparking wine for $3 that is good enough for this beer binging barbarian. People with a more sophisticated taste can find award winning wines for $20.
On the plus side, all the local breweries around me are now allowed to do deliveries. For most of them, if you order before noon, you are guaranteed your beer that afternoon. Love it so far, and it’s enabled me to branch out and find a few local places that I’d never tried.
My second marriage was a simple deal at the court house. On the way there we stopped at a florist and asked for a small bouquet of flowers bound with some ribbon. We didn’t think to give a context. The girl rang up the bouquet for… maybe $20. After ringing us up she started to put it together and chatted with us.
At some point one of us mentioned going to the court house next. She asked why. Getting married we replied. Her face turned white. She then explained that this simple bouquet, if for a wedding, had a different charge code that was (I forget the exact multiplier) maybe 10x what we paid. Then she shrugged and said she gets paid the same minimum wage regardless and sent us on our way.
All that to say, not sad to see the wedding bubble pop.
I should at the same time acknowledge as others pointed out that not everyone that serves the wedding industry is diving into Scrooge McDuck pools of money. Like the girl that helped us, she got a crap wage regardless if we paid $20 or $200 for a bundle of weeds.
The wedding-industrial complex sucks. When I was planning our wedding I called a small winery that my wife and I liked to get a price for a reception and it was all going well until the guy on the phone paused and said “Wait, is this for a wedding?” When I said yes he then gave me new prices that were 3x more.
That said, happy to drink our local fizzy plonk just like we did at our wedding reception (which was not at the above-mentioned place, BTW).
I do appreciate that weddings groups can be difficult to deal with for some service providers. And I am sure that at some point way back they decided to charge for pain and suffering. But jump to modern times and what might have been reasonable once is now just an open grift at every point of contact.
But frankly I’m way past done with the larger concept of marriage as it is today with it’s antiquated laws and ideas about gender/roles and what even constitutes a valid relationship and taxes for couples versus single people. Just push the whole steaming mess off the cliff and start fresh.
But to get back on topic slightly. If I want bubbles I go for prosecco. Take that champagne. Shots fired.
That was kind of the idea behind Bush’s (the father) proposal of the repeal of yacht taxes in 1992 Critics were quick to jump in and say that this was just the act of a rich man looking out for other rich men, but the argument (true or not) was that the yacht building industry employed a lot of people who would be helped by this cut.
That’s always the argument.
But unless the tax cut/subsidy/grant/contract/whatever comes with conditions that guarantees jobs/wages they don’t mean it.
The fact is that all the wine agroindustrial complex and in a lesser degree the milk agroindustrial complex had problem with lockdown.
A cheese maker here that makes cheap cheeses and use its logistics to deliver more specialized cheese has started to sell milk in their shops because the milk stock is too big for fresh cheeses like mozzarella. In one of its shops started to sell one flavour ice cream.
They could somewhat move production making more cheap cheese or more expensive one, but there are limits.
Same is for wine agroindustrial complex. Instead of expensive wines one could use grapes to make cheaper ones or distillate the grapes, but the production goes the same, because cutting production means cutting vines.
