According to a bulletin I received from My Foodservice News (mymfn.com), matters look pretty dire for the restaurant business in America. Under the headline, “Restaurant Performance Index Fell to Record Low,” the National Restaurant Association announced that in every category, including current situation, expectation and capital expenditure, the month of September was one of the worst in the history of record-keeping for the industry. Statistics have not been issued yet for October, another month of implosion for the world’s financial institutions, as well as my 401k, but the current report indicated that restaurateurs are extremely pessimistic about the prospects for the next six months.

But in the same newsletter, a piece by Mike Steinberger, who writes about wine for Slate.com, trumpets “Good News about the Recession!” Whoa, what good news is this? That restaurants may begin cutting prices for the wines on their lists. “Extortionate markups do send a regrettable message,” says Steinberger, “but it is nothing that a deep recession can’t cure. In the current economic climate, gouging on wine is not just unsporting but suicidal. Restaurants looking for strategies to survive the downturn ought to begin by cutting the prices on their wines.”

Gosh, Mr. and Mrs. America, don’t you feel better already about your pensions going down the tubes? What else will a deep recession cure? Obesity? Drug addiction? This is like the crew of the Titanic telling passengers, “Yes, the ship is going down, but, look, we’re waiving the shuffleboard fees!” The remedy for outrageous wine prices in restaurants is to stop eating out.

For restaurant wine prices to go down, prices on wines all the way from the producer to the broker and supplier to the wholesaler to the retail outlet, whether a store or a restaurant, will have to come down, and I see no sign of that happening. Coincidentally, the same day that I received this report from My Foodservice News, there dropped into my inbox an email newsletter from the venerable and honorable Burgundy Wine Company in New York, touting the 2006 releases from Domaine Leflaive. Admittedly, Leflaive is a high-class operation and the wines are superb, but $58 for a Bourgogne Blanc? $106 for a village Puligny-Montrachet? $148 to $290 for Puligny-Montrachet Premier Cru wines? Here’s a product that seems recession-proof if you possess sufficient fiduciary prowess to indulge.

Here’s an email bulletin I received from Sam’s Wine and Spirits in Chicago yesterday. Founded in 1946, Sam’s is one of the best and most comprehensive wine stores in the country. So:

The Only Thing That’s Gone Up More Than Gas… the Price of Bordeaux

Brian Rosen, President of Sam’s Wines and Spirits states “We heard the buzz from our customers so we responded by obtaining the largest inventory of 2005 Bordeaux in the country with over 5,000 cases to be delivered to our stores.” Brian also offers another worthwhile wine investment, “Since the buzz has been primarily focused on the 2005 Bordeaux, earlier vintage wines such as the 2004 Bordeaux will offer a great shorter term return.”

Notice what’s missing here: Not a mention of when the Bordeaux from 2005 will be ready to drink, just when they might be ready to sell. No mention of the qualities of Bordeaux red wines, their potential for nobility, grace and elegance. No indication that when the Bordeaux from 2005 reach maturity they will drink wonderfully with a beef crown roast or venison, that they will bring to your table a sense of history and geography and artisanship. No reference to the wine’s ability to bring friends and families together in a shared moment of great wining and dining (and all the Bordeaux of 2005 are not extravagantly expensive). No hint that the real investment is in pleasure and the satisfaction of drinking a magnificent bottle of wine.

Have the wines of Bordeaux from 2005 really “appreciated” 300 percent since their “birth” that year, or are merchants simply charging 300 percent more than they did when the wines were offered as futures? If you paid (or promised to pay) $300 a bottle for Pichon-Longueville (or whatever) two years ago, could you sell that bottle now for $900? I would say, Dream on.

And don’t forget that if you invest in wine, you have to take responsibility for proper storage: Constant 55 degrees, no vibration, humidity regulation and so on. Whether you have your own cellar, lucky you, or pay for storage in a well-maintained facility, keeping that wine safe and cool costs money, part of which goes to pay for the fuel that runs the refrigeration unit.

So, thanks, pal, for making the gasoline for my car more expensive, while you sit on your “investment” and wait to rake in the dough.

How many times do I have to say this? Whether it’s today, tomorrow or 10 or 20 years from now: Wine is to drink.

Image from vintages.com.

Beverage mega-giant Constellation Brands has been in such a buying mode since purchasing the Robert Mondavi Winery in November 2004 (for $1.03 billion) that it’s almost stupefying to learn that the company has actually gotten rid of some California estates, purchased as recently as December 2007. In that month, to refresh your memories, Constellation bought, from Fortune Brands’ Beam Wine Estates, for $885 million, Geyser Peak, Atlas Peak, Buena Vista Carneros, Gary Farrell Winery, XYZin and Clos du Bois. Four of those wineries (or brands) — Atlas Peak, Buena Vista, Gary Farrell and Clos du Bois — had been owned by Allied Domecq, from which Fortune had acquired them in 2005.

In the recent transaction, announced Tuesday, Constellation retained Clos du Bois and Wild Horse (also a former Beam property) while selling, for $209 million to the newly organized Ascentia Wine Estates, these properties: Geyser Peak, Atlas Peak, Buena Vista Carneros, Gary Farrell, XYZin, the Washington State wineries Columbia Winery and Covey Run and Idaho’s Ste. Chappell. Together, these wineries produce about a million cases of wine annually. Ascentia is headquartered in Healdsburg, Sonoma County. The company was launched by Jim DeBonis, who was chief operating officer of Beam Wine Estates, with major investment from William and Peter Deutsch, whose W.J. Deustch & Sons is one of the country’s best-known wine importers (Yellowtail, Georges Duboeuf), and GESD Capital Partners of San Francisco.

That’s the succinct version of these mergers and acquisitions. Things get really complicated if we trace them back 10 or 15 years; some of these wineries have had more owners than Lindsay Lohan has had mug-shots.

Anyway, these maneuverings seem aimed at one result: To give Constellation the power, using Clos du Bois’ ubiquitous inexpensive chardonnay, to complete against equally ubiquitous Kendall-Jackson in the all-important $12 chardonnay niche, both in retail and in restaurant by-the-glass and bottle sales. Besides that factor, Clos du Bois has been an under-achiever for decades. Will Constellation put the money into Clos du Bois to return its flagship cabernet sauvignon-based Marlstone and Briarcrest wines to the glory days of the late 1970s and early ’80s? The fact that Clos du Bois is not grouped with Constellation’s top-brand Icon Estates properties would imply that we shouldn’t bet on it.

The properties that Ascentia acquired make an interesting and slightly difficult roster. Buena Vista Carneros — the original winery was founded in 1857 — has lately been turning out excellent cool microclimate pinot noirs and syrahs. Gary Farrell Winery produces highly regarded pinot noirs in the Russian River Valley, but the winery’s eponymous founder left after selling to Allied Domecq in 2004. Atlas Peak, which has undergone many shifts in ownership, is now a brand, making primarily cabernet sauvignon wines from purchased grapes; the former Atlas Peak vineyards are owned by Tuscany’s Piero Antinori, who was always a partner in the deal. Columbia Winery and Covey Run are two of Washington’s best-known labels and are fairly familiar to American wine consumers as producers of a variety of popularly priced products, especially riesling. Geyser Peak makes a widely appreciated sauvignon blanc as well as focusing on regional and vineyard designated merlot and cabernet sauvignon wines; however, the Australian winemaker Darryl Groom, who brought Geyser Peak to an acme of recognition in the 1990s, is no longer with the label.

My point is that most of these wineries are in a state of transition or are simply not well-known, and Ascentia will have to work hard to bring some order to the arrangement and to find niches for a dizzying array of products. As production costs go up and wine sales flatten, it will be a challenge to present some of these labels as fresh and meaningful and as compelling choices for consumers inundated by brands at every price point. Deutsch’s established national distribution network should help.

Meanwhile, we’ll wait breathlessly for Constellation’s next move. More acquisitions? More divesting? More consolidation? Remember, readers, the wine industry is all about markets and marketing and what American wine consumers can be persuaded that they need to drink.

How many brands does Constellation Brands need, anyway?

Constellation, the world’s largest wine producer — $5.22 billion in sales from February 2006 to February 2007 — announced Monday that it paid $885 million for the wine business in the United States of Fortune Brands. Constellation, headquartered in Fairport, N.Y., gets five well-known wineries: Clos du Bois, Wild Horse, Buena Vista Carneros, Gary Farrell and Geyser Peak. Fortune is not selling its spirits brands, which include Jim Beam, Courvoisier, Canadian Club, Maker’s Mark, Dekuyper, Knob Creek, Laphroiag, Vox and lots more. Constellation also acquires some 1,500 acres of vineyards in Sonoma and Napa counties.

There seems to be no stopping Constellation, which appears to own everything that Fosters Wine Estates, E. & J. Gallo and The Wine Group don’t own. Constellation startled the wine world in late 2004 by buying Robert Mondavi Winery and by acquiring, in 2006, the Canadian beverage giant, Vincor.

So that you wine consumers understand the scope of Constellation, let me provide a partial breakdown of the mammoth company’s wine holdings, which are concentrated in four divisions: Centerra Wine Company, Inc.; North Lake Wines; Pacific Wine Partners; and Icon Estates.

Centerra (Canadaigua, N.Y.) includes these brands: Alice White, Arbor Mist, Cook’s, Covey Run, Inglenook, Monkey Bay, Robert Mondavi Private Selection and Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi, Talus Collection, Almaden, Manischewitz, Papio, 3 Blind Moose, Paul Masson Brandy, Rex Goliath, Toasted Head, Paul Thomas, Hogue, Vendange, Ste. Chapelle and Turner Road.

The portfolio of North Lake Wines, also based in Canadaigua, consists of more than 30 brands includes Farallon, Great Western, J. Roget, Marcus James, Paul Masson table wines, Taylor California Cellars, Vina Santa Carolina and Kelly’s Revenge.

Pacific Wine Partners (Monterey County, California) goes slightly up-market with its roster, which includes Blackstone, Black Box, Hayman & Hill and R.H. Phillips. This division imports from Australia Banrock Station, Hardys wines, Leasingham, Barra Valley Estate, Yarra Burn, Chateau Reynella and Starvedog Lane. From New Zealand it imports the popular Nobilo line of wines.

The big dog is Constellation’s Icon Estates, based in Napa Valley. Here the line-up of notable wineries — or brands — includes Franciscan Oakville Estate, Mount Veeder Winery, Robert Mondavi Winery, Estancia Estates and Ravenswood in California; Columbia Valley in Washington; Ruffino Estate in Tuscany; Drylands and Kim Crawford in Marlborough, N.Z.; Tintara in Australia’s McLaren Vale; Veramonte in Chile; and the dessert wine makers Inniskillin and Jackson-Triggs in Ontario.

These lists encompass only about half of the wine brands in Constellation’s stable, and we haven’t mentioned beer and spirits.

How does Constellation’s acquisitive nature affect the structures of the properties it buys and the quality of the wine?

That’s an open question. Hundreds of employees lost jobs after the Robert Mondavi acquisition. Mark Martin, a Constellation spokesman, was quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle as saying that it’s too early to know about job cuts that might occur because of the Fortune takeover, but said, “One of the things we look for is whatever synergies we can gain from the operations.” For huge corporations, of course, “synergies” depend on potential profits.

It will be interesting to see, for example, what happens to Sonoma County’s Clos du Bois. Founded in 1976 by Frank Woods, the winery now produces about two million cases of wine annually. It’s a popular restaurant brand for inexpensive chardonnay, merlot and gewurztraminer, though its upper-tier Alexander Valley red wines, Marlstone (a Bordeaux-style blend) and Briarcrest (100 percent cabernet sauvignon), have long lost the luster they displayed from about 1978 through the late 1980s. Will Constellation engineer a revival of Marlstone and Briarcrest while expanding the exposure of the moderately priced tier, or write them off as lost causes?

The redoubtable Dan Berger posted an essay on the Constellation acquisition of Fortune’s wine brands to the Appellation America website on Tuesday (here), in which he discusses the issues that occur when large companies swallow up wineries. His conclusion? Sometimes it helps; sometimes it hurts. It depends on the companies involved.

Sales of French wine in the United States rose 13 percent in volume and 22 percent in value from 2005 to 2006, according to Sopexa USA. Several individual regions showed even better improvement, a 21 percent increase for Bordeaux, 19 percent for Burgundy, 23 percent for Provence and 32 percent for Cotes-du-Rhones.

There’s a reason why sales of French wines are increasing in this county: Intelligent and persistent marketing. I regularly receive email and hard mail bulletins from the Loire Valley Wine Bureau, the Bordeaux Wine Bureau, the Office of Champagne, and other trade bodies, and from Sopexa, the public-private mixed-capital joint stock company dedicated to advancing the cause of French food and wine around the world. In other worlds, the French government puts money into these efforts.

The bulletins usually involve information about various wine regions or latest vintages, promotions of particular kinds of wines or campaigns to raise awareness and increase sales of a region’s products. Yesterday, for example, I received in the mail a handsome and informative little brochure from the Loire Valley Wine Bureau about Muscadet. The Loire Valley group also regularly hosts tasting of Loire wines in the Northeast and the West Coast.

Other major promotions are underway. The Burgundy section of Sopexa is in its third year of a “Burgundy Best Buys” campaign, in which it promotes a list of red and white burgundies priced from $15 to $35. Because it’s short (and no link is provided, how freaking annoying and what an oversight!), I’ll reproduce that roster below. The Bordeaux Wine Bureau for the second year offers “Today’s Bordeaux,” a list of 100 wines priced between $8 and $25. These were selected by a panel of judges in a blind tasting of almost 300 wines. You can see the list here. Wines of France, an arm of VINIFLHOR, the French National Office for Fruit, Vegetables, Wine and Horticulture (I love these acronyms), for the third year is sponsoring “Spring into French Wines,” a part of which is a list of “Top 40 French Wine Picks,” chosen by Master of Wine Sheri Sauter Morano. You can find that list here. The “Spring into French Wine” campaign is backed this year by a $1.5 million budget for the New York metropolitan area, Washington D.C., Chicago, California, South Florida and two places in Massachusetts, all big wine markets.

The point is that no other wine-producing country that I’m aware of engages in this sort of extensive activity to promote its wines in the United States. And certainly no entity in America, quasi-governmental or not, works to promote our country’s fine wines in Europe or anywhere else in the world.

You can criticize the French on all sorts of historical and cultural issues — and they can criticize right back, of course — but in this particular area, the world’s wine-making regions could learn a Gallic lesson.

Here’s the list of “Burgundy Best Buys” for 2007:
White:
Bourgogne, 2004, Faiveley, $17
Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes de Beaune, 2005, Château de Santenay, $20
Chablis, 2005, Domaine Christian Moreau Père & Fils, $20
Pouilly-Fuissé, 2005, Maison Louis Latour, $19
Pouilly-Fuissé, Domaine de la Collonge , 2005, Gilles Noblet, $22
Santenay, Les Terrasses de Bievaux , 2005, Domaine Jacques Girardin, $25
Santenay, Clos de Malte, 2004, Maison Louis Jadot, $25
Chablis, 2005, Faiveley, $29
Chablis 1er Cru, Fourchaume , 2005, Jean Marc Brocard, $31
Mercurey, 2004, Château de Chamirey, $31
Beaune 1er Cru, Beaune du Château, 2004, Bouchard Père & Fils, $34
Meursault, 2005, Labouré-Roi, $35

Red:
Bourgogne Pinot Noir, Signature , 2005, Maison Champy, $15
Bourgogne Pinot Noir, 2005, Maison Louis Jadot, $20
Chorey-lès-Beaune, 2005, Maison Joseph Drouhin, $20
Savigny-lès-Beaune, 2005, Domaine Rapet, $30
Mercurey 1er Cru, Les Champs Martin, 2005, Domaine Adelie, $29
Mercurey, 2004, Château de Chamirey, $31
Mercurey, 2005, Château Genot Boulanger, $35
Marsannay, Grandes Vignes, 2005, Domaine Bart, $30
Gevrey-Chambertin, 2005, Labouré-Roi, $32