Covering all the Champagne Bases
I was thinking about naming this post "The Difference Between Forbes and BusinessWeek." But after thinking about it, I don’t think that makes sense. The readers of both Forbes and BusinessWeek articles probably belong in a similar demographic.
So, let’s call it…"Covering Your Bases on All Fronts".
Nick Passmore has certainly done this.
For Forbes.com Passmore penned "The Most Expensive Champagnes of 2006," an interesting piece on the prestige Champagnes that will set you back upwards of $750 per bottle. The take away line in this article, for cynics, is this:
"For many of the top-of-the-line bottles here, the price is controlled
not so much by the production cost as by what marketing executives
believe the market can bear."
Yet for those wondering what the qualitative status is of these upper echelon sparklers, Passmore makes that clear too:
"But make no mistake: This doesn’t mean that the champagnes included
here aren’t good–they are; in fact, they are all superb and utterly
delicious examples of the winemaking craft."
But then, in BusinessWeek Online, Passmore writes the article meant for the rest of us:
"Most Affordable Holiday Champagnes".
These are the wines, sourced from all over the globe, that most of us will be drinking come December 31. They range in price from $15 to $43 and many of them are in fact very good bottlings.
Here at the end of the post I’m again tempted to consider why Forbes.com gets the "most expensive" champagnes and BusinessWeek Online gets the "most affordable" versions. That’s another subject. For now it’s enough to take these two stories and consider which sparkler best suits us for the upcoming celebration of one more year in the bag.
Tom, I don’t think either of these articles deserve a mention. The online versions of both make you click to see each one at a time, rather than all on one page. This is the worst sort of web design and a complete waste of time.
Those have got to be the most annoying and useless websites in the world. it’s amazing that with the resources these people have they couldn’t come up with better-designed and more workable sites.
One has to wonder about the insight of Nick Passmore if he thinks the price of goods is set by the costs of production. That said, in the fizz biz (as in many others), there is the psychology that the more it costs, the better I feel about myself for being able to afford it.
Countdown to New Year’s Eve