Dieter01 wrote:Ken and Jim, you guys need to stop picking at each other! You are not hearing what the other person is trying to say... As Jim pointed out its a lot easier to expand in the coffee world than the wine world. There is no more acreage available in Chablis. That said, quality of existing producers have improved enormously over the past years both in the world of wine and coffee.

I'm sorry, but that's a specious argument. Even in the best wine growing regions, the great majority of the wine produced is indifferent at best. People who are sufficiently interested in coffee or wine to bother posting about either on the internet are generally not interested in consuming mediocre or worse examples of either product.

If 80% of Chablis used to be crap, with only 20% being worthy of a search, if you shift 10% more of the mediocre stuff over into the "very good" category, then you have increased production of good product by 50%. Similarly, even with 30% of the stuff (made up numbers) now in the "good" category, there is probably at least another 20 or 30% that could be shifted from mediocre to good.

Since we don't consume the crap here (at least I hope we don't), every bit of commodity grade product that is shifted over into the good column is a net find.

The marketplaces for both coffee and wine are dynamic, and improvements are being made in both. The better coffees represent a much smaller percentage of the whole, than do the better wines, within their respective marketplaces, especially if you take such things as storage and staleness into consideration. Of the people that buy wine, more on a percentage basis are willing to pay up significantly for better quality, than can be said for coffee consumers. The cash that is available to pay the producers in both marketplaces drives the expenditures and resultant quality that result in these products. As a result, the wine market is even more dynamic than is the coffee market. It is simple economics; money produces results.

There is plenty of room for improvement in both wines and in coffee. To say that you can't do much with wine but you can do a lot with coffee makes no sense whatsoever, and I think or at least hope that Jim can recognize that he chose a poor example to illustrate his point.

ken