There is a curious disconnect between what it costs to produce a bottle of wine and what consumers expect to pay for it. Since it’s widely assumed that there’s a straight-line relationship between price and quality, the unwary often shy away from less pricey offerings, suspecting that they are being sold plonk. This is not always the case. Big volume brands produced from high-yielding vineyards and vinified in purpose-built facilities can be made for less than R50 a bottle.You can comfortably extract more than 700l of juice from a tonne of grapes. Assume a producer pays a grower a generous R5,000/tonne in a high-yielding (20+ tonnes/hectare) region: this brings the juice cost in at a little more than R7/l or R5.50/l for a 750ml bottle — before winemaking, losses, packaging and excise. There are inland riverland sites that benefit from ample irrigation water and are designed for mechanical harvesting, and where these yields are lucrative. The processor can charge at least R10 a bottle to transform the juice into wine and to bottle it — and to make a profit, leaving the brand owner with a real margin even at R50.These assumptions don’t apply where yields are lower and water is used to sustain the vine rather than to bulk up volumes. Vineyards in and around Stellenbosch (and the other premium appellations of the coastal region) typically yield less than 10 tonnes/hectare. Farming costs are also higher where the terrain isn’t flat. Here growers need to earn at least R15,000/tonne — and this still wouldn’t cover the replanting costs. However, even with these higher juice prices, the effect on the final selling price of a bottle of wine is probably less than R20 — everything else being equal. Beyond that, what really drives up production costs is the use of new oak and fancier packaging. But it’s the downstream investment in marketing, distribution and sales that’s the real killer.About a third of South Africa’s wineries produce fewer than 100,000 bottles of wine a year. If your sales and marketing salary bill is more than R1m (before the travel and promotional expenses), the impact of these postproduction overheads can increase the cost of a bottle by R20-R40. This alone is often more than the juice cost and certainly more than the dry goods.So where do the prices of R400 or even R1,400 a bottle come from? Not the oak barrels, not the corks, not even the sales and marketing teams. They come from the inefficiency of high overheads carried by low volumes or from pricing strategies disconnected from input costs, from middlemen, storage and distribution centres, and from the gullibility of consumers who want to believe that the more expensive the wine is, the better it must taste.I looked through the best wines I tasted recently in the under R200 a bottle price bracket. There were a few chardonnays (La Motte and Lothian), a fabulous gruner veltliner (an Austrian aromatic variety) from Diemersdal, several sauvignon blancs (Cape of Good Hope Altima, Diemersdal, and Paul Cluver) and an extraordinary array of chenins. Among the best of these was the GOAT from Perdeberg, KWV’s The Mentors, a delicious unwooded cuvée from Cilmor, an old vine Chenin from Roodekrantz and a fine example from Painted Wolf.There were also a number of excellent reds under R200: one from Boland Cellars (the Reserve pinotage blend); Stellenzicht’s Thunderstone blend; a fine pinotage from Du Toitskloof; another from Durbanville Hills; decent syrahs from Hazendal and Perdeberg; and a particularly impressive shiraz from Nederburg (The Winemaster’s 2024). Nederburg repeated at this year’s Investec Trophy Wine Show the extraordinary result achieved by the 2022 vintage two years ago: Best Shiraz of Show as well as the competition’s best value wine. While this tells us that good wine can be affordable, it’s also stark evidence that producers are under enormous pressure and their pain is evident in their pricing.