$5 wines a big hit with Target customers

when it comes to retail wine sales. It’s certainly not available everywhere (my public library doesn’t offer anything by the glass or bottle), but no one is surprised much — least of all, me — when decent, affordable wine shows up in new and heretofore-unlikely places.

Something that did surprise me, however, was learning recently that Target had its own wine. Target, the big-box retailer. You know, the place you go for a desk organizer, a garden hose or an oversize letter of the alphabet in unpainted wood? Target has sold groceries and wine for some time now, but never its own wine brand.

Technically, it still doesn’t. You won’t see Target’s name or its recognizable red-and-white bull’s-eye logo on any of the bottles. But Target does sell this particular wine exclusively, making it “theirs.”

Here’s the thing: It’s only $5 per bottle.

It’s a $5 bottle of wine, and based on Target’s reputation, it’s safe to assume that if the company is backing a product, it’s probably decent. But I wouldn’t know because the wines were mostly sold out all across Chicago when I tried to track them down.

There are five different styles — pinot grigio, chardonnay, moscato, cabernet sauvignon and a red blend — all labeled California Roots and made by Trinchero Family Estates, the same operation whose portfolio includes value-driven brands like Bandit boxed wines, Menage a Trois, Charles & Charles, Sutter Home and more. After several consultations — via phone and in person at stores — I found a chardonnay and a moscato. The other three styles were nowhere to be found, and this was only about 40 days after the wines arrived in Target stores. Logic would suggest that the wines did not disappear during my twoday wild goose chase. There’s a good chance those spots on shelves (and in backrooms) had been empty for weeks.

Target headquarters assured me that the wines will be replenished, a sound strategy for a product promoted as a great “everyday” wine choice. A decent $5 bottle of wine is going to move fast, and the fact that Target’s supply was so quickly exhausted suggests people are drinking wine as a regular habit not just for special occasions.

It also suggests that more people are keeping a modest stash of wine at home — inexpensive bottles that can be opened spontaneously without much thought. It’s not just that we want cheap wine. We want good wine — correction: good enough wine — that doesn’t break the bank.

That magic number low enough to qualify as an “everyday wine” price can vary by a significant amount from person to person. There was a day, not terribly long ago, when inexpensive wine would not draw people into a store, let alone a department store better known for affordable kitchen utensils and bedding. The shift says a lot about our current wine-buying habits.

A run on $5 Target wine (considering that there are other similarly priced wines out there, most notably in supermarkets) signals that wine consumption continues to be a regular thing that we do — “we” being all of us who consume grocery store products with no preconceptions.

When we notice that something we consume regularly is on sale, we take advantage. That’s what happened at Target, and it will continue to happen there and at other stores that sell decent wine for hard-to-believe prices. Don’t expect a lot of $5 bottles to show up anytime soon, though. You might have to pay somewhere closer to $10. But that’s still dirt cheap, considering all that goes into creating a bottle of wine and delivering it precisely to those empty spaces on retail shelves.