What if Coffee Cost As Much as Wine?

Running the numbers reveals an interesting truth about how we value these two beverages—and where the oft-repeated comparisons between them fall flat.

Photo by Bernhard on Unsplash

I’ve used wine as a point of comparison for coffee for almost my entire career.

Back when I worked as a barista, I reached for it all the time. Whenever customers looked at a bag of beans and inquired about the tasting notes—“Is this coffee actually hazelnut- or lavender-flavored?”—I’d tell them the notes were like a wine label: suggestions of flavors they might taste in the drink rather than a literal list of added flavorings.

Mostly, I used wine as a way to justify specialty coffee’s price point—and existence. When customers balked at the price of a cup of coffee, I’d exclaim, “Well, you’d pay double that for a glass of wine at a bar!” Usually, that got a nod of acknowledgment, but still, most people bristled.

There are a lot of reasons why comparing wine to coffee makes sense. Wine grapes and coffee beans are both agricultural products that are typically harvested just once per year, meaning they are at the mercy of climate events and changing weather patterns. Both come from fruit (coffee beans are actually the seeds of a cherry-like berry). And both are regularly portrayed in popular culture as gate-kept and snobby domains.

I’m thinking of April Ludgate’s fake entry into a wine-tasting competition in the sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” or when comedian Nate Bargatze detailed his difficulty ordering iced coffee during a recent special. He joked that his wife had to write out her coffee order, which he showed to the barista because he “can’t pronounce” some of the words.

But there are also a lot of reasons why the metaphor falls flat. Wine arrives to consumers as a finished product, unlike coffee beans. There’s much more scholarship and documentation of wine throughout history (which reveals something about how we view and value wine, a product of the so-called “Global North,” versus coffee, a colonial commodity extracted from countries in the “Global South”). And let’s face it: Wine has alcohol, so there’s a different value proposition for consumers versus coffee.

(As a side note, it seems like we’re generally disposed to correlate alcoholic content with value. I’m thinking back to a podcast episode I produced with my former colleague, Bryan Roth, about the connection between ABV percentages and price. One of the guests interviewed rightly pointed out that lagers are technically more complex to brew than IPAs; still, because IPAs generally have higher ABVs, customers are content with paying a higher price than they would for lagers.))

Throughout my career, I’ve seen coffee professionals—myself included—use wine’s standing and marginal similarities to coffee as a way to bolster the latter’s value, and encourage mainstream acceptance of higher prices.

Recently, I began to wonder, “What would that actually look like? What would coffee cost if it were priced like wine?”

I started doing some math. I had to make a lot of assumptions and guesses, but even using estimates that favored wine, I found that if we compare wine to coffee, gram to gram, a bag of coffee would need to be four times more expensive than it currently is to be worth the same as a bottle of wine.

Here’s how I came up with that number:

A bottle of wine is 750 milliliters, a volumetric measurement. First, I needed to convert milliliters to grams, a weight measurement. Wine is slightly less dense than water because of its alcohol content, so a 750mL bottle of wine is roughly 758g of liquid (again, this is a rough estimate and changes based on alcohol content).

I wanted to know how much a gram of wine would cost, which meant deciding on an average bottle cost. Again, this varies, so I tried to work within rough categories: If a bottle of wine costs $15, what would I expect a bag of beans of analogous quality to cost? I decided to compare a $15 bottle to a $20 bag of beans.

I divided $15 by 758 and got 0.01978. I rounded that up to 0.02. A gram of wine costs about two cents.

Coffee was a little trickier. I started with $20 for a 12oz bag, but then I needed to figure out how many grams of brewed coffee that bag would yield. Using a 1:16 ratio of coffee beans to water, I figured I could brew 13 12oz cups of coffee per bag. (12 ounces is roughly 340 grams, so you’d need about 22 grams of coffee to brew each cup. I rounded up to 25 to account for waste; 340 grams divided by 25 gets you 13.6.)

Next, I multiplied 13.6 by 340 and got 4,624—that’s the total amount of liquid coffee you can get from a 12oz bag of beans. I divided $20 by 4,624 and got the per gram value: 0.00432, or less than half a cent per gram.

If I applied the value of wine (two cents a gram) to coffee, that $20 bag would cost around $90.

Clearly, I made many assumptions when doing these calculations. I also tended to skew the numbers so that the gap between the value of wine and coffee was smaller, not bigger. My math problem also doesn’t take into account how coffee and wine are served—I only looked at prices from a retail, take-home perspective—nor the fact that serving and producing wine requires overhead and licensing that coffee doesn’t.

We in the coffee industry often reach towards wine as a way to justify specialty practices and prices. But does it serve coffee to tether it to a beverage that exists in a wildly different cultural (and financial) context? If there is anything that this small thought experiment proves, it is that coffee is a beverage that needs its own lexicon—and deserves a value system that doesn’t rely on faulty comparison.