Short blog article posing that exact question. The article is otherwise devoid of facts or hypothesis, but I'm very much interested in hearing HN's thoughts, since it's a very interesting question.
Because running a winery that produces distinctive wines and having that winery crank out hundreds of millions of cases a year isn't that feasible. It's not like Coke where you can just produce more of the same product with the same process without affecting the character of.
Wine popularity absolutely does follow a power law distribution. The leading brands are ones like Yellowtail, Woodbridge, Beringer, Cavit, and Sutter Home.
wine is probably more like cereal. In any case there were about 300 million cases sold in the US in 2008<p>Here are rankings of the top wine producers by case in 2008<p><a href="http://www.winebusiness.com/wbm/?go=getArticle&dataId=54412" rel="nofollow">http://www.winebusiness.com/wbm/?go=getArticle&dataId=54...</a><p>E&J gallo - 68 million
constellation - 59M
The wine group 44M