Tag Archives: wine back labels

Winebits 768: Wine consumption, back labels, Pix.wine

Man shopping at wine store
Remember, only 1.3 bottles a month.

This week’s wine news: U.S. wine consumption compared to the world, plus the language of wine back labels, and Pix.wine folds

• About one bottle a month: David Morrison, writing on the Wine Gourd blog, details how little American care about wine – or, as he puts it, “For most Americans, wine is not a big deal.” The post looks at per capita consumption, where the U.S. ranks 18th, between Canada and South Africa, at 12 liters a year. That works out to 16 bottles annually, or about 1.3 bottles a month – more or less the average over the past 20 years despite the total increase in U.S. wine consumption. In other words, the increase in consumption has not been bigger than the population increase. Or, writes Morrison: “No-one should conclude that wine is in any way a staple product in the lives of US citizens.” His analysis, in the wake of the past two Gallup alcohol use surveys, is well worth contemplating.

• What’s on the back label? The South African wine writer who uses the non de plume Cape of Good Wine takes a look at wine back labels, a subject we’ve gone into quite a bit on the blog. His take: There is more to back labels than bad winespeak (and he goes into detail on that, too), and especially in his native country. He is particularly impressed with the way some producers do the right thing on the back, listing sustainability and fair trade efforts. Maybe, he writes, producers should use the back label as their main selling point: “And I hope there’ll come a day where we will all rotate each bottle in eager anticipation of seeing how the winery is more environmentally and socially responsible.”

• Pix.wine: I wasn’t going to write about the wine site Pix.wine closing this month; call it more bad news for those of us who write about wine, and leave it at that. But 1 Wine Dude Joe Roberts, a long-time pal of the blog, points out that Pix’s demise is just one more sign of wine’s problems. Its failure, writes Joe, is another sign that the wine business has no idea how to adjust to the digital age. A few caveats here: I wrote for Pix and my editor, Felicity Carter, is one of the best I’ve worked with, wine or otherwise. Plus, Pix impresario Paul Mabray has done a hell of lot for wine and wine writing. So I may not be especially impartial when I say Joe makes some fine points (though in language we don’t use on the blog) about the wine business’ woes. Would that someone besides Joe and I – and a handful of others – cared.

More insight into the gibberish of wine back labels

wine back labels
The relationship between back label descriptors and price for red wine (from Mark Thornton’s study).

Mark Allan Thornton, the Harvard PhD student who has done groundbreaking work trying to make sense of the gibberish that is wine back labels, has done it again. His second study has found that the back labels on cheap and expensive wine seem describe the same flavors with different adjectives, depending on how much the wine costs.

“The presence of ‘dark’ indicated a less expensive wine on average, whereas the nearly synonymous descriptor ‘black,’ which appears in the same flavor cluster, was strongly associated with the back labels of more expensive wines,” he told me in an email. “In other words, I think these results suggest that people may use different words to describe the same flavors depending on whether the wine is expensive or cheap.”

The good news? That the goal of the study was see if certain flavors could only be found in more expensive wine. Given that the first study found what Thornton calls a “quite modest” relationship between price and quality, given what’s written on the back label, this is even better news for consumers. If you want dark fruit flavors, you’re just as likely to get it with a cheap bottle as an expensive one.

So what’s the catch? As Thornton notes, wine back labels are not unbiased reviews, but marketing material. Hence, the study starts with a strike against it. In addition, he says, finding enough wine back labels to work with to overcome this handicap is problematic, given how unwilling the wine business is to share data (also a problem in the first study).

Still, the conclusion is worth pondering (and probably isn’t all that surprising give how confusing back labels are), as are several other highlights:

• White wine descriptors vary more with price than red wine descriptors do, which doesn’t seem to make much sense. My guess? Maybe the presence of sweet white wines offer more opportunity for variation.

• Balance and complexity, which should be the goal of every winemaker, are useless as back label descriptors. Balance was used on cheap, but not expensive, white wine, and not at all with red wine. Complexity had no correlation with red wine pricing and appeared on expensive white wine. Does this mean wine marketers don’t think cheap white wine drinkers care about complexity and figure we’re not smart enough to understand that it will be difficult for a $5 red to be as complex as a $100 red?

• Vanilla, oak, and color were associated with more expensive wines, while dry, clean, and tropical were associated with less expensive wines. Again, this is baffling, since clean should be a goal for every wine.

For more on wine back labels:
• Back labels and the flavor of lynches
• How to buy wine at the grocery store
• Making wine easier