Tag Archives: wine

Update: How we buy wine

how we buy wineHow do we buy wine? Thats the question I’ve been trying to answer for years, and it still comes down to price — even more than quality

The wine business sells a lot of wine, but there are very few good numbers explaining why we buy what we buy. Is it price? Is it taste? Is it ratings? Is it the label? Is it magic?

Hence my attempts over the years to put a human face on this question: What influences us to buy the wine that we buy? The most important, as near as I can tell from talking to consumers for more than a decade, is price. The second? That the wine they’re buying doesn’t taste like wine – that is, it doesn’t taste like they expect it to taste, bitter and acidic. Instead, and my colleagues need to control their tempers here, they like wine that has what the call a smooth taste.

I saw this again in early May waiting in line at my neighborhood Aldi, where the customer in front of me – an older white man, and wealthy by the size of his SUV in the parking lot – was buying a bottle of Winking Owl merlot. That’s a $3 bottle that can best be described as inoffensive, but is neither bitter nor acidic.

The Wine Curmudgeon, being the son and grandson of retailers, asked the man what he liked about the Winking Owl, and mentioned that he might like Aldi’s Vina Fuerte even more.

His response? “How much does your wine cost?” About $5, I said. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “This is really good wine for the money,” pointing to the Winking Owl, “and everyone likes it – even people who don’t like wine, and even people I didn’t think would like it.”

So we can argue about premiumizaton all we want, parse the numbers about what’s hot and what’s not, and wax annoyingly about the latest cult wine that none of us can afford to buy. But in the store, none of that matters. It’s price and it’s taste. The rest is just there to confuse us.

More about how we buy wine

• Once more, how consumers buy wine
• How people really buy wine
• Another study agrees: We buy wine on price

Winebits 424: Scottish wine, domain names, crowdfunding

Scottish wine
A Scottish wine story requires a picture of haggis, the Scottish national dish.

? Too much rain: Scotland’s hopes for its own wine, which never seemed possible because the climate was too cold and too went, have been dashed once again. The drinks business reports that persistent rain in eastern Scotland has prevented Aberdeen’s Christopher Trotter, a chef and food writer, from producing anything commercially viable. He wasn’t able to bottle any wine in 2015, and the 2014 vintage yielded just 10 bottles — which critics called ?undrinkable.” The Wine Curmudgeon feels Trotter’s pain. Regional wine, no matter where the region, is always more difficult than you think it will be, and there are always problems you never imagined. And I’ve tasted plenty of undrinkable regional wine.

? Bring on .wine: Want to brand your website as definitely wine? Then you can buy the .wine and .vin domain names, two so-called not-coms that are finally available. There was concern from some legally protected wine regions, like our friends in Champagne, that the .wine and .vin names would be used to abuse their place names, but they bought Champagne.wine and solved the problem. The Wine Curmudgeon probably won’t buy winecurmudgoen.wine or .vin — not sure it would make much different to my brand, and winecurmudgeon.wine sounds stupid, anyway.

? Kickstarting a winery: Recent changes in federal investment law allow businesses like wineries to use crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to raise $1 million in any 12-month period from friends, followers, customers and community as long as the sites meet federal guidelines. This is a significant change to current law, though not everyone is sure it’s a good idea. It’s one thing to raise money for a wine book on Kickstarter; it’s another to raise millions to expand a winery. Regardless of anything else, writes Jesse Debban in the North Bay Business Journal, the new regulations mean “the public — including your competitors and customers — will have access to sensitive information about your business.” Which may be OK in the tech business, but is something completely different in the highly private wine business.

Great quotes in wine history: Prince Charles

WordPress, the blog’s platform, is blocking TubeChop videos, so you can’t watch this clip. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Prince Charles’ reaction after a snooty Winestream Media critic gives his favourite $10 wine a 78. Who says the Windsors don’t have a sense of humor?

A tip o’ the Wine Curmudgeon’s fedora to the Dedoimedo website; this post is based on his “My reaction to — ” series. The video is courtesy of digitalmediafan via YouTube.

How to market wine to people and actually teach them something

How sweet is Alsace rieslingThe graphic at left is from an Alsace riesling promotion, devised by Louise Jordan. Her goal? Show consumers that riesling doesn ?t always mean sweet.

?I kept seeing time and time again that in every infographic put out by consumers and wine professionals alike, that riesling was always in either the off-dry or sweet category, ? says Jordan, who works for the French wine region ?s marketing company, Teuwen Communications. ?Also, whenever we do large scale consumer Alsace tastings and serve riesling, people always assume they ?re sweet. And many times, even when we tell them the wine is bone dry, they still say it’s sweet. ?

Click here for a bigger version of the graphic, which will open in your browser. Comparing riesling ?s residual sugar to soft drinks and orange juice is brilliant, and I say that even if Louise wasn’t a friend of the blog. And noting that a Starbucks-style latte has eight times the sweetness of a riesling is brilliant. That more people don’t do more like this speaks volumes about what passes for wine marketing, including the all but useless descriptors on the back labels. Which do you think will help the consumer make a better decision?

This is just another example of how far behind wine is in sucessfully talking to its customers. If wine doesn’t believe in ingredient or nutritional labeling, I suppose it is too much to expect more like this.

Anthony J. Hawkins and the Wine Grape Glossary

The Wine Grape Glossary, perhaps the most important wine reference tool on the Internet, was compiled by someone who did it to learn how to use a computer and to teach himself basic programming.

Thank you, Anthony J. Hawkins.

“That’s one reason why it’s so simple,” says the 83-year-old Hawkins, retired from the ceramics department at Alfred University in western New York state. “I didn’t want to put in any bells and whistles because I didn’t want it to be too complicated.”

It’s almost impossible to overstate the significance of Hawkins’ work. The site lists thousands of grapes (not even Hawkins knows how many), cross-referenced by parentage and the grape’s name in different regions and countries, along with growing and winemaking notes. All of this is annotated with academic sources and references.

Not sure what monastrell is? A couple of clicks and you’ll see that it’s a Spanish red grape that isn’t related to the French mouvedre, as is commonly thought. Surprised to see symphony listed as a grape on some California white blends? Click through and you’ll find that it’s a cross devised in 1948 at the University of California-Davis to blend with sweet wines.

And it’s free and incredibly easy to use. By comparison, Jancis Robinson’s new book, “Wine Grapes,” which has been released to critical raves, runs almost 1,300 pages and costs $175.

Is it any wonder I check the glossary (hosted by Robin Garr’s Wine Lovers Page) at least a couple of times day? Or that it’s reference material at many wine competitions that I judge?

Even more amazing is that Hawkins wasn’t all that interested in wine when he started work on it in early 1990s (though, he says with a laugh, he has a nice cellar now). He knew a home winemaker, and wanted to learn more about what that involved, as well as to understand what grapes were being grown in upstate New York 20 years ago. His goal, he said, was to grow a couple of vines so he could pluck grapes from his bedroom window. Besides figure out computers.

And, in those almost pre-Internet days, there weren’t many places to look. “Jancis Robinson ?s Guide to Wine Grapes,” her first grape book, wasn’t published until 1996 and only had 800 entries, an abridged version of a more expensive book that was almost impossible to find. Hawkins was on his own.

“The sources were hard to come by, though I did eventually get decent references from Cornell,” he says. “And the first versions were a little inaccurate, and I got some comments on that. It was like working in the dark. But then it started to grow like topsy.”

Until 2007, when Hawkins had to stop work on the glossary. He has had some health problems, he says, including heart surgery. But that doesn’t mean he wants to see it fade away.

“Yes, I’d like to see someone take it over and improve it,” Hawkins says, knowing that it’s time for an update that he can’t do. For one thing, diamond, one of my favorite New York state hybrids, is missing. Anyone who is interested can send him an email at hawkins at alfred dot edu (forgive that format, but I want to spare him any spam).

As for me, I want to double check the difference between ruby cabernet and cabernet sauvignon. Excuse me while I click.

Wine of the week: Domaine du Tariquet Classic 2009

Sept. 2, 2011 update: Tasted the 2010 at The Esquire in San Antonio, where it was surreal to see Tariquet on the wine list, and for only $21. The wine was everything it should be. There was a bit of grapey fruit, lots of citrus, and that wonderful, fresh, clean style. And it paired well with fried dill pickles.

The good news: This is still great cheap wine, and a member of the $10 Hall of Fame.

The bad news: The 2009 isn’t as interesting as the 2007 and 2008. I’m not sure if it’s because the vintage was lacking or if the 2009 is too old. As wonderful as the Tariquet is, it’s not made to age more than a year or two; hopefully, the 2010 will be here soon. There’s less green apple and more grapiness in the 2009 than in other vintages.

Having said all of that, the Tariquet ($10, purchased) shows what can be done when a producer cares about making quality cheap wine. It’s a white blend composed of ugni blanc and colombard, two grapes held in lesser repute most everywhere else in the world. But in Gascony, where the Tariquet is made, they are as important as chardonnay is elsewhere, and it shows in the wine. And the winery has been around since the late 17th century, so the winemakers know a thing or two about what they’re doing.

Tariquet, as a winery, has become hip over the past couple of years, and its wines show up in all sorts of fashionable French bistros. Why can’t that happen in the U.S.?

More about Domaine du Tariquet:
? Wine of the week: Domaine Tariquet Classic 2008
? Wine of the week: Domaine Tariquet Classic 2007
? An Internet toast to Domaine du Tariquet