Winebits 701: Focus groups, mergers, restaurant wine

This week’s wine news: How focus groups “dumb down” a product, plus will the last Big Wine merger take place and middling news for restaurant wine

• Focus groups and “dumbing down:” Focus groups remain one of wine’s most insidious problems, having given us sweet “dry” wines as well as “smoooth” wines without any varietal character. How do focus groups work? One of the writers of the James Bond movie series offers a terrific explanation: “From my experience, here’s what happens to movies when [focus groups] start invading the creative process: Everything gets watered down to the most anodyne and easily consumable version of itself. The movie becomes an inoffensive shadow of a thing, not the thing itself.” One of his examples is the popular movie musical “Sweeney Todd” – research indicated it would be more popular without its songs. Remind anyone of too many cheap cabernet sauvignons on the supermarket Great Wall of Wine?

• More mergers? The wise guys are still buzzing about the next great booze merger, where Pernod Ricard (Campo Viejo, Kenwood) is once again rumored to be after Brown-Forman (Korbell. Sonoma-Cutrer). The deal, given the way the world works today, would have little to do with wine – Pernod wants Jack Daniels, Brown Forman’s flagship brand, so it can better compete with Diageom (Crown Royal, Johnnie Walker) in the whiskey market. Because, of course, Pernod’s sales of $10 billion annually puts it at a tremendous competitive disadvantage.

• Not such bad news: The outlook for the restaurant wine business is sort of looking up, according to a report from distributor-compiled sales reports. SipSpurce reports that about half of the restuaurants that closed at the beginning of the pandemic have reopened through April, calling it “significant progress” in the return to a more normal restaurant world. The report expects restaurant wine sales to grow, and that the business reached bottom in February. The bad news? Retail wine sales declined 0.6 percent in the first quarter of this year – something that was totally unexpected.

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