This snarkiness among industry insiders has got to stop
Just because things aren’t going right, it doesn’t mean we have to point fingers
No doubt, when circumstances get irritating, many of us get snarky. Can’t help it, it’s a natural compulsion of thinking, walking, talking creatures.
There’s a lot to be irritable about the wine industry these days. Obviously, large proportions of the adult populace are simply refusing the grape-derived drink. Especially, or mostly, those who used to nonchalantly plop down $8 or $9 bottles into their shopping carts on their way from the fresh produce to the dairy aisle. It’s their choice. You don’t tell consumers what to do, or what they should be doing.
But is that any reason to get snarky? If anything, people in general are regressing to a mean. Overall, at the moment American wine consumption is at approximately the same level as it was in 2014, which is still well over three times higher than when I started in the business in 1978, as a tastevin-wearing sommelier in a white tablecloth French restaurant. Call it being an old fart, but I still say “hallelujah” when casual consumers show at least a little interest in wine. Believe you me, selling wine in the late ‘70s and the 1980s was no picnic. I have the mental scars to prove it.
But just because things are not going exactly the way we think it should be, it doesn’t mean it’s time to start forming circular firing squads and start squawking about who is doing the wrong thing.
I’ll just say this: I think we should be more than thankful to be working in an industry with such diverse points of view. We should also be respectful, beginning by holding our tongue, particularly in view of the fact, as the old saying goes, that there is always more than one way to skin a cat.
There is a reason why the market is now so incredibly diverse: Consumers want it that way. There is just not any one way to grow, produce, market or sell wine. The multitudinously divided market is resisting sameness. Let’s let everyone do their thing. The market will sort it all out, not snarky pundits or self-appointed experts.
Be that as it may, many of the recent gripes coming to the surface don’t even make sense; at least in terms of the basic principle that we can all have a right opinion, but just not the same opinion. Let us tackle, head-on, some of the issues many elements in wine-related industries have been getting particularly nasty about:
Natural or low intervention wine
Sure, you may hate these styles of wine, yet the number of these types of wines, and vintners, seem to be proliferating all the same, like some dread disease, or pimples on the epidermis of oenophilia. But stop, think about it. Do you think low intervention, or funky or even flawed wines, would be in demand if there weren’t a sufficient number of consumers who actually prefer wines that way? What’s it to you if you don’t? You say nee-ther and I say nigh-ther.
The entire concept of “natural,” of course, is ill, or loosely, defined. Another non-issue. The only people to whom a definition matters (apart from the French, who unsurprisingly have already come up with their own standardizations) are people who buy them, and they seem to be just fine with the category’s wide range of methodologies and conceptions. “Wildness,” or dearth of expectation, are all part of the appeal.
This, of course, is all part of the consumer perception of anything natural, from fibers going into clothing to leavening of breads. It’s a preference built on taste. You can naysay all you like, but you are simply not going to stop consumers from going in this direction.
If anything, the tiny, growing faction of “natural” wine lovers and producers are absolutely no threat to the conventional wine industry making a perfectly good living producing technically cleaner, more predictable wines meeting far more popular, commercial expectations. Natural style wines are oppressing no one; least of all, consumers who used to, but no longer, seem to be buying value priced commercial wines. Just like avid devotees of Beethoven or Taylor Swift have nothing to “fear” from the popularity of NWA or Alice In Chains.
Bottom line, there is absolutely no accounting for taste, nor should there be. As we used to say in the ‘60s, “let the kid rock and roll.”
Biodynamic (and now, regenerative) farming
For some reason, to many parts of the conventional wine industry Biodynamic farming is scary. Or hocus pocus. The anti-Biodynamic hysteria used to be worse, ten or fifteen years ago; a lot of it because of its founder Rudolph Steiner, whose spiritual beliefs were never exactly mainstream. So what? To me, that’s like being critical of Christianity because Jesus was a lapsed Jew who claimed to defy death; or Buddhism because Siddartha was an extreme ascetic who walked around naked. At some point, practices have absolutely no relation to their origins.
And besides, try telling the owners of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti or Littorai in West Sonoma Coast that their Biodynamic practices are baloney. They, like numerous Biodynamic vignerons around the world, are only producing some of the finest, and most highly demanded, wines in the world.
Over the past five, ten years the latest bugaboo has been regenerative farming; similar, though less codified, to the Biodynamic approach in that it focuses on soil health and biodiversity. Yes, you can call it just another “latest trend,” but regenerative farming has grown to the point where it is clearly more than a trend. Followers around the world practicing techniques such as no-till, indigenous plant cover cropping, crimping (i.e., rolling over, rather than mowing, of growth between rows) and integrated flora and fauna management are reporting dramatic increases in vineyard health, productivity and wine quality. The proof, as always, is in the pudding.
Terroir as a subject
Terroir has probably become a bugaboo because suggesting it as a factor distinguishing a wine is associated with some kind of elitism, turning off potential consumers.
The concept may be French in origin, but it is far from elitist. Terroir, broadly defined, simply means “sense of place”⏤something you find when a wine tastes like where it comes from. To me, that’s no more confusing than saying Giuseppe Verdi composed a few great operas in his day. Giuseppe, however, is simply the Italian name for “Joseph,” and Verdi means “green.” So in a way, as I recently saw in an Australian movie, the all-time favorite operas such as La Traviata and Nabucco were really written by a guy named “Joe Green.”
Saying “ordinary” consumers can’t possibly grasp terroir is, in a way, like suggesting consumers are too stupid to understand anything complicated. Judging from their choices related to just about any other commercial product, they are definitely not stupid. It’s like Violetta singing her way to tragic death in La Traviata⏤any Joe Blow can feel that, even if the words are in Italian.
Terroir, however, is not even half-complicated. Lovers of California wine, for instance, need no specialized knowledge to know that they might prefer wines grown in California, a state acclaimed for its warm climate producing wines with vivid fruit profiles. This is exactly what terroir is all about⏤appreciating wine for the sensory qualities most likely to be produced because of where it is grown. There is nothing confusing, or elitist, about it. You like what you like. In fact, most Americans prefer wines grown in California. Millions of wine drinkers cannot be wrong.
It is the same for wines of Europe. Not all of them are the same, of course, just like not all California wines are alike. Nonetheless, most consumers of European wines appreciate them because they are less likely to taste “fruity” than, say, California wines. Many European wines are earthy, many lighter, many a little more tart or dryer than the products of California. In this case, inveterate buyers of European wines are making a choice based on the broadest conceptions of terroir⏤the sensory qualities associated with the sense of place most likely to be expected in those wines.
Terroir, of course, can become a more complicated concept when wine lovers become consumed with the tastes of more specific wine regions within regions, individual villages, vineyards or even blocks within vineyards. Nothing wrong with that, of course, because that’s what appreciation of wine is all about. No different than beginning a lifetime love of books with Fun with Dick and Jane, progressing to Up a Road Slowly, Jane Eyre, The Hobbit, Ulysses or The Corrections. It doesn’t mean, just because you study Joyce or Franzen, that you are a snob or elitist. Neither should Brontë or Tolkien fanatics apologize for their obsessions. For most people, the more obsessive, the better.
From the simplest and most everyday priced wines, to the most glorified, rarest and priciest of wines, terroir plays a part in the choices consumers are making every day. It’s not the only factor, but it is most certainly not a barrier. It’s an inevitable conduit.
Wine and food suggestions
Just within the past few months I have heard the subject of wine and food combinations described as anything from “nonsense” to “pseudoscience.” The current fear among many a wine cognoscente, it appears, is that the mere suggestion of a good match of a wine and a dish is either off-putting or overly intimidating to would-be wine consumers. When consumption of wine goes down, the blame game begins.
Let me try to parse this apprehension in a way anyone can understand: When a cook, or chef, recommends an ingredient to enhance a dish, it is neither nonsense nor pseudoscience. It is based on simple tried-and-true experiences. Certain ingredients have a way of making a dish taste better.
It does not mean, of course, that there is only one ingredient that is likely to enhance a dish. Everyone knows, for instance, that there are a gazillion ways to cook a chicken, most of them delicious, many of them different for the sake of being different. We love our variations.
It is the same with wines. There will always be wines that make dishes taste that much more delicious. Citing those wines, and describing the reasons why the combinations work, is neither nonsense nor pseudoscience. Almost always, it is based on simple tried-and-true experience. You make conscious choices of wines with dishes for the same reason you choose certain ingredients to go into a dish. Quite often, we talk about it. That’s the intelligent thing to do.
I did this for a living, as a matter of fact, during nearly the entirety of my 28-year career in hospitality as a sommelier and restaurateur. Typically, I would gather staff together and we would taste four or five different wines with several dishes. The results would always be the same: A good proportion of the staff might prefer one wine with a given dish, whereas other members of the staff might prefer one or two other wines.
Make no mistake, my staffs were always thoroughly drilled on the perception of all five senses in dishes, and their interaction with basic components of wines. Mind you, cooking can definitely be a science. Although only a fool would doubt that, it doesn’t keep anyone from entering a kitchen and trying it for themselves. Yet as hospitality professionals, we never pretended to prove the existence of a “science” pertaining to sensory ramifications of wines when matched with food. We tasted, or rather evaluated our sensory impressions, with the use of a little thing called common sense.
We were also conscious of the fact that we were tasting wines and foods in the exact same way as our guests: Many of whom are very likely to prefer certain wines with certain dishes, which gave those wines a higher percentage chance of pleasing a customer. Having this knowledge made us better at doing our jobs, thus making our restaurants more likely to succeed (for a deeper treatment of our restaurant experiences, see my post Teaching wine and food matching).
The bottom line is this: You can take numerous wines and taste them with a dish, and more than one of them will taste delicious with that dish, usually for more than one reason. As with a cook choosing ingredients to make a dish taste better, it’s a matter of making choices based on experience... and because it makes sense to make heads or tails of it.
Ergo, there is absolutely nothing wrong with recommending wines with dishes. Even if it means nothing to you, it means plenty to countless consumers, burgeoning and long devoted oenophiles alike. Don’t confuse your personal opinions with the basic needs, or preferences, of so many others.
Wine marketing⏤out with the old, in with the... same ol’?
Since the wine market’s recent crash, it’s wine industry consultants who have really come out of the woodwork. It may stand to reason why, but when times are tough, who can afford ‘em?
I’m a journalist, not a marketing consultant, but as Yogi Berra once said, you can observe a lot just by watching. What I’ve been seeing, at least during my nearly 50 years in the business, is a wine industry that used to sell wine as a lifestyle and entertainment beverage. Bottles used to recommend dishes on their back labels, and entertainers such as Lucille Ball and Orson Welles hawked brands in the same fashion as Joe DiMaggio’s Mr. Coffee.
But when wine appreciation began to get “serious” between the 1970s and early 2000s, it became all about concepts such as vineyards and varietals, sense of place and history of regions, star winemakers and their barrels, prestige brands and their noble lineage. Somewhere along the line, sommeliers, and anything having to do with “mastery,” became sexy, and many an unsuspecting consumer (like industry insiders themselves) fell under the sway of 100-point scores—considering their arbitrary conception, accorded an absurd amount of weight.
Now, of course, we’re told the “old way”⏤the very approach to marketing that increased wine sales in the U.S. from 267 million gallons in 1970 to well over a billion by 2020 (Wine Institute)⏤is all wrong. Evidently, younger generations could care less about vineyards, history, barrels, scores or lineage. “Sommelier” has gone back to being synonymous with “snob.”
Instead, the way to communicate wine right now is by putting it in contexts such as emotional attachment, personal values, meaningful experiences, people connections. I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like the lifestyle, entertainment and celebrity approach of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. While selling wine based on “feelings” may seem shallow, at least it’s not pretentious or cynically manipulative. While consumers are smarter than ever, who can blame them for trusting their feelings over what they’re being told?
There is, of course, no resemblance between the print/broadcast communication of just 30 years ago and the digital and social media marketing of today. There is actually a lot of lifestyle communication of wine going on as we speak, done mostly by that fully realized coterie of intelligentsia we now call influencers, and many wineries have been duplicating their approach in their Direct to Consumer sales.
Thank goodness for the influence of influencers. Where would we be without them? They’re telling the meaningful “stories” that we only used to get through bumbling corporations—test-marketed to death by marketing departments and dumbed down by advertising agencies—but with a great deal more of the enthusiasm, spontaneity, originality and innovation that we actually appreciate in real life.
Today’s consumers, influencers such as Georgia Panagopoulou (@wine.gini) constantly remind us, “don’t remember information, they remember what the information means to them.” Like the taste of wines themselves. Imagine that⏤it is all about the wine.
Despite all the recent grousing, maybe things are looking up after all!
Perfect -- thanks for saying what needed to be said. Keep it coming Randy. I'm enjoying the next generation of makers from all over (and all walks of life) and the young consumers discovering them, it's very fun to see happening again. Also, folks acting like they've never seen an RTD or mixed wine beverage before. Hilarious.