Thoughtfully posted by John on Tuesday, August 17, 2010.
I didn’t intend to write much tonight, but then I read Matt Kramer’s column, “Let’s Make it Simple” in the Wine Spectator that landed in my mailbox this afternoon. I was fired up after I read one of the first lines: “Everytime somebody insists on making wine ‘simple,’ wine loses.” Amen. When I was on FOX Business News a few weeks back, I tried to convince Middle Americans that buying branded wine in the vending machines being installed in Pennsylvania was a terrible idea because they would never have the opportunity to enjoy good wine. I am certain that many viewers that day and readers of today’s issue of Wine Spectator think that Matt Kramer and I are snobs. I can live with that – I know what I am.
I am someone that couldn’t agree more with what Kramer has to say in column. He believes that brands lead to dead ends – that the wine buying public won’t use branded wine as bridge to learning about and drinking better wines. Instead, they will stick with their $6.99 bottle of South Australian sweet water and only change to another brand when a new billboard pops up on the freeway advertising an equally abominable bottle of schlock. Wines like Bitch and Evil really aren’t wine, Kramer points out. I couldn’t agree more.
Kramer goes on to give two of the most prominent examples of how brands have nearly destroyed the reputation of two winemaking centers – Australia and Beaujolais. There is an ocean of soulless, bland juice flowing out of Southeast Australia. It is essentially all the same product from a super zone in South East Australia that is roughly a third of the size of the United States. How can wine blended from such vast expanses produce anything of quality? It doesn’t. And the only two things that are different about each brand from Down Under are the equally neon and mind-numbing marketing campaigns behind each and the manipulation techniques that take place in the factories that spew out these “wines.”
As for Beaujolais, the Nouveau campaign bastardized by Duboeuf and Co. is at the very heart of manipulation – the wines are doctored to add flavors that aren’t inherent in the grapes and then the banana-juice they turn out is marketed in pleasant looking flowery bottles on the third Thursday in November. Wine educators should be teaching consumers that Beaujolais doesn’t equal bananas and bubblegum, instead, many are using doctored Gamay from one of the most misunderstood wine regions on the planet as typical examples. Both of these crucial winemaking areas produce amazing wines that represent incredible value. However, much of the wine drinking public doesn’t get a chance to explore these true representations of place since they open up their Sunday supplements to find “professional” wine writers extolling the virtues of mass-produced wine (Duboeuf and Co. is sneaky like that).
And Kramer hits a romantic part of my heart as he rightly eschews branded wine because they do not seduce us. We all want to be seduced. And I don’t think I am waxing romantic. Our lives are short enough as it is. We want to be seduced by wine, John Keats, our lovers and everything else in between. Most consumers don’t know that wine can seduce, they only know that their bottle of Yellowtail, Little Penguin or Purplish Swill keeps for a couple of days in the fridge.
Kramer also hits on the hot-topic discussion of the moment – making wines more available to consumers. And he doesn’t mean cases stacking brands to the sky in discount warehouses or stocking automated wine kiosks with best selling brands. What he means is that great wine, at all price points, styles and flavors (and the information that goes into their production and place of origin) be made more readily available to consumers. Then and only then will consumers (and some of the dolts that push these McWines) have an opportunity to enjoy truly delicious wine. And these wines don’t have to be expensive – we are in an era of unprecedented opportunity to buy amazing wine at stunningly low prices. Most of the wine drinkers would never know as they don’t ever make it past the case stack of the Chick on a Bicycle.- John's blog
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