Winberis

European wine growers choose long term strategy

Happy Day!

According to Just-drinks.com, European wine growers are rushing to apply for subsidies to rip-up non-economic vineyards.  What was one of the most contentious elements of a reform package designed to drain the EU's "wine lake" seems to have become quite a well regarded option.

France and Spain (amongst others) have long had the problem of producing far more wine than either country could hope to market.  This problem has created:

• social rifts as evidenced by CRAV, a group which emerged in response to the brutal economics of producing the relatively non-descript wines of the Mediterenean coastal regions. 
• a bottomless pit for EU subsidies which could happily be used for developing new markets for European wines as opposed to industrial distillation. 
• a situation where good wines from large apellations like Cotes du Rhone suffer from consumer backlash toward the BOGOF specials they've had at one too many art openings

Now it seems:

• "If all the requests were granted, the Commission would have to more than double its compensation budget for 2008, from EUR464m (US$598m) to EUR1bn"
• "We can only accept about 45% of the demand this year"
  
• "Applications from Spain amounted to 9% of the country's vines"
• "Up to 175,000 hectares of EU vines are to be grubbed over the next three years as part of the EU wine reform process"

Here's to a rise in the average quality of wine in Europe!  (and an end to the produce / distill death spiral)

Thoughts on Bordeaux En Primeur

A friend of mine recently posited the following query, and I find it to be a worthwhile topic, certainly one with a current relevance:

“What are your thoughts on Bordeaux En Primeur?  With a fair amount of controversy surrounding the entire process, do you think this centuries old system will survive?

I've been working on a project on futures wine market (mainly bordeaux) and my research has forced me to believe that there are serious shortcomings in the system, especially the distribution channel.  Would you agree that we are not going to see a huge shift from the present pricing policy considering the fact that new markets, led by Russia, China & India are going to fill up any voids created in the traditional western markets?

While we are at it, does the relegation of these fine wines to mere commodities like cotton, coffee and pork belly bother you?”

I think we need to pay attention to where pricing power exists in the en primeur value chain.

We can safely assume that the First Growths, plus their right bank equivalents will continue to be in great demand in the medium term.  I think we can also surmise from the 2006 and 2007 vintages, that they will sell en primeur despite vintage quality.  This is a great place to be in the market.

We have also seen that companies that occupy places with more modest market presence have come under a great amount of price pressure in the last few vintages, specifically since 2000-2001.  In these more modest strata, retailers have more pricing and distribution control and are able to set the pace.  Price increases for the '05 vintage have been eroding, and plenty of wine remains in the market.

I believe that this market polarization will continue.  The best strategy for brands like Lynch Bages, etc. which straddle the line between the top and the middle, will be to try to make the leap in perception of quality/scarcity while they can.  The middle of the market will reap few of the rewards available to the top.  Spending now will, I believe put these companies in a much stronger position going forward, with healthier margins providing worthwhile returns.

As for whether I regret this state of affairs?  Bordeaux has been largely a commodity producer for its whole history.  This region began by producing anonymous bulk wines for foreign markets.  Chateau brands came much later and don't represent a "normal" state of affairs, or a "manifest destiny". I believe that 90% of the production of Bordeaux will head back to its history as anonymous wine for export. French government policy of supporting economically nonviable production will only exacerbate this situation. So no, I don't see any gross injustice.

Price Elasticity

I'd like to take this opportunity to weigh in on the question of price increases in wine.  In a recent opinion published in Harpers, Brian Howard says the following:

Yet has the consumer stopped buying these essentials and everyday pleasures? No, consumers are spending to maintain their food lifestyles, and maybe cutting down on DIY, furniture and white goods. The issue of what the UK consumer does about wine price increases turns on whether wine is considered one of the essential grocery items.

Our evidence suggests the industry should press ahead with moderate and hard-fought price increases and consumers will follow –or still buy from elsewhere in the supplier’s range. Suppliers should also face up to the counter-claim that listings will be lost or consumers will stop buying. The only reason that consumers would actually stop buying is if their favoured wine were no longer on the shelf at any price.

I couldn't agree more with the above sentiment, but I'll take it further. 

I believe that many wine marketers have a sense that consumers' concept of price and value are inextricably linked.  That the collective willingness to pay is communicated between consumers in a particular market at light speed and with great accuracy.  Any attempt to alter a product's price point will be met with not only customer resistance, but with a loss of goodwill and perhaps the end of the world as we know it.

We frequently see the phenomenon of wines of similar quality and market readiness content to sit a very different price points for no reason other than the assumption on the part of the brand manager that this is what the market demands and moreover, this is all that the market will accept.

I reject this philosophy as a reactionary stance based in largely in fear.  The signals which indicate the value proposition of a wine are sent to consumers as clearly through the shelf tag as through the label.  We often forget that price is one of the most important choices we make as a part of marketing strategy, where often it is treated as the natural consequence of the other choices we make.  We revert to cost-plus pricing because it's easy.

Take a look at the experience of Kendal Jackson in California; they were able to take a unilateral price increase from (foggy remembrance) $12 to $14 without sacrificing volume.  I know it's only one data point, but I think we can extrapolate the following:

For every step toward a conscious price positioning, we take a step toward price inelasticity. 

When we within the brand behave as though there is absolute price elasticity, how can we expect our customers to behave any differently?

Consumer Expectation, Consumer Benefit and Willingness to Pay.

There is currently a debate raging in the international wine industry about whether or not it is a necessity to ship wines internationally under strict temperature control.  There exists copious anecdotal evidence that extremes of temperature damage wines, and that by ensuring consistent temperature for the duration of a wine’s journey from producer to market one can mitigate this damage. 

I have personally been on the receiving end of containers of (excruciatingly rare and expensive) wines which upon opening, reveal that instead of being temperature controlled for the entirety of their journey, spent a week unprotected on someone’s 90 degree loading dock. 
Ouch.

In the case of wines retailing for $600.00 per case, making the argument for temperature control at $2.00 per case is simple arithmetic.  Adding $0.17 per $50 bottle is cheap insurance.  Likewise, when the cost of goods on a case of wine is $24.00, the math is pretty much done for you.  At almost 10% of the total landed cost, the previously cheap insurance becomes an unaffordable luxury.  The difficult choices begin in the middle...

What does a wine importer do when the wines are especially robust, like alcoholic, tannic reds with modest value?  Likewise, what is to be done with inexpensive but delicate wines like Muscadet which will be heavily impacted by heat but which don’t offer the margins required justifying the use of reefers?

Consumers can be brought into a dialog with importers wherein they can both indicate their preference as to how a wine should be treated as well as be made to understand the costs associated with their choice.  Typically we use the importer brand as the language for this conversation.  An importer hangs his shingle with an implied value proposition, and the consumers indicate through their purchasing behavior whether or not the value proposition works. 

Let’s use the Muscadet example.  This young, fresh white wine from the Loire Valley has one mission in life… to refresh.  It should taste of mainly of Citrus, stone and a bit of briny sea air.  (I’m not kidding, have one.)  The problem with such an ephemeral wine is that once bottled, it begins a steady march toward boring.  Once the airy top notes of a wine like this disappear, all we are left with is the high acid and light body of a thousand insipid old-world whites.

As consumers we decide what we want.  The difference between the bottom of the market and the top (in the US) is the difference between $6.78 and $18.00.  Different importers with very different philosophies present these wines.  The cost of the wine ex-cellars is the first place we are asked to make an endorsement of one cost structure over another, the next is in transport (our choices are discussed in this article by David Schilknecht), the third is in the importer’s commitment to careful, appropriate marketing and a long term investment in brands and customer relationships over dump-and-see import.

The sophisticated consumer may not consciously make the decision of where they choose to position themselves in the consumer expectation, consumer benefit and willingness to pay equation, but by their behavior they make a statement.  A consumer’s behavior in regards to perceived import wine value is a referendum on the efficacy of  both an importer’s supply chain and their ability to communicate that benefit.

How does one define quality in wine?

• I wrote this short essay for my application to the Institute of Masters of Wine a couple of weeks ago while on a  visit to the US.  I waited to publish it until the deadline for application for this year had elapsed...  The idea was that the essay would be written in a two hour sitting under exam conditions.  Excepting for some spelling correction, etc. that I did after the fact, this came cask-strength from my brain.  Please excuse any unsupportable comments, I've spent much of my professional life drinking.
• (and moreover, I wasn't accepted to the program this year, so I'll have a similar essay, hopefully of greater quality, available soon as I apply again [29 May, 2008])

For the purposes of the question at hand, quality can be most succinctly defined as a wine’s ability to satisfy consumer expectations  We must first identify the elements of satisfaction in wine; they are objective quality standards, subjective quality standards and ensuing contextual filters.  Finally, as a necessary element in satisfying consumer expectation we have the question of value.  Quality doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the consumer must feel that the price paid meets or is exceeded by the perceived quality in the bottle.

Objective quality standards used in wine are easy to define.  There are both positive and negative elements such as alcohol, acids, phenols, extract, etc.  The levels and proportions seen as desirable are subject to changing consumer demands and industry trends, but will be clearly identifiable.  The other area of objective standards is the avoidance of faults.  Wines with substantial faults such as brettanomyces, volatile acidity, TCA, mercaptans, will be excluded from the quality race early on, unless something can be done to remedy the faults.  Faulty wines are commercially unfit.

The Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, an arm of the Australian government, are masters of defining quality primarily through objective means.  They have built a $36 billion export market based primarily on ensuring that all wines leaving the country satisfy minimum objective quality standards.  Wineries which don’t meet the standards of behavior or production quality are excluded from the marketplace.  The chief complaint leveled against “Wine Australia” is “soullessness”.  Many consumers feel that perhaps because of Australia’s intense focus on objective standards, the wines, though being the world’s safest bets, are also without a compelling nature.

The second measure of quality is subjective.  Here we find such elements as: balance, complexity, “compellingness” and the attractiveness of package design.  Unlike the objective standards by which wine is measured, subjective elements are impossible to create as standards, and instead become descriptive of a wine’s attributes.  The most important elements of subjective quality analysis are typicity and varietal correctness.  It is here that we find the expressions of terroir and the more poetic, transient and captivating sides of the production of wine.

An ideal example of a region that judges itself by subjective standards is the region of Burgundy.  Although minimum objective standards are observed, the Cru system plays the primary role in defining quality.  The Cru system has been developed over the last 800+ years to codify subjective characteristics of the various microclimates in the stretch of land between Dijon and Lyon.  Although limited to two primary grapes, and one primary tradition of vinification, the region has been broken into 500+ individual parcels!  Each individual area is intended to represent a quantifiable subjective difference irrespective of the vintage or winemaker.  The advantage of such an ancient and complex system of individual interpretation is limitless variety and the opportunity for wines of dramatic compellingness.  The downside is irregular quality, as in the adage, “Nine out of ten Burgundies are disappointing and expensive.  The tenth however, makes me start all over again.”

Neither objective nor subjective quality standards are complete measures of wine quality; wines also need to be seen through a set of cultural and historical contextual filters.  These filters can relate to quality elements, different interpretations of varietal correctness, and the effects of age.  While Brettanomyces is defined unequivocally as a wine fault, many consider the bacteria to add an element of desirable complexity when found in red wines of the southern Rhone Valley.  In regards to varietal correctness, Pinot Noir, for example, can exhibit very different characteristics when sourced from different terroirs.  Marsannay is known for its light color, low alcohol and ephemeral elegance, while Pinot Noir from the Santa Rita Hills is known more for being powerful, inky and of much higher alcohol.  As a wine ages, its character undergoes vast changes as well.  A Pauillac can be impenetrably dark, blindingly tannic and possess enormous fruit when young, while still being “of quality” 40 years later when it is a quiet echo of its younger self, with little fruit, a soft structure and not a trace of the power which was once its defining characteristic.  Quality analysis of wines cannot ignore the context which exists externally to the wine, but fundamentally influences how we experience the product.

The final consideration when dealing with quality in wines is the concept of value.  Value can be defined here in a simple equation: perception of quality divided by price equals value.  A wine which says “Penfolds Grange” on the label and sells for in excess of 200€ will properly be held to a different standard than a simpler Grenache-Shiraz-Mourvedre blend of the South Australia appellation, despite the fact that objectively they are quite similar.  Package design, distribution channel (Tesco vs. a Michelin three star) and reputation will all play into a perception of quality, none of which exist in either objective or subjective standards. 

Clearly quality in wine is a concept assembled of various constituent elements, including objective and subjective standards and filters of historical and cultural context.  The arbiter of quality in this regard is a consumer perspective which will be impacted by price.  Aspects of quality can be present without the whole being satisfactory.  Without a coherent success in all the aforementioned areas, the consumer will not have his expectations satisfied, and the wine in question cannot be truly considered “of quality.”

Terroir or Marketing?

This is a great article from the New York Times in which Harold Mcgee and Daniel Patterson sacrifice some sacred cows in regards to the concept of terroir.  I certainly recommend a read. 
I think that one reason we hold so tightly onto the concept of terroir is as a dyke against the rising waters of the "International wine style".  Part of what makes Burgundy so compelling is the wide range of differences one finds within such a relatively small delineated area.  Once we can't tell the difference (the voice of terroir) between Gevrey and Vosne, haven't we lost something special?

May 6, 2007

Talk Dirt to Me

 

By HAROLD MCGEE AND DANIEL PATTERSON

   

It’s hard to have a conversation about wine these days without hearing the French word terroir. Derived from a Latin root meaning “earth,” terroir describes the relationship between a wine and the specific place that it comes from. For example, many will say the characteristic minerality of wines from Chablis comes from the limestone beds beneath the vineyards (although, when pressed, they generally admit that they’ve never actually tasted limestone). The idea that one can taste the earth in a wine is appealing, a welcome link to nature and place in a delocalized world; it has also become a rallying cry in an increasingly sharp debate over the direction of modern winemaking. The trouble is, it’s not true.

When terroir was first associated with wine, in the 17th-century phrase goût de terroir (literally, “taste of the earth”), it was not intended as a compliment. Its meaning began to change in 1831, when Dr. Morelot, a wealthy landowner in Burgundy, observed in his “Statistique de la Vigne Dans le Département de la Côte-d’Or” that all of the wineries in Burgundy made wine essentially the same way, so the reason some tasted better than others must be due to the terroir — specifically, the substrata underneath the topsoil of a vineyard. Wine, he claimed, derived its flavor from the site’s geology: in essence, from rocks.

In recent years, the concept that one can taste rocks and soil in a wine has become popular with wine writers, importers and sommeliers. “Wines express their source with exquisite definition,” asserts Matt Kramer in his book “Making Sense of Wine.” “They allow us to eavesdrop on the murmurings of the earth.” Of a California vineyard’s highly regarded chardonnays, he writes, there is “a powerful flavor of the soil: the limestone speaks.” The sommelier Paul Grieco, in his wine list at Hearth in New York, writes of rieslings that “the glory of the varietal is in its transparency, its ability to truly reflect the soil in which it is grown.” In his February newsletter, Kermit Lynch, one of the most respected importers of French wine, returns repeatedly to the stony flavors in various white wines from a “terroirist” winemaker in Alsace: “When he speaks of a granitic soil, the wine in your glass tastes of it.”

If you ask a hundred people about the meaning of terroir, they’ll give you a hundred definitions, which can be as literal as tasting limestone or as metaphorical as a feeling. Terroir flavors are generally characterized as earthiness and minerality. On the other hand, wines with flavors of berries or tropical fruits and little or no minerality are therefore assumed not to have as clear a connection to the earth, which means they could have come from anywhere, and are thought to bear the mark of human intervention.

If this seems confusing — especially given that wine is made from fruit — it gets worse when you ask winemakers about how to get the flavors from the rocks into the glass. According to them, a good expression of terroir requires more work in the vineyards, or possibly less; it’s the hotter climate in California that leads to its high-alcohol, fruit-forward, terroir-less style, or possibly not; even the oft-heard contention that a winemaker must “work with what the vines give you” is contradicted by Ales Kristancic of Movia winery, whose family has been making wines from vineyards on the Italy-Slovenia border for hundreds of years. “Plants need to understand what the winemaker wants,” Kristancic says. “Only a winery with great tradition can make great vineyards.”

Since there’s so little consensus among winemakers about how to foster the expression of place — what Matt Kramer calls “somewhereness” — in their wines, what are our wine experts tasting? How can a place or a soil express itself through wine? Does terroir really exist?

Yes, but the effects of a place on a wine are far more complex than simply tasting the earth beneath the vine. Great wines are produced on many different soil types, from limestone to granite to clay, in places where the vines get just enough water and nourishment from the soil to grow without deficiencies and where the climate allows the grapes to ripen slowly but fully. It’s also true that different soils can elicit different flavors from the same grape. Researchers in Spain recently compared wines from the same clone of grenache grafted on the same rootstock, harvested and vinified in exactly the same way, but grown in two vineyards 1,600 feet apart, one with a soil significantly richer in potassium, calcium and nitrogen. The wines from the mineral-rich soil were higher in apparent density, alcohol and ripe-raisiny aromas; wines from the poorer soil were higher in acid, astringency and applelike aromas. The different soils produced different flavors, but they were flavors of fruit and of the yeast fermentation. What about the flavors of soil and granite and limestone that wine experts describe as minerality — a term oddly missing from most formal treatises on wine flavor? Do they really go straight from the earth to the wine to the discerning palate?

No.

Consider the grapevine growing in the earth. It takes in elemental, inert materials from the planet — air and water and minerals — and, using energy captured from sunlight, turns them into a living, growing organism. It doesn’t just accumulate the earth’s materials. It transforms them into the sugars, acids, aromas, tannins, pigments and dozens of other molecules that make grapes and wine delicious.

“Plants don’t really interact with rocks,” explains Mark Matthews, a plant physiologist at the University of California, Davis who studies vines. “They interact with the soil, which is a mixture of broken-down rock and organic matter. And plant roots are selective. They don’t absorb whatever’s there in the soil and send it to the fruit. If they did, fruits would taste like dirt.” He continues, “Any minerals from the solid rock that vine roots do absorb — sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, a handful of others — have to be dissolved first in the soil moisture. Most of them are essential nutrients, and they mainly affect how well the plant as a whole grows.”

Most of the earthy and mineral aromas and flavors that we detect in wine actually come from the interaction of the grape and yeast. Yeasts metabolize the grape sugars into alcohol, along the way freeing up and spinning off the dozens of aromatic chemicals that make wine more than just alcoholic grape juice. It’s because of the yeasts that we can catch whiffs of tropical fruits, grilled meats, toasted bread and other things that have never been anywhere near the grapes or the wine. The list of evocative yeast products includes an organic sulfur molecule that can give sauvignon blancs a “flinty” aroma. And there are minor yeasts that create molecules called volatile phenols, whose earthy, smoky flavors have nothing to do with the soil but are suggestive of it, especially in wines from the southern Rhone.

Grape minerals and mineral flavors are also strongly influenced by the grower and winemaker. When a vineyard is planted, the vine type, spacing and orientation are just a few of many important decisions. Growers control the plant growth in myriad ways, such as pruning, canopy management or, most obviously, irrigating and replenishing the soil with manures or chemical fertilizers. The winemaker then makes hundreds of choices that affect wine flavor, beginning with the ripeness at which the grapes are harvested, and can change the mineral content by using metal equipment, concrete fermentation tanks or clarifying agents made from bentonite clay. Jamie Goode, a British plant biologist turned wine writer, describes in his superbly lucid book “Wine Science” how techniques that minimize the wine’s contact with oxygen can increase the levels of sulfur compounds that may be mistaken for “mineral” character from the soil.

So, if vines absorb only rock that is dissolved in water, if grape and wine minerals are not a reflection of the rocks’ minerals, and if earthy aromas in wine come from microbes and not the earth, do soil minerals have any real role in wine flavor?

Hildegarde Heymann, a sensory scientist at U.C. Davis, is skeptical about the usefulness of the terms ‘terroir” and “minerality” as they’re used today. But she is intrigued by “minerality.” “People who talk about minerality are describing something they perceive that’s hard to grab on to,” she says. “My guess is that it’s a composite perception, something like ‘creaminess’ in dairy foods. ‘Minerality’ might be a way of describing a combination of complexity, balance and a substantial body. We do know that mineral ions can affect wine flavor by affecting acidity, chemical reaction rates and the volatility of aromas. And we’re just now looking at whether they can affect the body of wine, its ‘mouth feel.’ They might.”

It’s possible, then, that soil minerals may affect wine flavor indirectly, by reacting with other grape and yeast substances that produce flavor and tactile sensations, or by altering the production of flavor compounds as the grape matures on the vine.

The place where grapes are grown clearly affects the wine that is made from them, but it’s not a straightforward matter of tasting the earth. If the earth “speaks” through wine, it’s only after its murmurings have been translated into a very different language, the chemistry of the living grape and microbe. We don’t taste a place in a wine. We taste a wine from a place — the special qualities that a place enables grapes and yeasts to express, aided and abetted by the grower and winemaker.

In the years following Dr. Morelot’s missive on terroir, the quality of a wine became synonymous with the quality of the vineyard where it originated. This meant the value of that wine was tied to the land instead of to the winemaker, which allowed it to be handed down from generation to generation. The French went on to codify their vineyards into legal appellations, creating gradations within those appellations that demarcated clear levels of quality (grand cru, first growth and so on), the economic effects of which are felt to this day. Given that it was landowners who benefited most, the commonly held idea of terroir — wine as proxy for a piece of dirt — looks a lot like one of the longest-running, most successful marketing campaigns of the modern era.

Today, it’s easy to ascribe all this terroir talk to commerce, to the European reaction to California’s recent rise in viniculture status. It’s been suggested that terroir is just the Old World saying to the New: It’s the land, stupid — we have it and you don’t. But that doesn’t explain why so many Americans have embraced the concept with near-religious zeal. To paraphrase the great French wine historian Roger Dion, why have so many brilliant and passionate wine professionals been so eager to attribute solely to nature what is actually the result of hard work by talented winemakers?

The answer lies in the complex relationship between tradition, culture and taste. Those wine professionals have all spent vast amounts of time and energy learning what traditional European wines taste like, region by region, winery by winery, vineyard by vineyard. The version of terroir that many of them hold is that those wines taste the way they do because of the enduring natural setting, i.e., the rocks and soil. These wines taste the way they do because people have chosen to emphasize flavors that please them.

The pioneering French oenologist Ãmile Peynaud wrote nearly 25 years ago: “I cannot agree with the view that ‘one accepts human intervention (in vinification) as long as it allows the natural characteristics to remain intact,’ since it is precisely human intervention which has created and highlighted these so-called natural characteristics!” Modern European views of terroir recognize that typical local flavors are the creation of generations of growers and winemakers, shaping the vineyard and fine-tuning the fermentation to make what they feel are the best wines possible in their place. Typical flavors are expressions not of nature but of culture.

But culture, unlike nature, isn’t static. It evolves in response to shifting tastes and technological advances. Over the past 30 years, the staid world of European winemaking has been roiled by an influx of American consumers, led by their apostle, the writer Robert Parker. In his reviews, Parker has brushed aside the traditional practice of judging wine according to historical context (that is, how it should taste), focusing instead on what’s in the bottle. His preference for hugely concentrated, fruit-forward wines — the antithesis of distinctive, diverse terroir wines — has dramatically changed the economic landscape of the wine industry. Throughout the world, more and more winemakers are making wine in the style that Parker prefers, even in Europe, where this means abandoning distinctive local styles that had evolved over centuries. “Somewhereness” is being replaced by “anywhereness.”

The simplistic idea of terroir as a direct expression of nature has become a rhetorical weapon in the fight against this trend. Kristancic — who interrupted our interview to raise his fists and shout to the heavens, “They’re ruining wine!” — sees an advancing wave of homogenization that will eventually turn wine into a soulless, deracinated commodity. Like many others, he is afraid of losing what is special about the traditional role of wine in human life, its way of connecting people to the land and to one another. Conjuring granite in Alsatian rieslings and limestone in Chablis puts that connection to the land right in the bottle, ours for the tasting.

If rocks were the key to the flavor of “somewhereness,” then it would be simple to counterfeit terroir with a few mineral saltshakers. But the essence of wine is more elusive than that, and far richer. Scientists and historians continue to illuminate what Peynaud described as the “dual communion” represented by wine: “on the one hand with nature and the soil, through the mystery of plant growth and the miracle of fermentation, and on the other with man, who wanted wine and who was able to make it by means of knowledge, hard work, patience, care and love.” “Somewhereness” is given its meaning by “someoneness”: in our time, by the terroirists who are working hard to discover and capture in a bottle the difference that place can make.

Visiting Burgundy

I've gotten in a bit of trouble before by grabbing items from Jancis Robinson's website (which you really should subscribe to), and so imagine my delight when she published an article I wanted to steal from her website in the San Francisco Chronicle!  Now if Phil Bronstein wants to come after me, Paris is a long way from San Francisco.
This article is for all of the friends who are constantly asking for the scoop on visiting Burgundy... I couldn't have said it better myself.

Tasting through Burgundy

                                                                 

Jancis Robinson

Friday, May 11, 2007

Most of us know how to visit a winery, don't we? You walk into the tasting room and try to wangle a taste of as many of the producer's best wines as possible. 

But in Burgundy, the business of visiting to taste is very different indeed. 

The places where Burgundy is made have in most significant cases remained virtually unchanged for centuries. The typical Burgundian wine producer operates in a dark, damp, low-ceilinged stone cellar that can be found only by those with an intimate knowledge of village backstreets and the courtyards and passageways that lie behind and beneath them. Why, even the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the most famous and best endowed Burgundian wine estate of all, keeps half of its fabulous wines maturing in a subterranean cavern accessible only by what is virtually a trapdoor. 

Nor are the really interesting wine domaines in Burgundy particularly interested in receiving visitors. They can generally, after all, sell every bottle they fill. An almost infallible rule for tourists in Burgundy is that if they are invited to taste by signs outside an establishment, the wines therein are unlikely to be interesting. 

So the first challenge is to make an appointment to taste at a worthwhile address. Expecting to taste without an appointment is futile. Burgundian wine producers are busy, hands-on introverts who do not need adulation. An hour spent showing you their wines means an hour less tending their wines and vines, which they all do personally. There are none of Bordeaux's teams of workers here. A few helpers perhaps, but the name on the label is almost invariably that of the person who did most of the work.

We wine writers have better access than an unknown visitor perhaps, but even for us the Burgundian welcome is measured. Indeed a fellow wine writer recently exclaimed with more than a hint of exasperation, "Why is it that in Burgundy they never ever ask you for lunch?" In this respect Burgundian vignerons much more closely resemble cautious farmers than anything remotely like a public relations person. In fact, I have found that the more urbane and more famous the producer, the more effusive the welcome. 

Talking of lunch, it is vital to remember that the lunch hour, possibly two, is sacrosanct. Very few vignerons would welcome a visitor who arrived as late as noon and only exceptionally cooperative ones would agree to an afternoon appointment that began before 2 p.m. or after 4:30 p.m. This makes for some rather relaxing tasting days compared with the madness of tasting one's way round a more competitive wine region, where my tasting day could and has run from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. without any break for solid matter. Thus, the visitor to Burgundy needs to remember to make his own arrangements for lunchtime, whether by booking at a convenient village restaurant  or by buying provisions for a picnic  --  before all the shops close at noon, of course.

But even once you have your itinerary in place (last-minute arrangements are unlikely to work), more homework is still needed. Some villages such as Vosne-Romanee and Gevrey attempt via a map in the main square and a printed map in the tourist office respectively to locate individual wine producers but this is rare. You will typically be armed only with an address, and the typical vigneron's premises are signaled with nothing more (and often less) than a modest nameplate. You can save valuable time in a hard-pressed day by scouting around the village backstreets in advance  --  during lunchtime perhaps?  --  to locate your eventual destinations. 

Let us assume however that you have found your vignerons. And have turned up at the right time, and so have they. Although almost all of those under 40 speak English and occasionally other languages, many of the older ones speak nothing but French. You'll be looked up and down and then taken down into the cellar or cave, at some point collecting glasses and the all-important wine thief (pipette), because most of the tasting in Burgundy is done straight from barrel. And here we encounter one of the great professional obstacles for anyone who writes tasting notes. A Burgundian cellar is full of barrels and very little else. Barrels on their sides, as they all are here, are round. There is not a flat surface to be found. The vignerons will roam all over their cavernous cellars  to present you with samples of their wines from the most basic Aligote or Passetoutgrains up via village wines and premiers crus to grands crus, each one dribbled into your glass from their pipettes  --  and you will have a devil of a job balancing your glass and notebook. You will be presented with a spittoon, but you will be expected to pour back what remains in your glass, often into the vignerons' own glasses unless you demonstrate that you too can unerringly find the bunghole hidden under the barrel stacked above the one you're tasting from. 

Because the wines will be presented to you upwards in order of quality (which sometimes means that a great premier cru such as Clos St. Jacques in Gevrey may well be served after a lighter grand cru such as Charmes-Chambertin) it is vital that you don't gush with too much enthusiasm about the first few wines. Reserve the superlatives for the wines dribbled into your glass at the end. And you might also assume that whites will always be served before reds, but this is far from an infallible rule. Many producers serve their whites at the end, especially if they are very smart ones, believing they are much more testing than reds out of cask. 

You can be sure that you too will be tested, as a taster and a visitor, and that you will be participating in something that feels like an ancient rite. Because that, as so much in Burgundy, is precisely what it is.

---

Visiting Burgundy

For help organizing your Burgundy itinerary, go to  www.vins-bourgogne.fr. For a list  of local tourist offices, go to www.burgundy-tourism.com.

Thanks again Jancis!

Australians' New Push

An article by Scott Rochfort in Sydney Morning Herald from May 3rd, discusses the Aussie move upmarket:

The wine industry has set itself the ambitious target of boosting exports by an extra $2 billion a year by mid-2011, after unveiling a new industry blueprint aimed at raising the quality and value of Australian wines consumed overseas.
At the launch of Wine Australia: Directions to 2025 in Sydney yesterday, the chairman of the task force charged with reinvigorating Australia's $2.9 billion a year export trade, said the industry had to shift its focus from export volumes to opportunities to crack the growing appreciation for premium wines.

The Australians have made themselves the poster child of how to bring a once insular national wine industry to the global foreground in a relatively short amount of time.  Chile, Spain, and Italy would kill for the kind of discipline that the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation has been able to instill in it's member wineries.  That discipline, honed in a very competitive "fighting varietals" and lower market space will be quite a force to reckon with as they set their sights on the soft underbelly of high price/high margin business. 
People may scoff at the niche high end Aussies presenting a threat, but to that I would counter that thus far 1) The high end has been more of a nice trophy than a commercial priority, and 2) Their success with small production wines has been limited by the fact that they are small production wines.

The 49-point strategy will focus on developing a marketing plan aimed at improving the understanding of Australia's wine growing regions - and more expensive drops. It could also see the industry lift its marketing expenditure to more than $300 million a year. Mr McLintock said the strategy aimed to raise awareness of Australian wine, particularly in the US, in a bid to encourage drinkers to "trade up".

Just think, Wilson only needed 14 points to get the league of Nations off the ground...  Imagine what he could've done with 49 points!  Oh yes, that, and with Australia moving together like a Roman phalanx, $300 million is LOT of consumer education.  Pretty soon, you'll know exactly where the Goulburn Valley is.

A main aim is to get Australian wines out of the sub-$10 a bottle price bracket they dominate in the US. Mr McLintock said the plan was to increase the proportion of premium wine as a total of exports from 15 to 30 per cent in the five years. Mr McLintock also rejected criticisms the targets were too ambitious. He argued the figures were on the conservative side. "We are not making assumptions, the research is telling us it's a fact." Mr McLintock said the new strategy was a result of the industry's own success. He noted the Strategy 2025 report in 1996 had predicted annual wine sales would hit $4.5 billion by 2025. They are expected to hit $5 billion by June. "What we're talking about here is not a volume-led strategy but a dollar-led strategy," he said. "This is about a call to action for the industry," he said.

This will be an exciting time for well positioned players in the US and Europe, but will be tough for companies who enter the competition on a back foot.  The winners of this game will have efficient supply chains, marketing and sales functions that can acurately segment and communicate authentically with consumers, and above all, at any price point, offer value. 
Wine drinkers will both gain and suffer as a result of this new competition.  Outlets will become more consolidated (both on- and off-sale), Large efficient producers will buy up or chase out the mid-sized players, and small producers may rely more on non-traditional distribution, such as direct sales.  This will all serve to restrict the array of truly differentiated products available to consumers.
On the other hand, the price:quality ratio will be greater than ever before.
I'll be watching to see how this shakes out, but one thing is for sure, it wont be boring, or bloodless.

(For reference, here are the export numbers to April '07 in A$)

• United States $963m
• United Kingdom $958m
• Canada   $252m
• New Zealand  $101m
• Germany   $67m
• Ireland   $64m
• Netherlands $58m
• Sweden $51m
• Denmark $50m
• Japan   $47m
• China $46m
• Singapore $42m 

Coffee the new wine?

This yesterday in Decanter:

Angela Mount to make coffee the new wine
April 24, 2007

Maggie Rosen

Former Somerfield wine chief Angela Mount is turning her multi-million pound palate to coffee.

Mount – who made headlines around the world three years ago when Somerfield insured her taste buds for £10m (US$20million), saying at the time that they were 'vital to her job' - will advise Fairtrade and organic coffee company Percol.

She has also set up a wine advice website with ex-Western Wines MD Mike Paul, and also consults for the food and wine division of home tastings company Taste-In.

She will advise Percol on how to raise its consumer profile by addressing the parallels between coffee and wine.

'Until recently, people have tended to have a fairly simplistic view of coffee and this was mainly geared around strength,' said Mount. 'The wine industry has played a massive part in increasing people's experience of taste. Coffee is as diverse as wine. As with wine, soil, topography and climate produce different styles and flavours.'

Percol founder Brian Chapman, who also worked in the wine industry, has developed tasting notes for several Percol coffees that draw on the similarities between coffee and wine in terms of terroir and single origin status.

'Coffee farms are as intriguing and individual as vineyards,' he said 'I've always held a firm belief that coffee was more than just another beverage you kept in the cupboard.'

Starbucks tried this a year or so ago in California in what I thought was a ham-fisted way.  They very blatantly took wine terminology and applied it to their pre existing offerings, "coffee-muffin pairing" for instance.  It had all the authenticity of Dunkin' Donuts talking about the "mid-palate" of chocolate devils food with rainbow sprinkles...

One blogger I recently discovered, and like (despite his being a wine skeptic) puts it thusly:

More recently, I’ve also noted a trend towards coffee pairings. Some of it has come from Starbucks’ consumer education ads, while more experimental forms have included restaurant dinners featuring single origin coffees paired with each course of a meal. One example is the seven course pairing recently developed as a Coffee Dinner jointly between Navarre Restaurant and Stumptown Coffee Roasters of Portland, OR. Beyond the experimental novelty value, it forces the wine comparison too literally — with a mallot. Coffee pairing integrated into a meal plan makes about as much sense as pairing cigars with each course. And unless you’re Fidel Castro, that might not be too appealing…

I hope that Ms. Mount and Percol are able to take coffee down to what it means to consumers, how it fits into their lives and most importantly, distill a language and culture that already exist around the product into something communicable.  Coffee has a strong and diverse cultural relevance and history of it's own.  By embracing that relevance and history in a strong way, and owning it as an industry, "Big Coffee" can create a communication style of its own which will begin to resonate with consumers.

Let "Big Wine" be the one to steal customer insights from a new, non-alcohol source.  It would do both industries good, they have room to grow upward, and we could use a few new ideas.

-This also reminds me that I've occasionally heard talk of a coffee flavor wheel, akin to the UC Davis Wine Flavor Wheel, a tried and true tool...  See both below (the wine wheel is broken up into red vs. white for legibility).

Watch those en primeurs

Just a bit of a heads up...

Currently on Jancis Robinson's discussion board it seems that quite a few customers are experiencing difficulty getting their futures out of 1855.com.  That is worrying, especially since the stated reason for their sluggishness is that they've been growing too fast.  Hmmm.  I know that I prefer no unpleasant surprises from a firm that has taken prepayment from me, especially given the last few years' experiences with wine company fraud/mismanagement (Mayfair, Vintage Hallmark, etc.).

In my limited experience, it's worth paying a slight risk premium by going with someone reputable... I use K&L or Wine Club in the US (I've been their customer, they've been mine), and BBR in The UK.

Happy drinking!