This yesterday in Decanter
Angela Mount to make coffee the new wine
April 24, 2007Maggie 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).
Comments