Back to wine basics

There is, of course, no guarantee that the experience gained from consumer behaviour following the recession of 2007/2008 will be useful as a guide today, but it may be as good as anything else on offer right now.

And, when it comes to wine, one thing seems clear. The people pushing their trolleys around supermarkets are more likely to gravitate towards the familiar than the adventurous. A decade or so ago, UK supermarket buyers like Dan Jago of Tesco, who had once begged suppliers to bring them innovation, regretfully returned to the tried-and-tested. As an innovative producer ruefully said at the time “NPD – New Product Development – is dead”.

Packaging designers such as Kevin Shaw of Stranger & Stranger and Neil Tully of Amphora also found their clients were far less ready to commission labels that broke new ground. Spanish wines had to look Spanish and Bordeaux had to look like Bordeaux.

None of this is surprising. Wine buying – beyond the limited number of brand names and regions known to most wine drinkers – is inherently risky. People with a bit of spare cash may not be too bothered by the occasional disappointing red or white, but when every penny has to be put to good use, the choice is more likely to be between a trustworthy – or trustworthy-looking – bottle, or no bottle at all.

This is not good news for regions like Croatia and Uruguay that have been attracting interest recently, or for anyone whose brand isn’t already firmly established in a sector where brands are generally weak. The fallout from the last recession included the growth in the sales of well-packaged private-label wines from big supermarkets, and I see no reason for that not to happen again this time.

What are smaller, less familiar, less strongly branded producers to do? My answer – perhaps unsurprisingly – is to focus on who the most likely buyers of your wine are going to be and to address them directly and in terms that are most likely to have resonance with them.

Identifying and targeting potential customers is far easier than in the past; social media, has levelled the playing field. With a bit of effort, you can, for example identify which opinion formers are most likely to have an audience when talking about Croatian Babić or German Pinot Noir and avoid wasting time on the ones who won’t. You can even direct your attention to people who’ve holidayed in Croatia or unusuallly adventurous Pinotphiles.

But this is also the time to make life easier for risk-averse consumers. This may simply involve giving them more information; even apparently sophisticated technology such as augmented reality can be astonishingly affordable. Alternatively, now might be the time to consider sampler packs, including the test tubes that Jancis Robinson has spoken of approvingly.

And that’s my final point. While we can learn lessons from the last global slowdown, there are a lot more ways to apply them today than there were a decade ago.