My trouble, people often tell me when we are discussing the state of the industry, is that I treat wine as if it were one big category, instead of acknowledging that it’s made up of a lot of different segments. They’re 100 percent correct. There’s fine wine, jug wine, organic wine, single-estate wines, natural wines and appellation d’origine contrôleé wines and investment wines, to name just a few.
Almost all these have one thing in common: their appearance. They come in one of three basic shapes of 75cl bottle, with a label bearing words that are usually unintelligible to the uninitiated. Fronsac, Gaillac, Bergerac, Listrac-Médoc, Cadillac, Pontiac, Premier Cru, Grand Cru, Grand Cru Classé…
But one well-regarded organisation has decided to exclude even those variables from the equation. Tasters at the 30 or so competitions accredited by the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) are expected to judge flights of red, white, pink and sparkling wines without any indication of their provenance or grape variety. Segmentation is obviously not the kind of thing that has much appeal for the OIV.
Judges at non-OIV competitions are given at least some of this information, but their efforts still help to undermine another traditional tool of segmentation: price. In most other sectors, paying a bit more should get you something a bit better but, to judge by stories favoured by newspaper editors, the main reason for these competitions’ existence is to reveal that Aldi’s $15.00 Champagne, Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Chablis has won a shinier medal than a bottle with the same name on its label on sale elsewhere for $45.00.
Even when shoppers think they know the price — of a branded New Zealand Sauvignon or a Prosecco, for example — they will probably see it in their supermarket on offer for a much smaller or larger sum. In the UK, as a recent BBC survey discovered, some of the biggest brands such as Wolf Blass and Brancott Estate are discounted for as much as 45 percent of the year.
Provenance is just as unreliable. Back in the day, when it came to wine, at least you could be confident that French was better and Bordeaux best. But now, people who know about this kind of thing are happy to pay more for a red from Mendoza or Mendocino or Madagascar than one from the Médoc.
Screwcaps used to be a reliable indication of poor quality, but even that clue has been rendered useless by super-premium Australian and New Zealand producers who happily seal their top wines with aluminium closures. As far as most consumers are concerned, it’s as though McDonalds, Michelin-starred restaurants and factory canteens all had the same decor.
Food has always been far more clearly segmented. Everybody could see the difference between a dish prepared for a baron’s banquet and the bowl of gruel reserved for the pauper. Wine, however, was never segmented in the ways we understand today. Until 1860, British law forbade the sale of wine in bottles; for most people, for most of the time, wherever the grapes were grown, wine was a beverage that was drawn from a cask and served in a jug.
Old-style wine segmentation is well illustrated by Jane Austen who, in books and letters, refers to Madeira, Port, Constantia and, on an occasion when she was looking forward to welcoming dinner guests and sought to “drink French wine and be above vulgar economy”. Charles Dickens’ multitude of characters got through huge volumes of fermented grape juice, which he describes as “claret”, “light wine” and “rosy wine”, as well as simply wine.
Today’s wine drinkers would probably do a bit better than that. But not much. They can probably name a dozen or so grape varieties, regions or brands.
To put it bluntly, it’s little easier for a shopper standing before the supermarket “wall of wine” to make sense of its segmentation than for a winemaker to look at 100 wine drinkers and pick out the “adventurous connoisseurs”, “prestige-seeking traditionalists”, “social newbies”, “health sippers”, and “frugal occasionals” that form the pillars of Wine Intelligence’s segmentation of consumers.
So yes, I plead guilty to the charge of talking about wineas if it were a single commodity, for the simple reason that, for most consumers, most of the time, that’s how it appears. Brands such grande marque Champagnes, Barefoot, Mateus, Whispering Angel and Cloudy Bay and Chateau Latour — and those better-known appellations — are the exceptions to the rule. Until that changes, I can’t see any logical reason to alter my behaviour.
