Short-term thinking or Catch-22? 10 September 2007

Is it a good idea for a serious wine to change its style to early-drinking?

From Vieilles Vignes:

Joseph Heller wrote the classic Catch-22, portraying young Yossarian conflicted in war as a bomber who does not want to partake in this malady. Yossarian constantly finds himself in situations where he has a damned if I do and damned if I don’t option.

As we are all aware, the wine industry is not exactly the place to invest your nest egg (nor is the New York stock exchange for that matter). But some parties are doing well, as they deserve to, with ‘superior’ product and / or superior marketing or sales effort.

Doing the rounds of some eating establishments, as one does, I tried a wine or two for the first time in four years. Shock and horror: the style of the wine has totally changed… The question is: has the said producer (unnamed) become so good at flogging his produce that he is (was) forced to change his wine style altogether to make his (her) flagship wine a lovely drink at only a touch over two years old?

Now, I understand economics and you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, a sale is a sale after all. Also, I am not singing the song about sticking to the romance and tradition of wine making. My question is this, the quality and style of the wine was surely the reason it was a choice for many establishments. Now demand has outstripped supply, and the style and production method has changed, to keep up with the way-too-young vintages that are deemed drinkable.

COMMENTS

From Gerry Marlo:
Short-term opportunism and long-term commerciality: Many of these 'superior' producers have their marketing efforts firmly placed above their product's quality. Not a bad hand to play in the game of commodities. So is wine becoming just another commodity? I hope not, but it surely seems that way. In reality these marketers are creating brands not labels, and the essence of a brand is that you the consumer are not meant to think. They do that for you. ‘Buy this wine, the Wine Speculator gave it 95, it has so many medals the bottle sparkles like a Christmas tree, Bobby Parker jnr is still trembling with multiple orgasms after tasting it, and oh yeah, we have found the ultimate expression of terroir’... bollocks!

The wine media is a circus, thriving off hype, and these little Jimmy Swaggarts are making the most of it. As a consequence the wine itself has taken a back seat, an Aston Martin with a 'volla' engine under the bonnet. Taste some of these wines after 5 years and see how long they have lasted, some with seriously obvious faults (alc, brett, virused vines), not to mention the lack of complexity. I'm looking for a wine, not a TV show.

From Poor Tom:
You need to do more than just read between the lines when it comes to the wine industry. Unfortunately the problem comes in with the concept ‘wine’ - the marketing chap thinks money; the winemaker thinks labour, love, soul and passion (mind you not all of them and actually really very few of them still think that way); and the consumer thinks bargains, stars, awards and ‘tonight I get lucky!’.

It's sort of a vicious cycle in which someone will always get the very short end of the vine.  Wine is everything and the bag of chips - but many folk forget about this or are incapable of fathoming the concept and some are taught/forced not to think about it too much. The eventual loser in the battle between marketing-wine-consumer is the wine.

And for those of us who've thrown in the towel, sit back 'n relax and have a beer!