Jerry Lockspeiser

Director at Positive News

In last month’s article I considered the potential for huge disruption in the UK wine trade from new rules that will allow the blending and processing of wines imported in bulk. They raise the possibility of making drinks that have all the taste and packaging characteristics of established wines while not being subject to the historic restrictions for making them.

For example, a product that looks and tastes like Prosecco might be made from a blend of grapes grown in La Mancha in Spain, Transylvania in Romania, and the Western Cape in South Africa, with a suitable dose of sugar and injection of carbon dioxide to fizz it up. Fancy a classic New Zealand style Sauvignon Blanc, a punchy Argentinian style Malbec or a fresh Italian style Pinot Grigio? How about a wine with as low an alcohol content as you want, right down to zero. No problem, your wish is our command. The master creators would be more akin to cooks creating a new recipe, or alchemists making a potion.

A key issue I wanted to raise was whether such a change would matter. My answer was that it depends on who you are, and what your business or consumer interests are. For some consumers and businesses it may offer great benefit; for others it may attack their values and commercial interests.

The potential product changes the new rules might unleash raise another fundamental issue for the wine trade and for wine commentators. This is one that touches on the quasi-religious objection to what is seen as dumbing down, the closely related issue of wine snobbery, and whether we are as democratic about other people’s taste preferences as we might think we are.

The quasi-religious view declares that there is only one true way to make ‘real wine’, and that all others are infidels. It goes something like this: wines should be made using natural, traditional methods by small individual growers pouring their life, soul and personalities into creating products that express themselves and the place they are made in. They must eschew modern inputs, technologies, and mechanics. There are many shades of this approach, just as there are many religious faiths, but they all sit in opposition to highly mechanised, large scale, semi-industrial, commercially driven wine businesses, and the wines they spew out by the lorry load.

This view focuses on who makes the wines, how they do it, and – sometimes – what they taste like. There is a danger that aligning with a particular category narrows the mind by excluding others. Natural wines are a good example: it is not unusual to hear strong opinions for or against, quickly leading to two polarised camps where all such wines are either terrific or awful, rather than the drinker judging each wine on its merits as they see them.

I had the same problem many decades ago with my original organic wine business. At the time the quality of organic wines was very variable, leading to some people trying one for the first time not liking the bottle they had bought, and deciding that they didn’t like organic wine per se.

The quasi-religious view, whether tied to a production concept such as natural, organic, or biodynamic, or the broader ‘real wine’ description, can at times approach the fundamentalist righteousness of the pious adhering to a literal interpretation of the Bible, Koran, or Torah. The problem with this, as is amply shown in the religious world, is that there are many interpretations of the faith, and everyone thinks theirs is the only true one.

Believing that a certain way of making wine is the only true way, and that other more commercial and corporate approaches are lesser, leads directly to wine snobbery. Not only the usual meaning of this phrase, with its images of public school educated toffs drinking top end Burgundy while looking down their noses at the Pinot Grigio slurping masses, but also the arrogance of the wine educated and the wine fashionistas disparaging the choice of lesser mortals.

Many of us in the UK wine trade have been talking for decades about putting ourselves in the shoes of the everyday wine drinker, about using our marketing and packaging to talk to them in a language they understand about things they relate to. But we still tend to think we know best, simply because we have greater product knowledge. Which leads to the issues of personal taste, choice, and democracy.

How many of the trade truly accept that someone has the right to prefer Blossom Hill, or 19 Crimes or any of the other mass market “coca cola” style wines to, for example, a well-known much pricier Bordeaux or Rioja?  We hear that people must learn to appreciate the qualities of these more expensive wines, that they need exposing to their delights, or – God forbid – that they need educating. Why is it not acceptable to prefer what they already like?

Countless blind tastings with seriously large numbers of participants have shown that on average slightly more people choose the cheaper, technically sweeter (aka fruity) wines to the much more expensive, harder to drink classics. Who is to say they are wrong?

In general the trade still thinks the right way to assess wines is to taste the liquid, usually blind, often in a cold laboratory like environment, while focusing on technical aspects of sugar, acidity, length, balance and so on. While these have their place, so too do the multiple factors that will affect the perception of the drinker, such as sounds, colours, mood, situation, memories, what the product looks like and who it is being drunk with (if anyone). It is the latter group of factors that carry most weight in the real world.

Plenty of studies show that most people cannot pick out their favourite brand of wine or beer in a blind tasting of peers. In others an expensive red was put in the bottle of a cheap wine and vice versa. Many preferred what they thought was the better, more expensive wine, but it wasn’t. The participants tasted with their eyes and assumptions rather than their buds.

So when someone declares that they enjoy a celebrity branded wine, who are we to say they are being tricked into drinking something inferior? They are surely able to make their own decision, utilising all the inputs that affect their perception to maximise their enjoyment, including affinity with the celeb.

Our tendency is to want to try and make them ‘trade up’ to something ‘better’. There is something inherently patronising about the idea of trading up, as though we know better than they do what they will like. We may like the wine more, because we like that style better, and to make that style costs more (or maybe the producer/distributor/retailer profits more), but just because we prefer it doesn’t mean they must. Nor does the fact that it is more expensive mean it must be ‘better’.

The revolution in wine quality over the last 30 years has made cheaper wines far more appealing to the casual drinker than previously. You don’t need to pay a lot to get a decent clean, fruity wine to enjoy. We may want people to pay more (aka trade up) because we make more money at the higher price points. That is an entirely acceptable business aim, and one that should focus our minds on creating a product that people feel is worth spending more money on. This is especially challenging when the consumer’s interest is the opposite – they want us to produce wines they enjoy hugely without needing to pay more.

The area of personal choice and whether one wine is ‘better’ than another is fraught with complexity. If a clear, detailed descriptive benchmark for a specific style of wine is created and understood – a Gold Standard for that style – then people can taste a wine and assess how it compares against that Standard, at least to them, with their own individual taste interpretation. What the criteria are that the Gold Standard encapsulates can be anything those creating it agree on. The concept of ‘best’  can thus vary according to culture, geography, and preference.

Without such a standard, there is little sense in saying that one wine is better than another. People taste differently, have different likes and dislikes, and experience the taste of the same wine differently at times and in different contexts. The wine loved on holiday that is so disappointing at home is a common experience.

So let’s return to the new AI type wines that we may see in 2024, made from multi origin imported bulk and processed to mimic the style of popular wine types. How will these issues play out if they appear on the market? I am left wondering about ducks:

“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”

This article was first published in harpers.co.uk