Thoughts from Day 2 of the London International Wine Fair

First things first: despite being smaller in size and - seemingly - audience, the London International Wine Fair was a busier event than I and many others expected. Some exhibitors said they had had a very good couple of days, though, worryingly for the organisers, so did some producers who exhibited last year and merely turned up this time. As one said. "We saw all the same people, and saved a fortune".

The imbalance of exhibiting countries was also striking: huge stands for Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia (all of whose wines are invisible in the UK) and a vastly reduced one for Australia and none at all for New Zealand.

Also striking was the change in the role of the event. Five years ago, people came to the LIWF to find out what they might be seeing in their countries today. Now, those same people are noting how the UK has slipped from being a leader into the role of follower. Today, when it comes to packaging, Finland is taking the lead, while wine styles are being pioneered in the US. British professionals may say, that they don't want brands with names like Cupcake and Flipflop; that they don't think Moscato (an 18-month old soaraway success on the other side of the Atlantic) will work here; and that British consumers won't take to sweet red blends... But there is nothing on offer in London to suggest that the UK has any fresh alternatives to these US trends. The message from the LIWF is "business as usual" which, when you consider how little money is being made in the UK wine business, is hardly encouraging.

Hopefully Tesco's Dragon's Den stand and, our WINESTARS initiative which takes off tomorrow at 13.30 UK time have added a note of freshness to the proceedings. I'm certainly excited by the quality of the WINESTARS entries, the passion shown by their producers and their readiness to fly across the world at short notice to take part. With any luck, their efforts will be repaid with commercially rewarding listings.

The irrelevance of the country and region of origin of a wine (to most people)

The following post is a slightly amended version of one I posted yesterday headed "The irrelevance of terroir (to most people)."  Many of the nearly 1000 readers took the reference to "terroir" very literally, so I'm reposting it here, replacing that term with "origin" or similar and put all of these in italics. I think and hope the meaning will be unchanged.


How much do you care about the origin of what you eat and drink? How much does anyone really care about it? I know for a fact that Heston Blumenthal has a patchy interest in it, as do some highly distinguished members of the wine industry in places like Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne as well as the heads of several award winning wine companies.. Whatever they might say to the contrary. As for normal consumers, even the ones who take a keen interest in what they eat and drink, pay it very little attention.

Now, I know that even by my standards this is a contentious statement, but I have tangible evidence to support my case.

So, here goes. The country and region where it comes from is undeniably crucially - influential in the way a wine tastes. 

But this factor is also not limited to wine. Malt whiskies are influenced by the water from the local spring; coffee and tea to the humidity and altitude of the places where the beans and leaves are grown. Chocolate, cheese, honey and perhaps most clearly of all, olive oil, all bear the imprint of the place they come from. Olive oil comes top of this list because, as Chiara Planeta who is passionately involved with the award-winning oils produced by her family company in Sicily, points out, if you make it honestly, there's almost no human intervention. You simply harvest the olives - earlier rather than later, ideally - and extract the oil as quickly as possible after they leave the tree.

Fine olive oil is, in its way, as fine and noble a product as any wine, and just as ancient. And most people take zero interest in where it comes from. When I say "most people", I'm not talking about ignorant British or American consumers for whom olive oil is a foreign ingredient; I'm talking about the Sicilians who do their shopping down the road from the olive groves and use huge amounts of olive oil every day. Not only do they not take any interest in which part of Sicily their oil comes from, most don't even really care whether the stuff on their salad is actually Italian. Most of the oils on sale in the two supermarkets I visited have brand names like Bertolli and are bottled in Italy but generally hail from groves in Spain or Greece or Portugal. In each of the shops, Sicilian oil represented a tiny minority of what was on offer. Sicilian housewives evidently choose their oil on the basis of its house style and price. In one little shop in a small village, there were two oils on the shelf: a Bertolli at five euros and a Sicilian for four euros fifty. The shopkeeper approved of my choice of the local oil, but evidently still needs to stock the global brand.

    

This focus on style is even more evident elsewhere in Italian food shops. Italians care about coffee. And I'd say they probably care more about it than people in many other countries. But, here again, they show no interest in where it comes from. What they buy is the brand - Illy, Lavazza, Hag etc - and the level of strength which is helpfully indicated in at least one set of shops, by a set of colour codes. A British shopper used to the Costa Rican, Colombian and Brazilian coffees on offer in their local store would be staggered at the absence of any reference to provenance. What Sicilian shoppers buy is various versions of what Anglo-Saxons know as "Italian-blend".

 

The wall of coffee - and the Lavazza reference to its multi-country sourcing

I did see one reference to country: almost every Italian store has Lipton's English Breakfast Tea. Sadly, I was unable to discover precisely where in these lovely islands, the tea plantations might have been situated.

Now, at this point, I can hear a number of people angrily pointing out that their Italian friends DO care about tea and coffee and olive oil, and that the people who shop in supermarkets are just the ignorant masses. To which I would counter that these are precisely the same masses we expect to pay attention to wine terroir.

But here I return to my original contentious contention that a great many people whose livelihoods depend on a belief in where a wine comes from have absolutely zero interest in the way regionality applies to coffee. I know this because they have demonstrated it by their actions: they have spent their money - a lot of money in some cases - on a Nespresso machine - or one of its competitors.

Now, for anyone who has led a sheltered life, I'll briefly explain that these are devices that were developed at huge expense by Nestle to enable ordinary mortals to produce espresso coffee of a guaranteed style, quality and consistency. The system is highly ingenious: the coffee comes in little metal pods (“capsules”) whose colours and shape show the same kind of design flair as anything to come out of Apple or Bang & Olufssen. All you have to do to be sure of getting your desired cup of caffeine (or decaffeinated, naturally) is to choose the colour that relates to the style you want, pop it into the machine and press the button. Buying a Nespresso machine is a little like getting married: the expression “forsaking all others” springs to mind as one realizes that, until the patents run out, the only place one can buy pods that fit in it is directly from Nespresso shops or online.

The range is not huge. Just three of the pods are described as “Pure Origin” – Dulsão do Brasil, Indriya from India and Rosabaya de Colombia. The others - Ristretto, Arpeggio, Roma, Decaffeinato Intenso, Livanto, Capriccio, Volluto, Cosi, Fortissio Lungo, Vivalto Lungo, Finezzo Lungo and Decaffeinato Lungo – could come from anywhere coffee is grown. They conform to the explanation on an Italian Lavazza packet that the origin may vary in order to maintain the consistency of the product.

For a while, I tried to keep a rough tally of the number of Nespresso machines I encountered and the places where I found them. But after I hit my fourth Bordeaux chateau, third Champagne house and fifth head of a UK wine company, I gave up. They are becoming ubiquitous, with sales rising by 20% per year over the last decade. According to Nestle, over 21% of all espresso machines are now Nespressos, while a number of alternatives such as Sara Lee’s Senseo and Kraft’s Tassimo all make their own inroads into the tradition of selecting one’s own coffee from a range on a retailer’s shelf.

I must confess to having rather mixed feelings about these machines. I don't like the idea of having to buy all my coffee from one producer; I don't like being restricted to a limited range; I don’t like the fact that they cost up to thrice what one might pay for good coffee purchased by the bag; and I don’t like the fact that all those pods have to be recycled - or sent to landfill.

On the other hand I am really rather grateful for the fact that almost everywhere I go, people offer me pretty good coffee, and don't have to go to any great trouble to prepare it.

Now I know that Nespresso machines are, in the words of one coffee lover, treated as the devil's work by his fellow enthusiasts. And I know that there is a keen band of people out there who care passsionately about the coffee they drink, choosing their beans with care and possibly even doing the roasting themselves. But these are an infinitely tiny minority of coffee drinkers.

Most people appreciate the simplicity of buying by style and colour. So how does this apply to wine? Well, people are increasingly purchasing their wines by brand rather than country (think of Lindemans, Blossom Hill and Ogio in the UK and think of all those bottles of“Californian” branded wines whose contents are sourced from Chile or France.

So far, they haven’t often been offered the chance to use a colour code when choosing their wine, but I can see this option developing too. I have recently done some interesting consultancy work with the Australian brand McGuigan on a range of colour-coded “Classic” wines that applies Nespresso thinking and the line "What's your style?". Some 9,000 people scanned a QR Code in a magazine - and just under 3,000 very happily shared their tastes for “fresh”, "spicy", "intense" etc. The McGuigan wines are from Australia, but I'd be surprised if a similar concept could not be successfully applied by a multi-national brand such as Ogio.

The place something comes from is either important - commercially speaking - or it's not. And, judging by the way people, ranging from Sicilian housewives to Bordeaux chateau owners vote with their wallets, there are plenty of instances in which it really does not matter at all. And least anybody suggest the contrary, the argument that origin matters more to wine than to, say, coffee is intellectually indefensible. It's like saying that one can be prejudiced against a person's religion but not her skin colour. 

Traditionalist wine folk will hate this theme and say that people really should care about where a wine comes from, but I’d recommend that they wake up and smell the (origin-irrelevant) coffee.


In response to comments that this post lacks a conclusion, I've decided to add one here:


People like me have historically applauded retailers for the diversity of their ranges - and lamented when they, and producers, have moved towards simplification. We have wilfully overlooked the fear that the "Wall of Wine" engenders in a huge number of consumers. I now believe that we have been talking to ourselves (an endemic problem in our industry). Perhaps it is time - at the more basic, daily-drinking end of the market - for producers and retailers to embrace options such as doing away with vintage variation and introducing colour/style coding as a means of making daily drinking wine as easy to buy as coffee,

The irrelevance of terroir (to most people)

How much do you care about terroir? How much does anyone really care about terroir? Now, just to make sure we are talking about the same thing, my definition of 'terroir' includes the soil, aspect, altitude and microclimate that all essentially contribute to individuality. And, if we agree on that, I know for a fact that Heston Blumenthal has a patchy interest in it, as do some highly distinguished members of the wine industry in places like Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne as well as the heads of several award winning wine companies.. Whatever they might say to the contrary. As for normal consumers, even the ones who take a keen interest in what they eat and drink, pay it very little attention.

Now, I know that even by my standards this is a contentious statement, but I have tangible evidence to support my case.

So, here goes. Terroir definitely exists and is undeniably crucially - influential in the way a wine tastes. It is not - despite what some chauvinist Frenchmen have suggested - exclusive to France. Vineyards in places from Turkey to Tasmania have individual, influential terroirs. With me so far?

But terroir is also not limited to wine. Malt whiskies are influenced by the water from the local spring; coffee and tea to the humidity and altitude of the places where the beans and leaves are grown. Chocolate, cheese, honey and perhaps most clearly of all, olive oil, all bear the imprint of the place they come from. Olive oil comes top of this list because, as Chiara Planeta who is passionately involved with the award-winning oils produced by her family company in Sicily, points out, if you make it honestly, there's almost no human intervention. You simply harvest the olives - earlier rather than later, ideally - and extract the oil as quickly as possible after they leave the tree.

Fine olive oil is, in its way, as fine and noble a product as any wine, and just as ancient. And most people take zero interest in its terroir. When I say "most people", I'm not talking about ignorant British or American consumers for whom olive oil is a foreign ingredient; I'm talking about the Sicilians who do their shopping down the road from the olive groves and use huge amounts of olive oil every day. Not only do they not take any interest in which part of Sicily their oil comes from, most don't even really care whether the stuff on their salad is actually Italian. Most of the oils on sale in the two supermarkets I visited have brand names like Bertolli and are bottled in Italy but generally hail from groves in Spain or Greece or Portugal. In each of the shops, Sicilian oil represented a tiny minority of what was on offer. Sicilian housewives evidently choose their oil on the basis of its house style and price. In one little shop in a small village, there were two oils on the shelf: a Bertolli at five euros and a Sicilian for four euros fifty. The shopkeeper approved of my choice of the local oil, but evidently still needs to stock the global brand.

  

This focus on style is even more evident elsewhere in Italian food shops. Italians care about coffee. And I'd say they probably care more about it than people in many other countries. But, here again, they show no interest in where it comes from. What they buy is the brand - Illy, Lavazza, Hag etc - and the level of strength which is helpfully indicated in at least one set of shops, by a set of colour codes. A British shopper used to the Costa Rican, Colombian and Brazilian coffees on offer in their local store would be staggered at the absence of any reference to provenance. What Sicilian shoppers buy is various versions of what Anglo-Saxons know as "Italian-blend".

The wall of coffee - and the Lavazza reference to its multi-country sourcing

I did see one reference to country: almost every Italian store has Lipton's English Breakfast Tea. Sadly, I was unable to discover precisely where in these lovely islands, the tea plantations might have been situated.

Now, at this point, I can hear a number of people angrily pointing out that their Italian friends DO care about tea and coffee and olive oil, and that the people who shop in supermarkets are just the ignorant masses. To which I would counter that these are precisely the same masses we expect to pay attention to wine terroir.

But here I return to my original contentious contention that a great many people whose livelihoods depend on a belief in wine terroir have absolutely zero interest in the way regionality applies to coffee. I know this because they have demonstrated it by their actions: they have spent their money - a lot of money in some cases - on a Nespresso machine - or one of its competitors.

Now, for anyone who has led a sheltered life, I'll briefly explain that these are devices that were developed at huge expense by Nestle to enable ordinary mortals to produce espresso coffee of a guaranteed style, quality and consistency. The system is highly ingenious: the coffee comes in little metal pods (“capsules”) whose colours and shape show the same kind of design flair as anything to come out of Apple or Bang & Olufssen. All you have to do to be sure of getting your desired cup of caffeine (or decaffeinated, naturally) is to choose the colour that relates to the style you want, pop it into the machine and press the button. Buying a Nespresso machine is a little like getting married: the expression “forsaking all others” springs to mind as one realizes that, until the patents run out, the only place one can buy pods that fit in it is directly from Nespresso shops or online.

The range is not huge. Just three of the pods are described as “Pure Origin” – Dulsão do Brasil, Indriya from India and Rosabaya de Colombia. The others - Ristretto, Arpeggio, Roma, Decaffeinato Intenso, Livanto, Capriccio, Volluto, Cosi, Fortissio Lungo, Vivalto Lungo, Finezzo Lungo and Decaffeinato Lungo – could come from anywhere coffee is grown. They conform to the explanation on an Italian Lavazza packet that the origin may vary in order to maintain the consistency of the product.

For a while, I tried to keep a rough tally of the number of Nespresso machines I encountered and the places where I found them. But after I hit my fourth Bordeaux chateau, third Champagne house and fifth head of a UK wine company, I gave up. They are becoming ubiquitous, with sales rising by 20% per year over the last decade. According to Nestle, over 21% of all espresso machines are now Nespressos, while a number of alternatives such as Sara Lee’s Senseo and Kraft’s Tassimo all make their own inroads into the tradition of selecting one’s own coffee from a range on a retailer’s shelf.

I must confess to having rather mixed feelings about these machines. I don't like the idea of having to buy all my coffee from one producer; I don't like being restricted to a limited range; I don’t like the fact that they cost up to thrice what one might pay for good coffee purchased by the bag; and I don’t like the fact that all those pods have to be recycled - or sent to landfill.

On the other hand I am really rather grateful for the fact that almost everywhere I go, people offer me pretty good coffee, and don't have to go to any great trouble to prepare it.

Now I know that Nespresso machines are, in the words of one coffee lover, treated as the devil's work by his fellow enthusiasts. And I know that there is a keen band of people out there who care passsionately about the coffee they drink, choosing their beans with care and possibly even doing the roasting themselves. But these are an infinitely tiny minority of coffee drinkers.

Most people appreciate the simplicity of buying by style and colour. So how does this apply to wine? Well, people are increasingly purchasing their wines by brand rather than country (think of Lindemans, Blossom Hill and Ogio in the UK and think of all those bottles of“Californian” branded wines whose contents are sourced from Chile or France.

So far, they haven’t often been offered the chance to use a colour code when choosing their wine, but I can see this option developing too. I have recently done some interesting consultancy work with the Australian brand McGuigan on a range of colour-coded “Classic” wines that applies Nespresso thinking and the line "What's your style?". Some 9,000 people scanned a QR Code in a magazine - and just under 3,000 very happily shared their tastes for “fresh”, "spicy", "intense" etc. The McGuigan wines are from Australia, but I'd be surprised if a similar concept could not be successfully applied by a multi-national brand such as Ogio.

The place something comes from is either important - commercially speaking - or it's not. And, judging by the way people, ranging from Sicilian housewives to Bordeaux chateau owners vote with their wallets, there are plenty of instances in which it really does not matter at all. And least anybody suggest the contrary, the argument that terroir matters more to wine than to, say, coffee is intellectually indefensible. It's like saying that one can be prejudiced against a person's religion but not her skin colour. 

Traditionalist wine folk will hate this theme and say that people really should care about teroir, but I’d recommend that they wake up and smell the (origin-irrelevant) coffee.


In response to comments that this post lacks a conclusion, I've decided to add one here:


People like me have historically applauded retailers for the diversity of their ranges - and lamented when they, and producers, have moved towards simplification. We have wilfully overlooked the fear that the "Wall of Wine" engenders in a huge number of consumers. I now believe that we have been talking to ourselves (an endemic problem in our industry). Perhaps it is time - at the more basic, daily-drinking end of the market - for producers and retailers to embrace options such as doing away with vintage variation and introducing colour/style coding as a means of making daily drinking wine as easy to buy as coffee,

Why ask why? (an offering from Seth Godin's Blog)

Why ask Why?

"Why?" is the most important question, not asked nearly enough.
Hint: "Because I said so," is not a valid answer.

• Why does it work this way?
• Why is that our goal?
• Why did you say no?
• Why are we treating people differently?
• Why is this our policy?
• Why don't we enter this market?
• Why did you change your mind?
• Why are we having this meeting?
• Why not?

All relevant to the wine industry, a place where Whies of every size are slaughtered daily - if they even get to be born. 

Looking back... four decades of vinous evolution

An adapted version of a piece written for the 500th edition of Delwine in India)

I have to pinch myself sometimes to think that I can remember when colour televisions, calculators and mobile phones and even fax machines were all expensive novelties that I used to admire in the homes of other, wealthier or simply more adventurous, families.

  

Mobile phone and Wolf Blass Cab - both 1983 vintage

Another novelty, I remember from those early days – of the mid 1970s – was ‘real’ French wine. This was the time when Britain became – at least nominally – part of Europe and subject to its vinous legislation. Suddenly, the days of selling Spanish Sauternes, and of bottling the same North African red as Beaujolais, Nuits St Georges and Chateauneuf du Pape were over. The experience of discovering the real flavours of these wines, was rather like the switch from silent movies to the talkies. It was also, I now realise, a crucial evolutionary phase in the modern history of wine.

Britain in those days genuinely was at the heart of the wine world and books like Hugh Johnson’s World Wine Atlas influenced millions of wine drinkers internationally. Early editions of that book and Johnson’s similarly ground-breaking Pocket Book also reflected a second and far more important seismic shift in the wine world. Steven Spurrier’s Judgment of Paris tasting in 1976 was like the moment when the pebble hit the water: it took a decade or so for the ripples to reach the shore. The ripples most obviously included a new wave of Californian wines produced by ambitious and confident young winemakers who now knew that anything Bordeaux and Burgundy could do, they could do better.

But those novel ‘varietal’ Californian Cabernets and Chardonnays were only part of the picture. In the mid 1980s, Australia also began to export its own examples of these styles, along with unfamiliar stuff labelled as ‘Shiraz’ and ‘Semillon’. In Britain we gave the Aussies a warmer welcome than the Americans, partly because the wines were more affordable (the Californians seemed keen to emulate the Bordelais pricing policy as well as their winemaking) and because the producers took themselves less seriously and were readier to share a pint than to force us to compare their wines with first growths in smart restaurants. Our British cheapskate tendencies were even better catered for by a torrent of Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon produced by young Californian winemakers as part of a complex political barter deal involving Pepsi.

Hard on the heels of these newcomers, there arrived Sauvignon Blancs from New Zealand, and great value modern reds from other unexpected places ranging from Chile to Corbieres in France and la Mancha in Spain. Within a decade, wine lists that had once been limited to the classic regions of France, plus a few hocks, Chiantis and Rioja included efforts from continents with little or no wine history. The map of the wine world had, quite literally, been redrawn.

'Wine and foreign wine' - the traditional chauvinist French way of 

viewing the subject was once shared by other countries

I was at the heart of all this because, with Charles Metcalfe, I had launched Wine Magazine in 1983 and the International Wine Challenge the following year. Among the people who most embraced our new competition were British supermarkets which had only recently begun to treat wine seriously and were looking for ways to establish their credibility. What could be better than shelves full of medal-winning bottles?

The growth in the power of these supermarkets led to another phenomenon: discounting. Selling wine cheaply as a means of attracting customers who would buy other more profitable goods became part of their strategy. Interestingly, however, this was a uniquely UK trend. Nowhere else in the world focused so single-mindedly on low-price promotions. Another point of difference is apparent in the wines on the shelves as one moves from one country to another. British supermarkets rarely offer much of real interest to wine enthusiasts looking for great, memorable bottles. In China and Russia – and at the seasonal Foires a Vins – in France, their counterparts offer first growths as well as the humblest fare. In the US, Costco sells car tyres a few metres away from fairly priced bottles of Haut Brion and Opus One.

Wine in Costco

In Britain, we overlooked or, more accurately, underestimated the impact of the third evolutionary change. Robert Parker’s marking system arrived in the right place - the US market - at precisely the right time. People with no wine experience or knowledge, but with money to spend and a yen for sophistication leaped on the 100-point scale with glee. On the eastern seaboard of the Atlantic, we looked down on its simplicity and the fact that it was associated with one set of tastebuds. What we missed was the fact that Parker – and then Spectator and Enthusiast – points fitted perfectly into a culture where – unlike the UK – showing-off is culturally acceptable. Britons tend to apologize for their own success and take pains to avoid offending others; arriving at a dinner party with a £100 bottle of wine is not seen as generous, it might embarrass the host who has nothing of a similar quality to offer.  So British dinner parties are full of middle class people boasting of how cheaply they bought a red ‘that’s from a vineyard just over the road from Chateau Latour, and made by a distant cousin of a Rothschild, and remarkable at only £6.99 from Tesco’. In America, the challenge lies in how close to the 100-point score each of the guests’ and the host’s bottles can get.

In many ways, the Parker scale and its essentially egalitarian nature has probably provoked the greatest and most enduring changes in the wine world. In the Old Days, if you weren’t lucky or rich enough to have vines in a bit of Bordeaux that was ennobled in 1855, or a Burgundy Grand Cru you were doomed to a life as part of a lower caste. Today, just as a billionaire in a corner of the former Soviet Union can realistically set out to buy himself a world-class soccer team, a vineyard owner in Uruguay or India can employ Michel Roland or one of his successors in the sincere hope of making a wine that can score as much as a top Bordeaux.

To the arrival of new wine producing countries and new ways of rating and retailing them, has now been added a huge new factor: the explosion of the number of markets that now drink serious wines. Most coverage of this aspect focuses, perhaps inevitably, on the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – but producers are increasingly aware of the value of a long list of previously overlooked markets ranging from Azerbaijan to Vietnam. All of these countries now have well-heeled wine drinkers who may end up competing to buy the same bottle of desirable red or white.

This has contributed to the last of my set of changes: the extraordinary polarisation of the wine market. A decade or so ago, people who regularly enjoyed modest Bordeaux could at least imagine drinking a wine from a big name chateau perhaps once or twice in their lives. Now, with twelve bottles of Lafite 2009 costing more than a brand new Renault Clio Sport Tourer car, that prospect no longer has a place in any normal mortal’s dreams. At over $1000 a bottle, first growth Bordeaux is no longer a drink; it’s a luxury good, subject to the same rules as the $10,000 handbag. Or it’s an investment.

 

12 bottles of this buy one of these...  

Are these prices sustainable? Or are they part of a bubble that’s bound to burst? My guess is that they’re both. At some stage there will almost certainly be some kind of correction in the market, but over the long term, they will bounce back as new billionaires across the globe fill their recently acquired cellars and the wine fridges on their yachts.

At the other end of the scale, something else is happening. To the dismay of many wine traditionalists, wine is becoming increasingly industrialised and internationalised. Major retailing groups like to deal with small numbers of big suppliers, and they react to the fact that consumers now often buy wine in the same way they buy coffee: by style. If an Italian producer can’t offer a Pinot Grigio in the volume and at the price the retailer is looking for, the would-be buyer will simply source it elsewhere – quite possibly in nearby countries like Hungary or Romania. Just take a look at some of the Pinot Noirs on offer in the US. As a San Francisco Chronicle article revealed in 2010, bottles of this variety bearing the labels of such well-known Californian brands as Beringer, Meridian, Pepperwood Grove and Redwood Creek actually contained wine from Languedoc (France), Pavia (Italy), Valle Central (Chile), Rheinhessen (Germany). Next year, the labels will look the same, but the countries could be quite different.

  

compare and contrast the origins of these wines

I have deliberately omitted 'natural' wine from this list of evolutionary changes because I'm pretty sure that they will be little more than a footnote in the history of wine. But I do believe that sustainable agriculture will become increasingly treated as normal across the planet. 

  

Which wine brands do YOU most admire - your chance to argue with the Drinks Intl list

Drinks International's Top 50 Most Admired Wine Brands, selected by "Sixty members of the global wine community... including Peter McCombie MW, Peter Marks MW, Tuomas Meriluoto MW, Kym Milne MW and Lynne Sherriff MW."

It's always fun to pick holes in lists like this - that's what they're for.

This one feels a bit tired, but then maybe it has to reflect brands that are standing the test of time. Also, "admire" may mean different things to different people. Japan-based friends have also suggested (fairly in my view) that it's very UK-centric. If one considers the US market, Barefoot is infinitely more important - and admirable - than Jacob's Creek, for example. Are KJ, Ridge, Fetzer, Gallo, Woodbridge and Mondavi really the only other US brands worth including? Where's Louis Jadot? Why no Cloudy Bay? Or Icewine?

I'm presuming that Champagne, sherry and port were excluded...

I've highlighted some of the most questionable (in my mind) entries. 

1 Concha y Toro

2 Torres

3 Antinori

4 Penfolds

5 Jacob's Creek (Not strong in US)

6 Kendall Jackson

7 Michel Chapoutier

8 Guigal

9 Vega Sicilia

10 Chateau Margaux

11 Duboeuf

12 JP Chenet

13 Ridge

14 Brancott Estate

15 Marques de Riscal

16 Chateau Ste Michelle

17 Oyster Bay

18 Cheval Blanc

19 McGuigan (Very UK/Australian)

20 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti

21 Campo Viejo

22 Cloudy Bay

23 Chateau Lafite

24 Fetzer

25 Marques de Caceres

26 Blue Nun

27 KWV

28 Robert Mondavi

29 Santa Rita

30 Chateau Haut-Brion

31Villa Maria

32 Barefoot

33 Chateau d'Yquem

34 Faustino

35 Gallo

36 Chateau Le Pin

37 Lindeman's

38 O Fournier

39 Chateau Mouton Rothschild

40 Chateau Petrus

41 Undurruga

42 Woodbridge

43 Paul Jaboulet Aine

44 Babich

45 Dr Loosen

46 Wither Hills

47 Oxford Landing

48 Nobilo

49 Black Tower

50 Yellowtail

Now, it's your turn to edit the list! Comments please

Let's talk dirty... Thoughts on the real economics of wine

My most recent post bemoaning the lack of innovation among wine producers attracted a number of responses that seemed to imply that there is no real need to do anything new. Or that experimentation is intrinsically somehow undesirable. For one person, "non-traditional varieties, new barriques, cement tanks, or open ferments...are all reinventions that go in and out of fashion". Another said that he/she had "no desire to follow the current wine world's fascination with the next new shiny object...".

In other words, we are all on the right path and have no need to deviate from it... 

In the 19th century, that was precisely the attitude of the doctors at Vienna National Hospital when one of their colleagues, a Hungarian called Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, proposed a simple way to reduce the incidence of fatal septicaemia that was killing one in eight patients in the maternity wards. Semmelweis's suggestion was that the doctors should wash their hands before examining the patients. This now-obvious notion went down very badly, because the medical establishment refused to accept that they might be responsible for spreading disease, despite Semmelweis's proof that he could almost banish infection from the wards. He lost his job, had a nervous breakdown and died in an asylum aged 47.

So what has Dr Semmelweis got to do with wine? Well, by the standards of basic economics some high profile parts of the wine industry are in pretty urgent need of innovative surgical intervention, but the wine establishment's response to lateral thinking seems to have much in common with those doctors in Vienna.

The average bulk price of AOC Bordeaux is currently just over €1 per litre. In other words, producers who tend their vineyards for 12 months in all weathers, pick the grapes and crush and ferment them in the most famous wine region in the world get just €0.75 per bottle for their troubles, or a legally-sanctioned maximum of €5,500 per hectare. (Based on regional limits of 55hl/ha). This figure has to cover all material and labour costs and, as the producers frequently point out, is entirely unsustainable.

As Bernard Magrez creator of the best-selling Malesan Bordeaux brand (which he sensibly sold to Castel) and now owner of estates such as Pape-Clement and Fombrauge explained to me recently, the economics simply don't work. These estates used, he says, to be run by a couple with the help of a son or daughter and an employee. Today, there's no money for the employee; the wife has sought at least part-time work somewhere else to bring in a little cash and the only reason the next generation is around to give any kind of hand is the high level of French unemployment. Meeting the monthly bills is a struggle; but what happens when vines have to be replanted, the press or tractor need to be replaced or a hole in the roof repaired? Bordeaux has quietly lost around 10,000 independent estates; at least another 5,000 will probably be lucky to make it to 2020.

Bordeaux is merely a high profile example. There are plenty of other areas facing similar or worse situations: just look at the low prices at which delicious wines are now being sold by distressed producers in Spain. Buying cheap European wine without considering the financial viability of the people who made it is a little different to blindly filling your basket with clothes and toys produced in Asian sweatshops. The more canny Asians can see a way out of their situation. Incomes in China have risen sufficiently in recent years for manufacturers and their clients to have to subcontract production to lower-wage countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. 


Owners of wine brands are now doing the same, with labels such as Lindemans, Ogio and Blossom Hill being used for wines produced in a growing number of countries. If your Cabernet or Sauvignon doesn't fit the bill in style, quality and, crucially, price terms  there's a producer somewhere else in the world who's making one that does. And the person who is going to drink the wine often really doesn't know or care where it came from.


Winegrowers in many of Europe's classic regions are in no position to subcontract. They have to produce and sell an annual crop of grapes for whatever the market will pay for it.


In Minervois, where we work with Celliers Jean d'Alibert to produce Le Grand Noir and Greener Planet, bulk prices for the regional appellation are even lower than Bordeaux. Hugh Ryman, Kevin Shaw and I didn't apply any form of alchemy when we started to produce our "shiny new objects" there. All we did was sidestep the Minervois rules and opt to make Vin de Pays (or IGP as the category is now known) by blending varieties in ways that were not traditional for the region, but tasted delicious. Kevin's labels were not traditional either, and nor was the introduction of PET bottles for the Greener Planet Sustainable wines. And least traditional of all were the prices importers in around a dozen other countries were ready to pay for the wine.

 

Without going into details, I'd just say that these are up to €1 more per bottle than  the producers might have expected for their Minervois. And when you consider that, over the last seven years, we've built sales up to over a million bottles per year, this adds up to rather a lot of money for the winery and the growers. The wines have also won a few awards and been listed by restaurants such as Marcus Wareing's Gilbert Scott in the new St Pancras Hotel (below). 

I love working in the Minervois. The countryside is glorious, and the growers some of the finest in the country - especially now that they are embracing sustainable and organic agriculture (more non-traditional practices we helped to introduce by creating a brand with international sales). Sadly, our efforts to introduce even a little innovation in Bordeaux were less well received.

My intention, in writing this is not to promote our wines - though I naturally wouldn't mind it if they become more widely known. What I'm saying is that my call for innovation is not an academic exercise. We've proved that it works - as have  Languedoc neighbours such as Jean-Claude Mas whose Arrogant Frog is now a major success in Australia.

Anyone who believes that trying to make wine for pennies per bottle is a desirable state for the wine industry can go on supporting the status quo - and consigning the vinous equivalent of Dr Semmelweis to the asylum. Others might become a little more broad-minded.


Some very interestingly innovative wines are coming in as entries for WINESTARS at the London International Wine Fair. If you have a wine that isn't on the UK market yet and you think it might impress the buyers from Waitrose, Britain's best wine-selling supermarket, Laithwaites, the world's biggest direct-seller or restaurateurs Mitchells & Butlers, you only have a few days to send in your free entry.