The Continuing Uglification of The Wine Trade

Enter Rumour painted full of tongues. As the sales market shrinks it is not enough that you succeed; others must fail. Grand mergers between the biggest wine merchants have been mooted, whilst petty insinuations about small and medium companies going bust have been peddled. Who profits from the dark arts of selling but the biggest companies who have more to lose and their principals (without principles) who are pledged to play the protectionist game. Truth is now a rare commodity as the games of spin and propaganda become more convoluted.

Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.

Certain large companies have taken a leaf from the Sun Tzu manual of supermarket disinformation appearing to base their rottweiler sales strategies on liquidating opposition with a combination of feral gossip-mongering, chronic fibbing, critically deep discounting, and pathological freebie-offering. It’s as if they don’t have faith in their products or in their ability to sell them. D’Oh! This is the first year, I can remember, when wine merchants have actually sought to aggressively talk down their competitors, and the effect is akin to fingernails scraping at a coffin lid. Scrunch, or be scrunched, said Mr Boffin in Our Mutual Friend. Such hostile tactics may garner business in the short term but will eventually diminish the reputation of the trade in general. Rumours smoulder and breed suspicion, wine is devalued by the constant war on prices and the wheeler-dealing mentality that tries to buy business through loss leaders.  Wine sellers are increasingly split between dinosaur venture-capitalists whose solution to any problem is to throw money at it (the growth- at-all-costs mantra) and the small independents who rely on the quality of their wines and dedicated personal service to maintain relationships and create new ones.