The Blanding of Branding
Kramer is on a double date with a vertically challenged friend and is in his usual state of barely suppressed paranoia. All the people around the table are being non-committal, the small talk is excruciating and Kramer is one Quixote short of a fully tilted windmill. A waiter comes up to take their drinks order.
KRAMER: I like Merlot. Is Merlot good for you?
Girl 1: I love Merlot
Girl 2: I adore Merlot
Other guy: Merlot is my absolute favourite
WAITER: Sorry, we have no Merlot.
Kramer involuntarily sweeps a wine glass off the table
Branding is synonymous with imagery and packaging; it primarily concerns labels rather than content; it is about catering to the safest common denominator. An experiment for a recent television consumer programme demonstrated that children, when they are very young, and before they have acquired the veneer of social sophistication, have no particular attachments to labels. By the age of five or six social conditioning has set in: shown an identical pair of jeans, one with a label and one without, children will generally assume that the labelled pair is somehow better, not only because they have seen other children wearing the label, but they also believe that the label is a statement of legitimacy and intrinsic value. Similarly, with wine, the supermarket ethos is to make everything homogenous because true quality is not really the issue, consistency is. The underlying psychological premise is that people don’t want to have to think; they want a safety-first, risk-free environment for their choices and instant recognition helps: the Merlot lifebelt, for example, that Kramer grasps for vainly in the restaurant.
Branding was also a protection against some of the unknown filth from the Midi that was swilling around in the 60s and 70s and may have originally been responsible for introducing us to wine, but, remember, dear reader, with gentle shudder, the brands some of us grew up with: Piat d’Or, Blue Nun and Hirondelle to nominate the crudest felons (confession: I, poor deluded soul, actually liked Hirondelle but in those youthful days one swallow did make a summer). If the argument solely concerned the current quality of branded wines there would be no denying that there has been considerable improvement. The big wineries from Australia such as Rosemount and Penfold’s undoubtedly produce good wine across the price strata as do Fetzer and Mondavi in California.
The varietal, effectively a New World invention, boomed in the 1980s and 1990s and is still on an upward curve. To ask for a bottle of Chardonnay or Shiraz in a wine bar was to shortcut the tiresome navigation of a wine list. The varietal-as-label became a bald statement of assurance. Forget your pocket Hugh Johnson vintage guide. This was information in its most easily digested form. Furthermore, it seemed to democratise buying wine, in that no longer did we require specialised knowledge to confidently order a bottle. Having worked as a sommelier for several years I can attest to the fear factor displayed in front of a wine list. The hermeneutic ability needed to decipher the mysteries of Burgundy’s myriad vineyards or to interpret the artery-hardening names on bottles of German wines is not a gift most of us have time to acquire
What’s Up D’Oc?
The contention that French wines (in particular) should bite the cork and advertise themselves more flagrantly, as it were, is based around the idea that simplistic marketing is the only successful tool for selling wine. One of the main criticisms of French wines is that insufficient information is given to the consumer on the labels. I believe that argument is a total fallacy. Would Chablis sell any better if it were rebranded Chablis Chardonnay? Or Chateauneuf-du-Pape, if it were labelled Grenache/ Syrah/ Mourvedre/ Cinsault/ Muscardin/ Vaccarese/ Picpoul/ Terret Noir/ Counoise and so forth? I doubt it. The only area of France where you find the grape variety on the label is Alsace and much good it does them! Vin de Pays wine, of course, breezily flaunts grape variety on the label - the country of origin is almost irrelevant. Meanwhile, the idea of a back label as a conduit of information belongs purely to the supermarket culture; it is superfluous in a restaurant wherein the list itself should provide the information necessary to make an educated selection of the wine.
France’s marketing problems are partly historical and partly to do with the wines themselves. She began to lose market share after the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and the resultant short-term boycott of French wines. Secondly, French wines had become associated with the haughty elitist image projected by certain French sommeliers, whereas New World wines seemed self-consciously modern and trendy. Thirdly, not only were wines from outside Europe competing in wine competitions, they were invariably carting away barrel-loads of medals. Then throw into that brew the scam of Bordeaux price fixing that tarnished, by association, the image of French wines. People sought value for money, bang for buck. Fourthly, the wines themselves were being marketed with a disdainful arrogance, the perceived divine right that because France had dominated the market previously they always would. You can trace this logic back to the biblical saying “Good wine needs no bush”. Finally, it seems, alas, that many prefer the busty flavours that can be found in New World wines to the svelte, sometimes shy, charms of the French.
Robert Plageoles, of course, articulates a contrary point of view:
“We’re competing against New Zealand, Australia and Chile. Making our wines closer to international tastes only makes sense if you go in for this global philosophy. It’s the outlook that says you have to go for the lowest common denominator, to let consumer fashions dictate everything. What we are doing is to rediscover our own wines and then to find a clientele that’s interested. We are about creating a fashion of our own and not following a global trend.”
(as quoted in Patrick Matthews - The Wild Bunch)
As Australia, Chile and Argentina have increased market share, other countries have launched melodramatic advertising campaigns accentuating the sexiness of their generic brand. German Riesling is currently going through the umpteenth attempt to kick-start its surge to fashionableness (better luck next time!); this year posters of Rhone adorned the underground system, the calendar babes being pictures of bottles of Hermitage and Chateauneuf standing shoulder to shoulder with Cotes du Rhone and Tavel. The danger of branding is when one “liebfraumilks” the image of a region to death by lumping good and bad wines together - in other words dumbing down. Image-consciousness manifests itself in crass, delusional forms of bottle apartheid; the flute shape is regarded as a flibbertigibbet, a signifier of cheap synthetic Germanic sweetness, whilst the Bordeaux-style bottle, for some reason, exudes a comfortable bourgeois classicism. Example: wines on our list from Rias Baixas, Alella and Australia have all this year jettisoned the graceful flute for the poker-up-its-derriere Bordeaux bott. Conversely, the faux-porno billboard advertising campaign to make claret sexy has been brilliantly perverse; it reminded me of the rather more successful Irn Bru (a drink that really does taste of iron filings) campaign to appeal the twenty�something market. Necking a bottle of 1982 Chateau Cheval-Blanc or Pichon-Lalande with the one you lurve is undoubtedly a major shag-tastic experience; too much Bordeaux Inferieur, I fear, will spell D.I.V.O.R.C.E.
BUYING STRATEGIES
So it’s got clean fruit! That don’t impress me much (with apologies to Shania Twain)
There seems to be an increasing and unfortunate tendency to produce wines for consumer acceptance panels. This is a view propounded by Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards, and it is hard to disagree with him. The biggest buyers of wines are supermarkets demanding consistency, even if that presupposes dull, insipid, mass-produced wines. The definition of wine as “alcoholic grape juice” has no qualitative resonance, but it is in danger of becoming precisely that norm. Pressure is put upon the producers and wineries to “brew” technically correct antiseptic concoctions in order that chains of stores can stock the identical product as if conformity were desirable. So the price point is king and volume is his consort. The question is do the supermarkets reflect a general desire for convenience and attractive packaging, or do simply they push us into lazy habits of consumption?
We have to create a super-wine in half an hour without Nature’s resources - It lives!!
Dylan Moran - Black Books
With the tendency to create denatured wines with artificial yeasts, oak chips and added acidity, it is only a matter of time before screw-top bottles and sell-by dates come into practice. Wine is such big business that wine growers cannot risk offending the supermarkets. Vintage variation and vineyard management is what separates good wine makers from average ones. You cannot compensate in the winery for the mediocre quality of grapes that you pick, but as long as the wine satisfies the criteria of varietal correctness and cleanness (stability) it can become a supermarket standard. What sort of choice is it when you can buy thirty virtually identical cheap Chardonnays in a supermarket? It is surely part of the responsibility of buyers to enlighten consumers and lead them into areas they would not normally stray.
Not that branding is confined solely to cheap wines. Champagne houses spend ludicrous amounts of money on brand recognition to achieve customer loyalty. Having tasted most of the non-vintage wines from the Grande Marque houses during the past year I would venture to say that money would be more wisely spent reducing the price of the product, or, preferably making better wines. Champagne is the ultimate example of the emperor’s new clothes wherein people drinking it in good company feel embarrassed to articulate any dissatisfaction in case they become the gaffe-ridden outcast of some Bateman cartoon. Much champagne is a disgrace; bad, acidic wine released far too early, the rip-off aspect of branding incarnate.
I LIKE IT BECAUSE I CAN PRONOUNCE IT
People are just as apt to brand countries, regions and appellations as individual wines. Someone once told me they didn’t like French wines to which I replied that there was no such category for France was many countries, many cultures, many styles and grape varieties but a slight prejudice can become an idee-fixe if the one experience you’ve had of a country’s wine is a negative one. Branding operates on a more subliminal level when one examines sales of wines in restaurants. Reports prove year after year that the most popular sellers are Sancerre, Chablis, Pinot Grigio and so forth because people are buying the region or the appellation as a generic (as opposed to the grower). Lafite, Latour and Mouton (Rothschild and Cadet) are other generics. Certain varietal juxtapositions have also become formulaic: Chilean Merlot, Australian Shiraz, and New Zealand Sauvignon, for example. Naturally, the identity of the wine is not the label it wears, but the personality of the liquid in the bottle, just as we are greater than the sum of our clothes (I hope!).
The on-trade should share some of the responsibility in educating customers. There is too often a defeatist attitude from buyers in restaurants, with excuses ranging from “you can’t get the staff” to “it will never sell in this area - people are unadventurous”. Customers will generally buy what they recognise, hence you must give them as much information as is necessary to make an informed decision. You may have to cajole, to persuade and generally ginger expectations. Being proactive is the only way to generate wine sales. It is ironic that when menu descriptions are becoming more and more orotund, listing every ingredient down to the last crack of pepper and pointing out assiduously that Daisy the cow was an Aberdeen Angus who grazed serenely on the finest grasslands, wine lists are perfunctory and gnomic, often omitting vintage and country. As long as you have a sprinkling of familiar brands you can afford dumb down - after all who’s going to complain? (Such is the no-one-ever-went-broke-by-underestimating-the-taste-of-the-public logic) Yet what makes the wine is its terroir, the grape variety or varieties, the ability of the grower, and the quality of the vintage. Listing the wines by style or variety with concise tasting notes would seem a minimum requirement of service by any definition. Moreover, it is inexcusable simply to buy high street brands and put them on a restaurant wine list when you can source the most interesting and unusual wines in the world from the dozens of specialist merchants who operate in this country.
THE WILD BUNCH
We should not be afraid to institute higher standards in an attempt to differentiate between good and mediocre wines. I advisedly do not use the word “poor”, because, with all the modern technical advantages it is fairly difficult to produce incorrect wine no matter how anodyne it actually tastes. We should celebrate diversity and craftsmanship. Imagine a world where all clothes were machine-made, all houses were prefabricated and all cheese tasted like plastic supermarket cheddar. I deplore a certain prevalent inverse snobbery that elevates manufactured plonk to the same plinth as great living wine.
Take Spain, for instance. Extraordinary that a country that produces Federico Garcia Lorca, whose poetry contains a sublime sense of physical geography and conjures the ardent, elemental, creative, sexual nature of the countryside and its people, should produce wines so rooted in the bland modern idiom. In regions rich with their own culture and cuisine you find flying wine-makers using the wineries to churn out yet more Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. As usual technical correctness precedes character and, for the want of a better word, vitality; the source of origin for these wines becomes an irrelevance.
To quote Lorca on poetry:
“a return to inspiration, pure instinct, the poet’s only reason - by means of poetry a man more rapidly approaches the cutting edge that the philosopher and the mathematician turn away from silence.”
By the same rationale one might exalt the intuitive approach of the traditional winemaker who allows nature to be the inspiration behind the wine. We codify and rationalise things excessively until they are reduced to a digestible blandness, or as Wordsworth once wrote, “Our meddling intellect/Misshapes the beauteous forms of things/We murder to dissect”. Great winemaking, like any proper farming, lies in allowing (and helping) nature to express itself; not in destroying or compensating for the original product through a profligate zeal to make something clean or commercial.
If my pleas reek of a bleating, sentimental “Rousseauian” naivety, then so be it. The point is that there are traditional standards worth preserving and the definition of terroir is the key to individuality. The most useful form of branding, in my opinion, would be embraced in a more rigorous enforcement of the appellation controllee system. A.C. status should not inhibit innovation; it should, however, firmly protect the principle that wines reflect their terroir and allow regional diversity to flourish. If we always bow to commercial pressures we will sacrifice all this to a laboratory mentality wherein producers feel compelled to pull up traditional grape varieties and plant supposedly more commercial ones to shadow the market. Recently, I have tasted some stunning examples of old Alicante Bouschet, Carignan and Cinsault. We must ensure that these offbeat grape varieties survive by devising a system wherein quality is rewarded, mediocrity challenged and individuality celebrated - a system which will offer real choice to the consumers, not the choice of different versions of the same brand, but the opportunity to buy and drink wines created in the vineyard rather than the winery.