Tag Archives: wine education

The Dangers of Wine Education

30 Thursday May 2019

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wine educationWine education has become a necessity in the wine industry, not only for people entering the industry but for casual wine consumers as well who want to learn more about what they’re drinking and need help navigating the remarkable complexity of the wine world. This is of course a good thing. Knowledge about regions, varietals and methods opens our senses to subtleties in a wine that might go unheeded if we didn’t know what we’re looking for.

But there is a danger lurking in all that education.

Through education we can become so invested in wine-cultural codes, clichés and conventional interpretations that we are no longer truly tasting wine—we’re tasting what we think we should be tasting,not what’s in the glass. Wine tasting is cognitively penetrable—our beliefs about a wine can influence what we taste. Too much top down processing can lead us to reject wines that don’t fit conventional categories.

As wine lovers we should be trying to render taste-able what has been covered up by convention. This is in part what makes natural wines exciting. They don’t conform to the rules, at least until they become the new orthodoxy.

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Bad Advice for Novice Wine Drinkers

13 Thursday Dec 2018

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wine-tasting-1952074_960_720One of the worst pieces of advice to give a novice wine drinker is “If you like it, it is good”. Yet this slogan is a staple of many wine education classes, restaurant encounters with somms, and the server’s banter in winery tasting rooms.

The slogan assumes that there is nothing beyond your merely liking something that accounts for its quality, nothing more to be discovered and nothing more to be enjoyed. Thus, if you endorse this claim you have no reason to recognize the limitations of what you like or search for something better. It is a shame to encourage such an attitude in novice wine drinkers.

Sommeliers, of course, know this is misleading—that is why they put in the work to gain expertise. But they pretend otherwise because customers want their palates validated and are perceived to be intimidated if wine becomes too serious. Granted, not every situation is a “teaching” situation and sommeliers/merchants must be sensitive to what the customer is looking for. But to dismiss the possibility of educating a palate is irresponsible.

Granted there are many contexts in which wine quality may not matter much. A porch pounder may not be of the highest quality but that doesn’t matter if you’re just looking for refreshment.

But it doesn’t follow that there are no quality distinction between wines. For a novice drinker there is always something to be gained by expanding one’s horizons.  Discovery, learning, and insight ultimately depend on evaluation. “If you like it, it’s good” might work to sell wine but it will not educate anyone.

John Atkinson: Wine is Based on Traditions and Will Remain So

12 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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wine traditionsAs usual, Master of Wine John Atkinson has an insightful post about the past and future of wine making and marketing. Apparently, he is responding to a Twitter dustup among wine professionals about communication with customers. John’s  main point is that wine making does not lend itself to the frantic fashion consciousness on which modern marketing depends.

His argument is complex and takes many twists and turns. And so with apologies to John if I get something wrong, here is my summary of his argument, which I attempt primarily for my own edification in trying to understand it. The original article is well worth reading. This is just a summary. I will comment when I’ve had time to digest it.

1. The wine map specifying what is grown, where, and how wine is made has been rapidly changing in recent decades.

2. Despite enormous, rapid growth, New World wine regions have not realized comparable growth in profit, and Old World regions, while employing new technologies, are still faced with the same economic troubles.

3. All this change has largely taken place within a set of relatively fixed assumptions about what wine should taste like, modeled on the French approach to varietals and methods.

4. This stability in our image of wine is in contrast to the distant past when radically new approaches to wine making such as Sherry, Madeira, and Champagne emerged.

5. Thus, wine expertise and creativity have reached a plateau where all change is channeled into a fixed framework for defining wine quality, a framework that revolves around small differences between vineyards or regions.

6. People concerned with marketing wine lament this stability, arguing that the wine trade must expand its consumer base to sustain growth. They attribute slower growth to wine experts who use technical language, obscure place names, and insider jargon that is inaccessible to the larger public.

A Shift in topic here as he describes the nature of modern marketing in General:

7. Growth in modern, consumerist economies is built on demand creation. We continuously buy when encouraged to desire new fashions and reject what’s out of fashion, not when products wear out.

8. In order to give consumers what they desire, consumers must be able to compare goods and services. This comparability is achieved by establishing money and sales as the measure of value.

9. Thus brands that can establish themselves as aspirational and successful become the catalyst for desire. In essence, brands create the desires they purport to satisfy.

10. Although the ideology of consumerism portrays itself as virtuously “listening to the consumer”, its capacity to grow is really dependent on gaining efficiency through reduced competition, low wages, poor working conditions, waste, and the outsourcing of social and environmental costs. These costs are hidden from the public.

And here, he turns to the question of wine communications and marketing in particular:

11. Although expert communities must develop their own ways of communicating, wine experts ultimately depend on the consumer and must develop ways of communicating to them, although this can often be managed if winemakers minimize talk about the production process.

12. However, modern marketing is faced with a fundamental contradiction. Profits are often incompatible with giving people what they want, e.g. the loss of independent booksellers.

13. Wine insiders, while acknowledging the problems in communicating with customers, don’t trust the marketing pitch of “listening to the consumers” because they suspect it’s just a band aid for what wine brands really care about—efficiency and profit.

14. Yet, all of us depend on brands and respond to marketing in our economic lives and it’s reasonable to expect wine to be the same.

15. But wine’s resistance to marketing is not just a matter of language. Wine is defined by the amount of time it takes to produce wine, realize a profit, and gain expertise, the latter of which in some cases has taken centuries.

16. Thus, inertia in the wine industry is structural, not a matter of choice. Marketers who scream about this inertia simply miss this point.

17. Given the aforementioned stability in wine production, we are unlikely to see radical changes in the future. Reducing S02 or extracting tannins for white wines are minor changes, not on a par with the development of sherry or Champagne.

18. The current mode of differentiation in wine, which emphasizes the co-evolution of a place and the culture that makes wine there, is sufficiently enriching to consumers to function as a message for marketing and branding.

19. In any case, the potential for making gobs of cash is limited both for New World and Old World regions. It’s likely the fate of bulk wine is to remain a marginal commodity regardless of marketing, and emerging wine regions aspiring to produce quality will have to struggle to gain attention and reputation  in the face of more established regions.

Conclusion:

The inertia of wine is in the production process, not in the communication process or our inability to innovate.

There is a lot to think about here, especially the prospects for significant change in wine styles that would mark a departure from our current image of wine.

Wine is Complicated. Maybe That’s a Good Thing.

02 Monday Apr 2018

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wine examRecent data suggests wine sales are leveling off while beer sales, especially in the craft beer segment of the market, continue to grow. This news has prompted the occasional comment that perhaps wine is too complex for people to appreciate compared to beer. These conversations reminded me of an old column by NY Times wine writer Eric Asimov comparing beer and wine consumers.

“Beer consumers are a far more confident lot than wine consumers. They’re at ease with beer, mostly because they’ve had a solid grounding in their subject, unlike wine consumers who’ve been brainwashed into believing they must be educated or taught how to “appreciate” wine before they can enjoy it.”

Matt Kramer, in the Wine Spectator Online, took exception to Azimov’s claim wondering why wine drinkers feel they must apologize for their intellectual approach.

Wine lovers have nothing to apologize for. You don’t see music lovers apologizing for suggesting that perhaps you might better understand a concert or even a song if you spend a little time learning about music. You sure as hell don’t see art lovers apologizing for the seeming incomprehensibility of so much of contemporary art. If we don’t get it, we’re unashamedly told, the fault is ours for not bringing enough context to what we’re viewing.

Asimov claims that beer drinkers gain all the knowledge they need by knocking back brews with little education about what’s in the glass. But Azimov’s observation implicitly contains the explanation for why beer drinkers glibly guzzle while wine drinkers studiously sip. If beer drinkers can fully appreciate beer with little study or thought, it must be because beer is less complex than wine.

It is true that you can become a savvy beer consumer with knowledge of just a few facts. Once you learn to distinguish ales from lagers, note a few color gradations indicating malt flavor,  and you become familiar with German, Belgium,  English, and American styles, you have a pretty good idea of what’s in the bottle. There is of course a bit more to it than that—unconventional yeasts or aging programs are gaining in popularity–but the basics  of beer are relatively simple.

Truth be told, I know beer drinkers whose approach to beer is every bit as intellectual as the most committed wine nerd, just as there are wine lovers who don’t know Napa from Naples. But Azimov’s rant ignores the empirical data that suggests that what we taste is in part dependent on how we think. Tastes are cognitively penetrable. It may be that the need for knowledge in order to understand wine  makes wine much more satisfying because knowledge enables us to pick out more components of the wine.

The properties a wine appears to have will depend on how it is categorized and that requires knowledge of varietals and wine regions. Someone familiar with Pinot Noir from California’s Santa Lucia Highlands—intense, concentrated, and alcoholic—will likely think many Oregon pinots austere and thin. But when compared to some of the lighter offerings from Burgundy, the Oregon Pinot will seem robust.

Wine science writer Jamie Goode described an experiment conducted by Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College:

In this test Pepsi was pitted against Coke blind, with subjects not knowing which was which. They invariably preferred the taste of Pepsi, but this wasn’t reflected in their buying decisions. Montague wanted to know why. So he re-enacted the Pepsi challenge with volunteers. The difference was that this time their brain activity was being scanned by an MRI machine. On average, Pepsi produced a stronger response in the ventral putamen, a region thought to process reward. In people who preferred Pepsi, the putamen was five times as active when they drunk Pepsi than it was in Coke-preferring subjects drinking Coke.

In a clever twist, Montague repeated the experiments, this time telling subjects what they were drinking. Remarkably, most of them now preferred Coke. The brain activity also changed, with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region that shapes high-level cognitive powers. The subjects were allowing what they knew about Coke – its brand image – to shape their preferences.

The implications for winetasting are clear. What we know about wine will mold how we perceive the wine, and will even shape how much we enjoy a particular bottle. Here is a similar experiment using wine in which experimenters showed the most effective way of training subjects to recognize features of a wine was through conceptual learning, which involves explaining how the wine is produced and discussions of wine varietals.

It may be that by not studying beer beyond a superficial level, beer drinkers are missing out on the subtleties of flavor. It is wine’s conceptual complexity—the endless flow of information about wine regions and production methods– that allows the subtle discrimination of flavor that make wine enjoyable.

Some People Shouldn’t Be in the Wine Business

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

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sommelierHere is another in a seemingly endless parade of articles seeking to dumb down wine for the poor, overwhelmed consumer. This guy thinks that although the wine obscurantists of yesteryear have been vanquished by Parker scores  and Cellar Tracker reviews, wine is still too complex for people to understand, and it’s all because wine experts are just showing off:

In the past wine knowledge was linked to class. This is why it lends itself so well to British comedy, which is often about social status….This link between class and wine knowledge began to unravel with the rise of American super critic Robert Parker in the 1980s. He not only pronounced in an authoritative fashion on wine but he scored them out of 100. Many decried this as philistinism, asking whether you would score a Velázquez or a lover, but wine buyers loved it because it simplified or seemed to simply wine. Armed with a bit of Parker, the average wine drinker could now begin to navigate his way around a wine list….In the 1990s and 2000s, the public became better informed and wine democratised. Supermarkets began selling classed growth Bordeaux off the back of Parker scores. With one super critic in place and good wine seemingly available everywhere, the professionals were losing their grip.

So being “better informed” means going to the wine shop  and buying whatever Parker says you should buy. I guess “better informed” means realizing that 90 is higher than 85. Moreover, today we have CellarTracker where members of the public can rate the wines they drink according to a similar scale, the use of which of course requires the very same skill of being able to count.

But alas apparently we are still being flummoxed by wine experts. The culprits nowadays are sommeliers who put obscure wines on restaurant menus for the sole purpose of showing off their superior taste and knowledge:

Something had to be done. The answer was “natural” wine. This was ostensibly a reaction against the sort of wine that Parker liked, powerful, oaky wines made in a Bordeaux-meets-California style. But just as important, the producers were obscure and you couldn’t buy the wines in Oddbins. A new generation of writers, sommeliers and merchants staked their claim as keepers of arcane knowledge….A further advantage of these wines from the perspective of the initiated is that some of them taste awful, but they are meant to taste like that. So when customers try to send them back, they can be put in their place with a “you just don’t get this wine, man.”

Have you every had a sommelier insult you with “you just don’t get this wine, man”? I haven’t. It’s not the best way to get a tip or to hang on to your job. And the one example he provides  of  an offending wine list  is perfectly intelligible to anyone with a modest knowledge of wine, with the name of the producer, region and varietal listed. The wines include a few lesser known varietals and regions along with more standard fare, but all from small producers—what’s wrong with that?

According to this article we are to believe that people don’t drink natural wines because they enjoy vintage variation or vineyard expression but because they’re just trying to show off. And people don’t prefer small, lesser-known producers or regions because they’re tired of the same 20-30 wineries appearing on every wine list. They’re just trying to impress. I guess if it’s not Cabernet or Chardonnay from Constellation it can’t be good.

Of course, as one might expect there is the inevitable throat clearing at the end that undermines his whole point.

I’m not saying that wine is straightforward. It is an immense subject and changing the whole time, you can now buy wines from Croatia, Georgia and Greece at Marks & Spencer. And most wine professionals do do their best to illuminate, but the truth is we don’t want people to find things too straightforward.

No kidding. This is why we need experts to help us keep up and we want to keep up because the proliferation of wine styles and regions is itself fascinating. If you don’t like that you’re in the wrong business.

And this travesty is posted on the website of Master of Wine who purports to be a wine educator. Sheesh.

I Can’t Get My Head Around This Fight

06 Wednesday May 2015

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boxersIt’s not exactly Pacquiao vs. Mayweather but every once in awhile wine critics square off against each other and try to land a few blows.

In one corner are the demystifiers—wine writers who think wine is too complicated and precious. With a  little plainspeaking and a few comments on the objective features of wine, they argue, the scales will fall from the eyes of the average wine consumer, who will then fall in love with wine, while remaining blissfully ignorant of terroir, tannic grip, or malolactic fermentation.

In the other corner are the connoisseurs—experts, long on experience, and well-versed in the endless subtleties of wine who employ the arcane argot of winespeak that leaves most ordinary consumers scratching their heads in bewilderment.

Recently, Jeff Siegel (AKA The Wine Curmudgeon) occupied the d-mystifier’s corner. In criticizing a glossary of wine terminology that included the word “hedonistic”  he writes:

Again, this is not to criticize Teeter, who is probably trying to help, but to point out yet again how most post-modern wine writing has little to do with the average consumer. It’s as if they’re writing a movie review that discusses camera angles and editing techniques instead of the plot, and then getting angry when someone asks them what the movie is about.

And what’s worse is that they call those of us — who want to write intelligently and clearly, who want to educate wine drinkers and not preach to them — a variety of not very nice names. I’m not going to link to them, because it’s not worth the aggravation and the Internet sniping that will ensue. But two prominent California wine writers have recently questioned whether people like me are competent to write about wine. Our sin? That we try to make it less intimidating and confusing, when real wine writers know wine is supposed to be intimidating and confusing. Otherwise, one of them wrote, what’s the point of learning about it?

It isn’t clear to whom Jeff was directing his ire but I would bet it was Stephen Eliot who recently occupied the connoisseur’s corner:

I question the endless and oh-so-monotonous claims that so many people are intimated and confused about wine that it needs to be demystified. And, while it may be heresy to the populists that rule the blogosphere, I would offer the thought that plumbing its mysteries is precisely part of what makes fine wine so endlessly appealing. Fine wine, I would argue, wants contemplation and thought.

Why are we having this debate? Isn’t it obvious that there is more than one audience for wine writing and all must be served? The de-mystifiers are simply wrong if they think wine isn’t complicated. To really understand it requires years of study and lots of attentive tasting. There is no shortcut—if you want to understand wine you have to put in the work.  But the demystifiers are right that most wine drinkers don’t care about the arcana. You can enjoy wine without it, although without the knowledge you will miss some of what wine has to give. However, none of that torturous, convoluted winespeak will cause someone to fall in love. In the order of things, love comes first, then comes the poetry.

But the connoisseurs are not trying to persuade the average wine drinker to fall in love. Their audience is the already besotted. To speak to that audience requires a vocabulary more fine-grained that generic descriptors. Telling me that a wine is fruity and soft with a dry finish tells me almost nothing about wine quality and doesn’t distinguish one wine from the next since there are thousands that would fit that description. Wine is devilishly hard to describe and it stimulates the imagination as well as our sensibilities so if you want to provide accurate descriptions you have to invent a vocabulary that somehow represents what our senses sense—it seems to me “hedonistic” is a perfectly good description of some wines. That it bewilders the uninitiated is largely irrelevant.

To raise in victory the arm of the demystifiers is to treat wine as a mere commodity, like orange juice, with nothing to offer the lover.

To raise the arm of the connoisseur is to ignore the fact that most wine drinkers have not succumbed and want only a satisfying beverage.

Two styles of writing to serve two audiences. So can we declare this a draw before a knockout punch sends half the wine community to the mat.

Are Wine Enthusiasts Ruining the Sommelier Profession?

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Wine Culture

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I’ve seem some pathetically ridiculous arguments in my life, but this one might just win the prize. Adam Teeter at Winepair argues that people seeking wine certifications with no intention of working in restaurants are ruining the  reputation of restaurant sommeliers:

Much like art in the ’80s where enthusiasts took classes, majored in the medium and yet never held a job in the actual profession, the attraction of wine enthusiasts to attain certification in order to prove their knowledge of wine to their peers is at an all-time high. Yet it seems to come with a fundamental misunderstanding of what it truly means to be a sommelier, and the reinforcement of this trend is slowly eroding the respect we should have for people that work in restaurants, while reinforcing an ever-growing rise in snob wine culture. The idea among the general public of what a sommelier is has been tainted by people with no interest in ever actually serving in the profession, causing the role to be seen as someone more concerned with tasting notes and being able to identify wines blind than facilitating a wonderful experience for the diner. This has ultimately led to a growing distrust for the sommelier — an unfortunate result.

The argument seems to be this.

(1) Many people are seeking wine certifications with no intention of working in restaurants.

(2) Some of these people are competitive snobs interested only in showing what they know

(3) Sommeliers working in restaurants are losing respect.

Therefore, non-professionals seeking wine certification are causing professional sommeliers to lose respect.

What exactly the connection is between premises (2) and (3) we are not told. But here’s an analogy that shows the absurdity of the argument. Countless baseball fans spout statistics galore and pontificate with authority on the relative virtues of players and teams. As far as I know that hasn’t harmed the reputation of professional evaluators of baseball talent.

Teeter’s prejudices are showing. He seems to think that nothing is worth doing unless you’re making money at it. The idea that someone might just be really interested in wine knowledge for its intrinsic  value never enters his comprehension. Are some of these people excessively competitive, insufferable bores? Of course. There are insufferable bores where ever humans congregate.

Teeter is right about one thing. The job of the restaurant sommelier is to serve the needs of diners. And so by the end of the article, he inadvertently reveals the real problem:

Zach Geballe puts it this way: “The single most important part of being a sommelier is facilitating the best experience for the customer possible, not pushing people to an obscure wine you are geeking out on, or proving how much you know. Some people look at the sommelier position as a glamour position, which is elevated above the service industry, and look at being a sommelier as a way to side step actually working your way up on the floor.”

Apparently, some of these insufferable bores work in restaurants. The solution is to not hire them.

Stop complaining about wine enthusiasts who keep the fine wine industry afloat.