Category: The Ill-Served Wine-Buying Plebs

The Ill-Served Wine Plebs in Restaurants: Part 1 – The Unhappy Realities

[“…But wine plebs are definitionally not able financially to pursue that goal. Nor, even for special occasions, are upscale restaurants the rational places to do so. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to declare them categorically to be the LAST places they should choose….Extortionate wine markups predominate in restaurants at all levels. Industry orthodoxy deems them a necessity if any profit is to be made at all.  This is the norm; the upscale restaurants merely amplify the wallet damage by fixing a higher bottom point to their price range. For by-the-glass wines, this can make a single glass cost just about what a perfectly decent, non-pedigreed entrée would cost at a quality ‘ethnic’ or casual restaurant without patrician pretensions, high-priced free-agent chefs, hip décor, expense-account- or millennial-magnet location, or price-bloating ideology….There are very few affordably-priced restaurants where wine plebs can learn or discover anything about wine…”]

 

The Ill-Served Wine Plebs in Restaurants 1: The Unhappy Realities

In the first four entries in this series beginning with https://thewinetribune.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/the-ill-served-wine-buying-plebs-1-retail-sources-of-help-and-advice/, I examined the realities confronting wine plebs when they seek advice at off-the-shelf retail wine settings.  In this new series, I extend that analysis to the other major venue for in-person wine purchases: licensed restaurants.

In this series, I examine the wine-related realities that wine plebs face when they frequent dinner restaurants with affordable menus or seek out pricier ones for infrequent, special-occasion, relative splurges.  Wine plebs [as opposed, in this classification, to wine patricians] are all those non-affluent, non-expert consumers of lower-end and modestly priced wines not vinified for significant aging.  This blog is about and for them. This series addresses the realities, limits, character, and pricing of the wines available to them in restaurants they can afford. It addresses, too, the nature of the advice and service those restaurants tend to provide for those who enjoy but lack expertise and broad experience with wine.

Our focus on wine plebs logically excludes from discussion most ‘fine-dining’ restaurants as that formulation is currently applied at the more traditional end of the expensive restaurant spectrum.  It also excludes numerous other self-proclaimed temples of culinary creativity, correctness, or campy-chic cuisines;  the kind that rely on just-in-time conformity to cost-raising trends, on self-determined  standards, and on some interplay of  fusion, ‘deconstruction’, and juxtaposition sufficient to get media and social media attention.  Unfortunately, these higher-end restaurants are where we are likely to find the better, more professionally selected wine lists, though they may also be overwhelmingly encyclopedic, overly in [lock]-step with current trends and crazes, or more aristocratically composed — and priced — wine lists.

If the wine-related goal of restaurant-going is to have access to a knowledgeably-selected and served range of wines, without concern for price, to learn how it accompanies a prepared and served meal;  then, assuredly, upscale restaurants are the places to go.

But wine plebs are definitionally not in position financially to pursue that goal. Nor, even for special occasions, are upscale restaurants the rational places to do so. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to declare them categorically to be the LAST places that plebs should choose to learn more about wine.

Extortionate wine markups predominate in restaurants at all levels. Industry orthodoxy deems them a necessity if any profit is to be made at all.  This is the norm; the upscale restaurants merely amplify the wallet damage by fixing a higher bottom point to their price range. For by-the-glass wines, this can make a single glass cost just about what a perfectly decent, non-pedigreed entrée would cost at a quality ‘ethnic’ or casual restaurant without patrician pretensions, high-priced free-agent chefs, hip décor, expense-account- or millennial-magnet location, or price-bloating ideology.

There are very few affordably-priced restaurants where wine plebs can learn or discover anything about wine in general beyond — at best if they are fortunate — getting a helpful suggestion about which glass or bottle of wine might be a decent accompaniment to the food they’ve ordered.  Wine bars were supposed to fulfill this role, and some do, but they tend to be clustered in metro areas or in wine country.

For the rest of us, the best places to do so are probably small, first-generation [and/or culturally enclaved], minimally-decorated, out-of-the-way, food-first [not ‘total dining experience’] restaurants serving an un-fused or un-watered down, narrowly regional or ethnic cuisine ordinaire with a small list of less commonly-encountered, and modestly priced, approachably and characteristically flavored, wines from the same general locale or tradition.

In my opinion, these are unquestionably the best places to dine out, regardless of prices. There are many good ones to be found, and not only in metropolitan areas. Unfortunately for wine plebs, the absolute [and even more so, the relative] numbers of immigrants from historically integrated food-and-wine regions of Europe — Western or Eastern — and Transcaucasia [or Western Asian] from modest backgrounds still close enough to their dining traditions  — and for whom opening a small, work-intensive, family-staffed restaurant is an appealing aspiration — have dwindled.

Today, they are likely to be Asian, North African, Middle Eastern, or Mexican/Central/South American. Some of these places have long wine-with-food traditions; others have nascent wine industries pioneered by a few older producers, but for many, their culinary impact is, at best, small and developing;  others have no such traditions of note at all.

For wine plebs, this reality illuminates yet another constraint on their ability to find competent assistance in their exploration of wines in restaurants. The main issue here is the limited wine-list types available to them in these best-case types of restaurants, let alone in the all-too-sprawling profusion of available wine/beer-licensed chain, franchise, theme, varyingly-hyphenated-casual, family, fastish food ‘stores’, and similar options.

With distressing regularity, the wine list offerings in these latter, ubiquitous restaurants tend to be much like the food: uninspired, available everywhere, copied, and adapted or ‘re-interpreted’ in thousands of similar venues, unlikely ever to be out of stock at any level from producer/bottler to local distributor [but seldom with specified vintages].

Understanding how we arrived at this situation requires some explanatory background and a survey of the concurrent transformations that have characterized the U.S. wine and restaurant industries from the outset, and then from the later 1960s to the present. This will be the subject of the second post in this series.

The Ill-Served Wine Buying Plebs 1: Retail Sources of Help and Advice?

“It was not always so.  With great variation by region, by degree of urbanization and affluence, and by local ethnic composition, lower-end wine consumers had a better chance than now of getting informed help and advice in the period between the 1970s beginnings of the U.S. wine boom and the spread of up-sized and often very up-scaled supermarkets, one-stop multi-service chains, and big-box buying clubs.”

Part 1.  ‘Twas Not Always So’:  The Brief Golden Age of Helpful Wine  Advice

For the people who are the subject and object of this blog — ordinary, non-affluent wine drinkers who drink modestly-priced wines, mostly with affordably-priced, home-cooked meals — it can be daunting, intimidating, and, all too often, impossible to get effective advice or assistance in selecting wines from the confusing array that confronts them; even at the supermarkets where most of them now do their wine buying.

It was not always so.  With great variation by region, by degree of urbanization and affluence, and by local ethnic composition, lower-end wine consumers had a better chance then than now of getting informed help and advice in the period between the 1970s beginnings of the U.S. wine boom and the spread of up-sized and often very up-scaled supermarkets, one-stop multi-service chains, and big-box buying clubs.

That brief period coincided with the spread and growth of U.S. wine  drinking out beyond ethnic enclaves and down the broadening levels of the socio-economic pyramid.  It was also the period when a significant segment of wine buying was done at dedicated, non-elite, local wine shops, and at liquor stores, pharmacies, and other shops with large [for the time] wine selections. Consumers who lived in metro areas, might also have had access to very large wine-warehouse stores [like Sam’s in Chicago, to cite one example] that put significant energy into great lower-priced, bulk-imported deals alongside huge inventories and pre-orders of high-end collectors’ wines.

Development of Helpful, Knowledgeable Staffs

At the better-run versions of these wine shops, lower-end shoppers with little wine knowledge stood a far greater chance than they do today of finding a salesperson with enough wine knowledge to offer honest advice and information. The good shops developed staffs with ever-increasing capacities to be genuinely helpful, especially to those who lacked much background and knowledge of wine but were trying to learn and who sought to incorporate wine into their meals, relaxation, and socializing.  The good retailers developed helpful salespeople by:

      • Allowing and/or encouraging them to join in-house samples-tasting sessions and to attend at least some of the numerous trade tastings offered by distributors, importers, and some producers throughout the year; and then — to keep these from being understood as mere party events — to follow up with discussions of what they had tasted
      • Encouraging and providing materials for them to read about and learn the good in wines at all price points
      • Providing guidelines and training in respectfully determining and accepting customers’ spending levels rather than cattle-prodding them to push customers to higher-priced wines. [Those all-too-common directives to up-sell anyone trusting enough to seek advice proved to be virtuoso examples of short-sightedness, functioning, as if by design, to drive off precisely the kinds of customers who, were they were to gain trust in a retailer, would be the most likely to remain long-term, loyal customers and staunch word-of-mouth advocates. Instead, they were the first to flee to the supermarkets to buy their wines, where — if they were unlikely to find informed advice if any at all — they were, at least, even less likely to be browbeaten, sneered at, or up-sold.]
      • Setting and enforcing firm standards prohibiting intimidation, dismissiveness, ironic commentary [uttered or performed], and all the other behaviors by which the slightly- or somewhat-informed will always seek to convey self-aggrandizing distance and disdain from ordinary, ‘little’ [perhaps even deplorable] non-experts
      • Encouraging and, if possible, facilitating — this was largely before most small retailers had web pages — customer feedback and call-in advice requests

Of course, not all retailers of that era did all these things, but the better ones did at least some of them;  and, in retrospect, we may well view the brief, two- or three-decade period when these types of wine retailers constituted an important market segment as something of a Golden Age of Helpful Wine Advice for uninitiated and non-affluent wine buyers.

The Demise of the Small, Well-Staffed Wine Shop

Some of the older wine warehouse stores with both value-priced and elite selections still survive, but many [most?] of the small, local shops and the well-stocked and well-run wine-and-liquor stores have succumbed to the new realities of how wine is retailed. For our purposes, their passing has strongly affected — for the unquestionable worse —how ordinary people get advice and help in selecting and learning about wine.

The small shops have mostly been driven out of business by the up-sized and up-scaled supermarkets cited above. These corporate monsters offer lower prices via economies of scale as well as one-trip convenience. They have had the same effect on the better wine-and-liquor stores, but many of these have stayed in business by transforming themselves into all-purpose party/convenience stores with shoddy, highly promoted wine selections. They also cut costs by doing service as distributors’ dumping grounds for off-vintages; mishandled wines; wines past their peak; and fashion-of-the-moment — soon to be flash-in-the-pan — wines; and for unmoved cases of mass-produced, highly-promoted, cliché [but not necessarily value-priced] wines that serve as sales-continuity anchors for many distributorships, but that need to be moved out as new vintages promise to swell inventories.

Coming in Part 2…..

[In Part 2 of this topic, I’ll begin a discussion of the realities of getting wine advice within, or outside of, the principal loci of non-elite wine retailing today:  supermarkets, big-box buying clubs, and restaurants.  As always, I will do so from the perspective of the non-affluent, non-expert buyer of lower-end and modestly priced wines intended to be drunk, not stored or aged.]

Peter di Lorenzi

The Ill-Served Wine Buying Plebs 2: Retail Sources of Help and Advice?

“Throughout the 70s-to-2000s period, the owners of these shops had few options in the face of inexorable changes in retail scaling, in the clustering of the upper-quintile-socio-economic-caste…..But for the benighted mass, those uninitiated into even an awareness of this higher-level gnosis, however, there remain two main sources of in-store information:  the bottles themselves and the little cards meant to describe the virtues of the file of bottles directly above”

Part 2.  The Quintile Realities of Wine Retail Enclaving:  The Competently Advised and the Disregarded

In Part One of this series [https://thewinetribune.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/wine-raters-reviewers-sources-of-help-and-advice], we described the period between the 1970s beginnings of the wine boom and the early 2000s as a kind of golden age of helpful advice for non-collectors and small-purchase buyers of low- or modestly-priced wines.  Part 2 of this topic will discuss the problem of getting wine advice within the principal loci of non-elite, retail wine purchasing today.  Here, as throughout The Wine Tribune, my focus will be on the plight of the non-affluent, the non-expert, the buyer of lower-end and modestly priced wines, and the buyer of wines intended to be drunk soon; not stored or aged.

At the time, few would have described the 1970-2000 years as a golden age of available advice for modest to low-priced wine buyers.  It was just what was then happening. Few could have foreseen the subsequent explosion of up-sized and often very up-scaled supermarkets, one-stop multi-service chains, and big-box buying clubs.  Nor could they have foreseen the gentrification of wine production, discourse, status, and pricing — though the yuppies among them were creating and implementing the process before their eyes.

Discernible or not, the unhappy result for non-affluent retail consumers, was the near-disappearance of independent small and mid-sized, knowledgeable wine shops or wine-sections selling modestly-priced wines in their non-affluent residential areas.

Throughout the 70s-to-2000s period, the owners of these shops had few options in the face of inexorable changes in retail scaling, in the clustering of the upper-quintile-socio-economic-caste, and, eventually, in the advent of online shopping:

      • They could hang on and try to survive; most — if they lasted at all — did not succeed beyond the surrender, retirement, or death of a stubborn owner.  
      • They could relocate to the elite areas.  Most, however, lacked the financial resources to undertake the much higher lease rates, upscale decor/fittings, and much more expensive inventories required to compete in those locales. 
      • They could promote lottery traffic, shrink their wine selections and reorient them jug wines and to the same heavily promoted brands found everywhere else. Those who did so often shifted emphasis to convenience and liquor-store items as well.  Many shops were forced to do this to survive. Characteristically, wine became an effectively vestigial aspect of their operations 
      • Or they could avoid complete financial failure by closing and selling off;  many ended up choosing this unhappy option.

Some wine shops did manage to survive and still do in modest towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods, but their numbers continue to decline.  In the U. S., those who drink low-to-modestly-priced wines get them from the three-large-scale outlet types cited above; from smaller-store, local or chain specialty-and-niche food-plus retailers such as Trader Joe’s, Aldi, and the like; and from the limited selections available at countless similarly-undersized, local markets. 

But the bulk of wine shops or wine sections with knowledgeable staffs that have survived — or come into being because of the changes wrought by upper-quintile stratification/clustering —have done so, overwhelmingly, in enclaves of the affluent, or even those of the ‘merely’ comfortably secure [In the US, the qualifying ‘merely’ is, of course, defined and situated at a rarely-acknowledged, historically unprecedented high level.].  The affluent and the comfortably secure are easily able to afford and occasionally get to learn about ‘better’ or ‘fine’ wine. Thus, we can easily find good wine shops with helpful staff in:

⦁  Zip codes, counties, or cities where significant concentrations of top 15-20% income earners — from any source or sector: private, public, legal, illegal, or mystifying — reside;  and/or trendier, recently gentrified, or gentrifying sections of major metropolitan areas. In these latter locales, though, the wealth is often, in significant measure, anticipatory:  younger and rooted in the socio-economic status of birth-families but living now, however well or easily, with expectations and projections about befitting careers, looming inheritances, grants, and profusions of advantaging personal and family connections made within the serial enclaves of affluence that have been the loci of their lives, etc.

⦁  State capitals, administrative centers, and other repositories of overpaid, over-pensioned higher-level government bureaucrats administrators, regulators — and the attendant encampments of lawyers, consultants, contractors, grantees, and lobbyists, and media.

⦁  College and university towns with ever-growing infestations of similarly well- and over-paid paid bureaucrats; HR staffs, compliance komissars, apparatchiks, and lawyers; diversity/social justice inquisitors and clerisy; a smaller number of academics;  often, well-pensioned, world-traveling retired teachers; and hordes of the children of affluence, their density varying with consensus institutional prestige.

⦁  Areas with a high presence of digital tech, financial service, research center, media, and entertainment industry employees, and other areas with similar concentrations of members of the cognitive/creative-control caste

⦁  Well-to-do retirement and vacation/tourism areas.

In this post and in this , I have no interest in the wealth of opportunities for helpful wine retail experiences to be found in the enclaves of the affluent. They have armies, populations of wine writers, analysts, raters, bloggers, teachers, tasting conductors, social media posters who are devoted to their tastes, needs, and price ranges — and dazzled by the disposable income they have to buy wines and wine services. 

My intent here is to enumerate, examine, and evaluate the realities of advice available to non-affluent wine shoppers [wine plebs] in the rest of the country. In finding competent wine advice at the venues they frequent, they have been as ill-served by the new realities of retail as they have been by ‘serious’ wine journalism, scorers, raters, critics, and educators in print information. See: [https://thewinetribune.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/what-arrogation/ ].

Retail Advice:  The Sorry Remaining In-Store Realities

There are exceptions to be found in below-top-15-20% locales.  Some are older shops or sections that have stubbornly resisted the departure to the enclaves of the advantaged. But for too many wine plebs, a dearth of retail wine staff capable of providing useful advice has become the norm.  Where, then, are they to turn to find a good value, an inexpensive bottle for tonight’s or this weekend’s dinner? 

There must be more than a few worthy wines on those shelves that are neither heavily advertised nor energetically merchandised, their qualities unrecognized, overlooked, doomed eventually to be carried off in the night to the hospice center that is the clearance shelves. Alternatively, those same bashful gems might be suddenly seized upon, grasped, abducted, and borne off in the shopping carts of slumming buyers of ‘better’ wines who have access to the higher knowledge dispensed in the sporadically-appearing ‘Low-Priced Wine Value Surprises’ sections of those wine-rating publications or websites that occasionally bother to sniff out high-quality, lower-priced wines.

But for the benighted mass, those uninitiated into even an awareness of this higher-level gnosis, however, there remain two main sources of in-store information:  the bottles themselves and the little cards meant to describe the virtues of the file of bottles directly above. these are commonly known in retail as ‘shelf talk’ or ‘shelf-talkers’.  [There are, of course, the unavoidable big displays and stacked cases throughout the store, but they tend to be the near-proprietary domain of favorite, high-volume distributors, showcases for periodic eruptions of short-lived trends, and cliched seasonal/holiday wines. Also, they seldom convey any useful information beyond price.]

Alas, the usefulness of the information provided on both the bottles and shelf talk cards is far more potential than actual.

In Part 3 of this series, I will examine in some detail the nature and evolution of helpful advice to be found on shelf-talkers and wine labels — and its very real limitations. And speculate on the likelihood of some probable on-the-ground retail models — as always, from the perspective of the buyers of modest-to-lower-priced wines.

The Ill-Served Wine Buying Plebs 3: Retail Sources of Help and Advice?

“In Part 3, I shall explore the function, promise, and pitfalls of the common ‘shelf talk’ cards, on which most buyers rely for guidance, given the prevailing absence of visible, informed staff.”

 

Part 3.  Shelf-Talkers:  Promises and Pitfalls

[In Part One of this series, I described the thirty-some-year period between the beginnings, in the 1970s, of the wine boom and the early 2000s as a kind of golden age of helpful advice for non-collectors and small-purchase buyers of low- or modestly-priced wines.  In Part 2 of this topic, I discussed the problem of getting wine advice within the principal loci of non-elite retail wine purchasing today. In Part 3, I shall explore the function, promise, and pitfalls of the common ‘shelf talk’ cards, on which most buyers rely for guidance, given the prevailing absence of visible, informed staff. Here, as throughout “The Wine Tribune’, my perspective will reflect the plight of the non-affluent, the non-expert, the buyer of lower-end and modestly priced wines, and the buyer of wines intended to be drunk, not stored, or aged.]

Shelf-Talkers

This [or just ‘shelf talk’] is the tradespeak term for the little descriptive cards hanging along the edge of a wine shelf directly beneath a column of wine bottles. They are usually created by producers or importers and provided to local distributors who place them on shelves or provide them to retailers. Deployed and maintained properly, they have the potential to provide information that helps consumers to understand the qualities of the wines they describe and better informs their choice.   In my considerable experience, their actual deployment — and especially their maintenance — in supermarkets and many smaller niche chain markets, is, with few exceptions, anything but proper.

To be sure, there are some big retailers and supermarkets who do provide what I have usually found to be helpful, reliable shelf talkers or their equivalents. These use up-to-date ratings from reputable sources.  They are rare, but to cite two from two shopping locations I now frequent:

·         Costco provides vintage-specific cards with mostly useful information for buyers, though they show an over-reliance on the opinions of the quirkily generous James Suckling.  If a newer-vintage wine has not yet been rated, they state that;  and they may cite ratings of earlier vintages, quite possibly cherry-picking only high, and omitting any low, ratings. In other cases, they simply proceed directly to their usually reliable, if more generic, descriptions.

[You have to do more time-consuming research than most wine plebs will are likely to undertake to sniff out potential subterfuges in even this, to me, mostly helpful system.  They self-evidently omit scores from bad vintages;  they may claim that no reviews are yet available when only unfavorable ones are;  they surely pick favorable snippets from what are usually longer reviewer descriptions;  and they pick reviews from sources who reviewed/scored the wine most favorably.  In my view, these are mild selection biases that I expect most sane retailers to employ with some frequency.]

·         A local supermarket with the best selection in our small shopping area does allow some distributor-provided shelf-talkers; but I know that they make time to taste a lot of wine and that they supplement the distributor cards with their personally hand-lettered ones to steer shoppers to less known, less marketed value wines that they have found to possess outstanding qualities.  The cards are usually written on decidedly non-glossy, non-colorful wine-case-divider cardboard with magic markers. Of necessity, they are concise, pithily descriptive value recommendations to try a wine that most shoppers would probably not have noticed. And I have found them to be inerrantly helpful and trustworthy.  As in other wine retail venues of this quality, staff members are able to provide helpful advice.

These, however, are noteworthy types of exceptions. It is far more common for shelf talkers to:

      • Refer to previous vintages, not shown, that once received a high score or favorable reference and then remain on the shelf for years to mis-describe lesser or failed vintages. In the meantime, the winery may have been sold to some conglomerate and degraded to lower quality production; still claiming the qualities of the original label as long as they can get away with it.   [I confess to having occasionally left tiny marks on some boasting shelf-talkers that I knew to be outdated, and I still see them hanging there years later, like the decade-old ‘going out of business’ ‘fire sale’, or ‘final clearance’ signs blaring in the windows of surplus and discount stores in tourist-trap areas everywhere.]

[Remember:  most retailers do nothing at all or just leave up old shelf-talkers until salesmen or paid shelf-stockers decide to replace them. Too often, if a reputable producer’s vintage is poor, the retailer is not aware enough to avoid it; and in high-volume, multi-department, one-stop super-stores or in smaller wine-as-an-afterthought venues, the corporate or store buyer may be incentivized, legally or covertly, to over-stock it and thus help move the wine out of warehouses. Most wine-lovers/enjoyers of any socio-economic caste understand that every producer has better and lesser vintages, but very few shoppers have the time to memorize them annually, especially as they vary by geography, climate events, or just bad luck. In such cases, sales-over-integrity corporate types know that leaving in place a favorable card from an earlier vintage, or a positive generic card will help launch a poor product into the carts of unsuspecting innocents. This same mentality [retailer ignorance or cynical ‘arrangements’] applies to far-too-old — usually white — wines that were found, for whatever reason, buried under newer ones in warehouses and to wines that somewhere in the process were stored in too-hot, too-cold, flooded, or otherwise undesireable areas and best moved quickly.] 

      •  Cite some gold, silver, or bronze medal awarded by some obscure or pompously-named wine competition in small print such as the ‘xxxxxxx [XX] County Annual International Wine Awards Competition’ [from any of the 3,143, or so, counties, parishes, or boroughs in the US].  The more meaningful of these, from significant California, metropolitan, and other wine-related areas, are multi-day events with large selections of wines, run seriously with competent, if often regionally-biased, tasting panels.  Many, however, are thrown-together affairs, scheduled between the ‘Kids Cookie Decorating Contest’ and the ‘Great Annual Chili Cook-off’ at the local county fairs or food events with a too-small selection of heavily marketed wines provided by local distributors and a panel of area public officials and TV weather-casters or — much worse — ‘news’ personalities’.  These ‘awards’ are cited on shelf-talkers, sometimes with no, or very sketchy, attributions, as number scores, medals, quotes, or award-aggregates — ‘Winner of 17 Gold Medals’. They are also flashed on glossy medallions glued to some lower-end or jug wine bottles.
      •  Worse yet, many cite neither awards nor useful information;  just the same vapid blather about glorious vineyards and the putative quality, aromas, and flavors of their wines that is pretty much also the unhappy norm on wine bottle back labels as described in the next post.

In Part 4 of this topic, I’ll discuss the final, and sadly ever-worsening, in-store [though not yet in-restaurant] hope for a source of  helpful  consumer information:  the labels — front and back — on the bottles themselves.  As always, I will do so from the perspective of the non-affluent, non-expert buyer of lower-end and modestly priced wines intended to be drunk soon.

The Ill-Served Wine Buying Plebs 4: Retail Sources of Help and Advice?

Now, somewhere, there must exist some microscopic wine-buying demographic — beyond shelf-talk and back label writers, perhaps —  to whom these aroma lists might be of use. But this putative demographic will not include any buyer of lower-end wines for tonight’s dinner that I know.  Nor will it include me nor millions of other, not limited to lower-end, buyers.

Part 4:  Labels — Anything but Informative and Helpful

[In Part One of this series, I described the thirty-some-year period between the 1970s beginnings of the wine boom and the early 2000s as a kind of golden age of helpful advice for non-collectors and small-purchase buyers of low- or modestly-priced wines.  In Part 2 of this topic, I discussed the problem of getting wine advice within the principal loci of non-elite retail wine purchasing today. In Part 3, I explored the function, promise, and pitfalls of the common ‘shelf talk’ cards, on which most buyers rely for guidance, given the prevalent absence of visible, informed staff. In Part 4, I explain the factors at play in the general failure of the industry to help customers by providing informative front and back labels.  Here, as throughout “The Wine Tribune’, my perspective will reflect the plight of the non-affluent, the non-expert, the buyer of lower-end and modestly priced wines, and the buyer of wines intended to be drunk, not stored, or aged.]

Back Labels

For brevity’s sake, I limit this discussion of wine bottle back-label information to those from America and the New World and on European wines designed more recently, primarily for New World markets.

Many of the traditional wines from the better-known European regions still offer only the most basic and legally-required information. This is due to multiple factors in the historical origins and development of the wine trade and wine consumption in these areas, and explaining it would require at least a large book — one that has already been written, many times, in many languages.  For a comprehensive English-language overview of this vast, long-existing historical-economic field, I would recommend the richly comparative and relatively recent work by James Simpson, ‘Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry, 1840-1914′ (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 36)’ [2011].

Several decades ago, in the earlier, pre-gentrified years of the U.S. wine awakening, a handful of then-emerging, small producers of quality California and other New World wines did provide specific, often detailed, information on their back labels. Most were producing better quality wines from those that dominated the market in their youth and in the years when many of them came of age in the wine industry.

Those had been the blended jug and ‘estate bottled’ varietals produced for and consumed by buyers who were largely disinterested in detailed production-process information and in knowing residual sugar levels, types of oak barrels used for aging, length of barrel aging,  specific grapes used in blended wines, anticipated years of aging predicted to result in optimally mature drinking quality, etc.

Most probably hoped that offering this information directly to buyers — the practice was effectively unknown at the time — would flex their transparent technical competence and their commitment to quality.  They likely hoped, too, that this differentiation would help, at least among more selective buyers, to offset the massive advantages enjoyed by big producers in available advertising, marketing, and distribution resources.

Some had foreseen that informative back labels would be of interest and use to those in the nascent field of broadened wine journalism and reviewing.  This field had languished in the more elite newspapers and publishing houses, written mostly by people born to families for whom drinking good Bordeaux, Champagne, Burgundy was not a financial challenge.

There were also multiple books by wine trade luminaries, each and all of whom wrote what amounted to the same book: ‘xxxxxxx’s Comprehensive Guide to or Encyclopedia of Wine’ [or some near-identical title], devoted to discussions of each of the major European ‘fine wine’-producing areas and enumerating the top estates therein and then covering other areas superficially, targeting mainly upscale, knowledgeable consumers, collectors and aficionados of coffee-table books.

For modest-to-lower priced wines, there were a few producers who did attempt to describe some combination of characteristics about flavors, mouth-feel, fruit-acid balance, length, and concentration. But today most wineries have abandoned the wine-making details and actual taste/mouthfeel indications of that earlier period in favor of strings of favorable generic adjectives;  or, worse, to gushing blurbs about their vineyards’ locale and landscape.

Far worse still, and becoming ever more common, are the purposeless enumerations of aromas allegedly perceptible in the wine. Too often, they are mere selections from a core of generic aromas that with picking and choosing can apply to almost any wine:  strawberry, cherry, vanillin, black currants, tobacco, maybe plums, for reds;  citrus, stone fruit, tropical fruit, vegetal, oak, minerality for whites.  Or certain subsets of the above that are nearly always applied to specific varietals. Those that get much more specific tend simply to be more precious, more esoteric.

Seldom helpful to consumers, this aroma-focused way of describing wine is an outgrowth of the California industry’s silly fixation on the U.C. Davis Aroma Wheel, with its 12 categories, 29 sub-categories, and 94 specific aromas. Created and released in the mid-1980s, it was a laudable educational effort to represent visually in three levels the factors influencing many familiar wine aromas in groupings based on various factors in the wine-making process. It has since been criticized as outdated, but also seized upon and expanded by imitators to what are now certainly hundreds and quite possibly thousands of wine aromas and, more recently, flavors.

This is fine for those whom it interests and finer still for those who can pull off a well-paid [and benefited] career ‘researching’ and publishing articles about it.  But, too often, especially from California, the effect of its prevalence is that the few allocated lines — that might, potentially, have been helpful descriptive prose — are used, instead, to inform the hapless buyer that “This distinctive wine from our award-winning xxxxxx-Valley hillside vineyards offers appealing aromas of wild gorse, mid-summer Scottish broom flowers, and fresh-sliced milk-thistle pods in a bright framework of crisp Japanese hiryu bitter orange acidity.  Perfect with seafood, chicken, summer salads, and seventeen-cheese pasta [substitute here any once-trendy, post-90s food-TV — or otherwise pointlessly ‘creative’ — restaurant item].”

Back in the days when I was attending a lot of trade tastings, I would watch, with puzzlement, more than a few otherwise rational professionals carefully making long lists of the aromas they detected;  lists that could have served no purpose for their customers or themselves beyond testing how well they remembered the however many aromas they had sniffed from their wine aroma kit, workshop, or class.

Now, somewhere, there must exist some microscopic wine-buying demographic — beyond shelf-talk and back label writers, perhaps —  to whom these aroma lists might be of use. But this putative demographic will not include any buyer of lower-end wines for tonight’s dinner that I know.  Nor will it include me nor millions of other, not limited to lower-end, buyers.  To be honest, I am seeing a little less of this than I did, say, three years ago, and seeing more about basic flavor, tannin levels, mouth-feel, fruitiness, etc.

Maybe, just maybe, there is some yet undetected, centripetal ‘common-sense force’ limiting the accelerating expansion and pervasiveness of useless, specialized ‘expert’ babble in our cognitive cosmos.

Front Labels

Beyond the basics of alcohol level and the more recent sulfite, intoxication, and pregnancy warnings], the front labels on wine bottles had long conformed to two basic types.

⦁          The traditional Old-World labels [with some notable exceptions, such as Alsace] showed the wine’s geography-based appelation and the quality designation in that area’s classificatory system. They included, in some form, the name of the estate-bottler, producer, or blender of the wine — in the national language.  In some regions there might be drawings of estates, vineyards, or other wine-related images, most often in black and white. German wines tended to multi-colored borders, framings, and sometimes images.

⦁          New World wines and wines from newer producing areas in the Old World tended to base their nomenclature on varietal and the estate-bottler, producer, or blender — often, at least partially, in English. Additionally, there was some designation of the geographic origin of the grapes utilized.

Both regimes are still widespread today, but since shortly before the turn of the 21st century the wine and craft beer industries fell victim to the practice of differentiating a product from those of the dull, formal past by giving it an ironic, frivolous, or absurd name.  We encounter this predisposition of the poor, the marginal, the excluded, the very local, and of youth throughout history in place names, flags, pub names, some British ales, and nicknames to cite a few that come quickly to mind.

For the most part, in middle-to-upper-class product-naming circles, this practice had long lain semi-dormant and festering, limited to occasional outbreaks among Dada artists and their ilk, jazz groups of the 1920s and 30s, counter-culture restaurants of the 1960s, rock groups, and some name-selectors in the digital-tech sector. But inevitably, growing numbers of no-longer-youthful Boomers entered the wine and then the craft beer industries.

As they did so, what began as a small outbreak limited to expensive Bordeaux-style ‘Meritage’ blends [too many grapes for convenient California-style varietal labeling] and often-more-expensive Italian Super-Tuscans [using French ‘noble varietals’ (basically cabernet and merlot) not allowed in regional appellazione regulations] soon erupted, from other social, sub-elite sources, into a virulent, copycat infestation of what was all along a mere hollow re-enactment of hackneyed épater mes aînés attitudinal posturing.

For already ill-served wine plebs, the use of names such as Undocumented Boson, Bloated Haiku, Chocolate Orgasm, and Overthrow made a bad situation much worse.  Now, already insufficiently informative front and back labels often became color- or design-saturated. This makes any useful identifiers that might be provided harder to see and almost certainly in smaller type-face — often on the back label in non-contrasting colors!  Can we be far, now, from the kind of creative burst that inspired the hundredth empty canvas or the thousandth blue square and their countless successors?

The ordinary buyer, previously able to look, at least, along the rows of front labels and price tags to make an easy choice based on country, region, appellation, or varietal, is now too often bereft of even this barest minimum of helpful information.

But then, anyone who has spent money and time and taken risks to produce a commercial wine or a beer and then names it  ‘Screaming Wormhole’ is confirming that he is more concerned with self-portrayal and generational/lifestyle-identity issues than with being helpful to consumers:  who get neither the preening nihilistic irony nor the sad, self-revealing — usually unrecognized and certainly unacknowledged — facile conformity.

This post concludes my examination of the unhappy plight of non-affluent wine plebs who seek available information and assistance at the kinds of retail venues where most of them purchase their wines. In a subsequent series, I shall examine the far more dire situation they encounter at the other major physical wine retailing institutions:  restaurants.  As always, I will do so from the perspective of the non-affluent, non-expert buyer of lower-end and modestly priced wines intended to be drunk soon.