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.
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