On wine and burgers

Yesterday, I had a very nice conversation with someone about Champagne -- and, oddly enough, I was not in a wine store when doing so.  While waiting in line at the bank, a woman in chef's pants (it turns out she is in fact a cook at a local restaurant) struck up a conversation asking "so what do you do?"  When I replied that I work in wine, she asked about my favorite Champagne.

When I told her, "it depends on what I'm drinking it with," there was shock and surprise; I believe she expected an answer like "Piper-Heidsick," or "Laurent Perrier."  A name that she recognized from the wine list.  She was further shocked when I broadly labeled the top volume producers as making "mostly mediocre wine."

So, I came up with a quick-and-dirty analogy that might be useful -- both with Champagne and still wines.  Comparing wine producers to hamburger restaurants.

Big names everyone's heard of are kind of like McDonalds or Burger King.  Big national fast-food chains.  Everyone knows McDonalds, and though the food there won't make you ill, it's not fine cuisine by any stretch. It's serviceable food, meant for mass consumption by people with a broad spectrum of palates.  Same with wine made for mass consumption; it's made to try and please as many people as possible.  Think Veuve Cliquot yellow label, or Chateau Ste. Michelle.  Yes, these names may make good upper-end wines (Grande Dame, or Indian Wells), sort of how McDonalds does sometimes do a good "special" burger (Black Angus and mushroom, for example), but for the most part, it's cheap and cheerful.

Smaller names that you may or may not have heard of are kind of like Five Guys, or In-n-Out, or Whataburger.  Regional chains, these places are about the same price as the big guys, perhaps a bit more, but they make good products.  The wine equivalent would be stuff you sometimes see on wine lists, but that you rarely find in a grocery store.  For Champagne, think Feuilette or Montaudon, for American wines think Martin Ray or Gordon Brothers.  They try, and generally succeed, at making top-flight products that are consistently good, and memorable.

Then, there's the real artisan producers.  RM Champagnes, estate-grown wines (oddly enough, many of these are in the category of "wineries lots of people have heard of," but mainly due to their cost, not as many people have had their wines).  This is like that friend who insists on having fresh-ground beef prepared at the butcher in front of him, hand-selects the freshest lettuce, makes homemade mayonnaise from scratch, and who grills that amazing burger that makes your mouth water to think of.  Yeah, the quality will vary slightly (good years versus bad ones for wine, days when all the butcher has is chuck roast versus sirloins for the burgers), but at the best of times, they're amazing, magical experiences.

And that, my friends, is why wine geeks are always searching for that new winery that "nobody's ever heard of, but you should try their estate cab!"  We're searching for the perfect burger in a world full of McDonalds.

Closing the deal.

While reading through my favorite consumer blog, Consumerist, I found an article about advertising and persuasion, which linked to this longer post, which distills the knowledge of the book "Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive". I found a number of these points to be important to the sale and marketing of wine, especially:

1. Inconvenience the audience by creating an impression of product scarcity: Does the allocation system ring a bell here? "Oh, I can't find Sea Smoke in stores, it must be awesome..." Making sure that the wine is available under only some circumstances (the allocation being in a store, or a restaurant having gotten some) is a great idea for marketing. Of course, it sucks for consumers, but as they say, them's the breaks.

5. Too many options necessitate selection, and hence frustration, when brain decides it’s unnecessary work: Far Niente has done a great job of this. They make 2 wines -- a cab and a chard (I've heard rumblings that they'll be making a zin next year, but for now, just the 2). Not like, say, Mondavi, where you can find 30 or more different types of wine. 2. Once you've decided on a bottle of Far Niente, there's basically no decision making left. With Mondavi, there's 6 or more varietals, each of which has several different wines -- Private Select, Napa, Sonoma, etc. There is something to be said for simplifying your product line -- find something you do well, and do it a lot.

7. A more expensive product makes the old version look like a value buy: Kind of at odds with #5, but look at Silver Oak, for example. Their Napa cab is around $100. Their Alexander Valley cab is $50-$60. Now, the Alexander Valley cab isn't cheap, by any means... but in comparison, it's a bargain!

9. A small gift makes people want to reciprocate and 6. Giving away the product makes it less desirable: Seemingly at odds, this explains why a lot of tasting rooms work the way they do -- spend $x on a tasting flight, get a free glass, or $x off of your order. People will take advantage of free samples... but even a small fee takes the sample out of the range of "free" and into the realm of "something I've paid for." Getting a glass, or a deal on your order? Why... bonus! Now I want to buy!

15. Labeling people into a social group tends to increase their participation ratio: Have you ever been told at a wine store or winery, "Ahh, you must like the good stuff!" (or something similar)? Congratulations, you've been labeled into the group of "people who buy expensive things." And therefore, you're more likely to buy expensive things... like that pricey bottle of wine you were eyeing...

41. Abstract names allow the customers to come up with reasoning: This explains why winemakers name their wines after abstract things; "Rattlesnake Hill," "Siena," "Trifecta." These have no solid meaning in the wine world... so they make the consumer create their own meaning, or at least ask (and get involved with the wine by doing so) why it's named that way (respectively: the hill had a rattlesnake nest on it when it was cleared, the wine's a Tuscan-style blend, it's 1/3 each cab, merlot, and cab franc, if you're curious).

Good wine is made in the vineyard (or the winery), but sales are made in the customer's head, and the wine industry knows it as well as any other one.

I know I've done it.  You've done it too.  You're in an unfamiliar (or even familiar) wine store, looking at new wines, and you look at the shelf talker, and in the corner you see "WA: 91."

You cave, skipping the description.  You buy the wine.  Based on a number.

Don't feel bad, we've all done it.  There's a number of sensory biases that the little number feeds into -- the bias of the expert ("if Parker likes it, and he's an expert, I should like it too"), the desire for simplicity (let's face it, it's easier to look for a number than to read a description), the sheer number of non-rated wines (I've heard many wine store customers say "well, this one's got a rating, it must be better.").  It's natural.

The thing is... (and this deserves bold text) a rating is what one person thought of the wine one time!  Often, in fact, this number is arrived at during a marathon tasting of 20, 30, even 40 wines!  So, what's going to score highly?  Wines that are gigantic, fruit-bombs with extreme flavors and intensity.  How could you remember anything but that style of wine when you taste so many in a row (if you've not had the opportunity -- trust me, palate fatigue sets in surprisingly quickly).  The truly amazing thing is this: day-to-day, your palate's sensitivity will change (imagine tasting wine with a very mild head cold -- a little hay fever, perhaps -- versus tasting it with completely clear sinuses; the wines tasted with the cold will rate lower).  So how in the world can we be precise to within 1% on how "good" -- as subjective and divisive a term as there is in the wine world! -- a wine is?

Additionally -- a number of vintners couldn't care less about what some critic in an office in New York or LA thinks of their wines.  They care about what the people who actually drink their wines think!  As one importer I have chatted with said -- "if you like the wine, and I like the wine, who is Parker to say the wine is bad?"  Do you think that people with that sort of attitude towards wine critics are likely to submit their wines for rating?  Probably not -- so there's a ton of hidden gems in the unrated wines.

A little secret: I've got about a bit over 750 ratings recorded on CellarTracker, and my average score is about 86.5.  86.5 should be, by the 100-point chart I've linked to above, that means that half of the wines I've rated are "good to very good" from Enthusiast, and "above average to very good" from Advocate and Spectator.  So is this a fair rating system?

No.  There's no way that I've been drinking wines that are that consistently above-average.  Heck, I've had wines that I've actively disliked that scored an 83 (the system I use is up to 5 points each for nose intensity, balance, and finish, 10 points for flavor quality, and 15 points for flavor intensity.  Add 50 points, and you've got the score.  Wine with a ton of intensity, a long finish, and reasonable balance can taste like crap and still score high -- and it has.).

So what's the point?  Well, for one, ignore the difference between an 88 and a 91 -- it's really subjective, and the margin of error for one person's tastes from day to day can be higher than 3 points.  Two, don't compare apples and oranges -- just because, say, Parker gives a wine an 88 and James Laube gives it a 93 doesn't make Laube's score any more or less valid; it just means that Laube liked it more.

It's not like there's a certification program for wine critics, after all; anyone with a working palate and an Internet connection can post blogs with scores!  There's no standardization, so really the best advice is to taste a lot of wines, and trust your own palate.  Don't slavishly follow anyone's dictum that this wine is good and that wine is bad -- be it Robert Parker, Micheal Broadbent, your wife, your wine-snob friend, or even me. 

Chart from DeLong Wine Info, with the JPG compiled by the Wine Economist.

A rose by any other name...

White wine is easy to understand -- when you squeeze a wine grape, almost any wine grape, the juice runs white (yes, you could, in theory, make a white Cabernet).  Red wine is a bit harder -- the red color comes from contact with the skins, so you leave them in the mix for a while.  Rose, though, is hardest still -- you have to leave the skins on for just a little while, and the juice is pink.  Note, of course, that this has nothing to do with how much sugar is in the wine; pink ≠ sweet.

Of course, you can also just mix red and white to make pink; this is the easy way out, and it's how some American wineries make their pink wines.  Folie a Deux, for example, makes a rose in their Menage a Trois line that's 2 parts red (Merlot and Syrah, for color and fruitiness) and 1 part white (Gewürtztraminer, for some sweetness).  In fact, this method is also used to make rose sparkling wine -- make the bubbly, then add some red wine at the end to make it pink (everyone from Cava to Champagne does this -- there are some who use the method of leaving the juice on the skins for a bit, but not many, and those are quite expensive).

Many European vintners have complained about the blended roses; they're cheap to produce, and they tend to make all consumers think of rose as cheap pink stuff, not serious wine (how seriously can you take a bottle of $9 wine that's got a punny name, after all?).  The wines produced through the traditional method, of course, are expensive and worthy of consideration, at least in their eyes (and mine, for what it's worth).

So, in the light of the recent EU ban on using certain terms on import wine labels, I felt I had to give the EU their due -- they banned the import of still rose made using the blending method, and the production of blended rose.  Blending is still OK for bubbles, though.

Good for them, for sticking up for traditional methods in winemaking.  Yes, it's a protectionist move, same as the name thing, but in this case it encourages people to make better wine, to treat it as a craft and not a beverage.

Sticks and stones...

While reading through other blogs, I happened upon a link to this article in Decanter (a British wine publication, that I highly recommend).  The quick-and-dirty version of it is that the EU has banned the use of certain terms on the label of US wines.  The list?  Chateau, classic, clos, cream, crusted/crusting, fine, late bottled vintage, noble, ruby, superior, sur lie, tawny, vintage and vintage character.

Insanity!  This is to say that, say, Chateau Montelena -- which has a definitively European-castle styled building onsite (see the above left photo from their website) cannot bring their wine into Europe without changing the name (one that's been in use for over 30 years).  Nor could Clos du Bois, Clos du Val, Chateau Ste. Michelle, or Chateau St. Jean.  You can't call your Port-like wine (Port is a protected term already, although a number of wines have been grandfathered in) a Tawny or Ruby, even if it is in that style!  If you age your wines on the lees -- the yeast particulates left over after fermentation -- you can't say it's been aged "sur lie."  You dare not make both a nonvintage and vintage cuvee if you're an American sparkling wine producer!

What a crock!  It means that we, as Americans, would have to develop an entirely new vocabulary to explain wine, one for which perfectly acceptable terms have been being used for years!  Great, we'll have to make a subject that is already unreasonably complex and imposing even harder to understand and potentially less accessable to the average person.  Great marketing strategy, there, guys.

Now, I'm the first person to say we should protect European place names for wine – in my personal opinion, there's no excuse for an American winery producing a Chianti, or a Burgundy.  And don't even get me started on Champagne being used on American wines – even with the modifier “California” or “New York” in front of it.  I shudder to think of the beating that that appellation has taken due to greedy American vintners subverting it's fine name and putting out mass-market crap (well... different mass-market crap than the vintners who belong in the appellation -- and, in fairness, the American mass-market crap is often not even made using the same method; Cooks "California Champagne" is Charmat-method, for example).  But this move smacks of pure European protectionism; three of the better-known American producers of mass-market wines are affected by it (Clos du Bois, Chateau Ste. Michelle and Chateau St. Jean).

What's the solution?  Should the US slap the EU with a similar ruling, saying "you can't send wine into our market without an explicit explanation of what the grapes are?" (labels from the Rhone would get a lot more complex then, and I fear the Bordelais would simply revolt).  Perhaps a tariff on EU wines?  Great ideas, but then US consumers suffer for the sins of the EU, in the sense of losing the ability to choose European wines or in overpaying for them.  In that case, we'd be no better than the EU -- after all, the European consumer's freedom of choice has been limited by this as well (in fact, one of the better American wines made by a European vintner is Dr. Loosen's Eroica, made under the Chateau Ste. Michelle label!  So, if you're in the Mosel and you want Loosen Riesling, your choices are limited to only the local wines, and not any of his Washington State endeavors!).  And, of course, European vintners, who already make more wine than they sell, lose out on a fairly major market for export.

There's a fine line between protecting the uniqueness that terroir imparts in a wine, and heralding the history of technique used in making it, and trying to unfairly stifle the competition.  This EU ruling seems to be firmly in the latter category.  It's as crazy as trying to forbid the word "Glen" in the name of a non-Scotch whisky.  Oh, wait... that's been tried.  And failed.

A Champagne Manifesto

In the world of wine, few wines are as romanticized as Champagne; there's an aura of luxury, romance, and celebration surrounding the word.  Champagne is what we use to greet the new year, to celebrate weddings and birthdays, what we splurge on.  It's... well, Champagne!

Oddly enough, though, it's often about as artisan of a product as Pepsi.  Often, in fact, it's about as industrial a wine as the Australian "critter label" contingent.  Champagne is, for the most part, dominated by the big luxury-good conglomerates (LVMH -- Louis Vuitton Moët Hennesey -- and Rémy-Cointreau are the best known of these).  What could be considered "big house" Champagne accounts for around 90% of the market, as of 2008.

Why are these wines bad?  Well, not so much bad, as suboptimal?  An analogy¹ may be in order; imagine a vintner -- your favorite, be it Heidi Peterson-Barrett, or Michel Gassier, whoever -- releasing a new wine called simply "California," or "Loire," or "Piedmont," named after the grand region where the wine is from.  There's no vintage date.  The blend of grapes is left unknown, but they do tell you "some of the grapes are from here, some from there, but we can't tell you where all of them are from -- trade secret, you understand.  Yeah, there's no appellation on it, but really, isn't all that appellation stuff just too complex anyhow?  At any rate, the wine is luxurious, worthy of top prices -- it'll start at $40 a bottle.  We made a million cases of it last year.  So buy it."

You'd look at them like they were insane, right?  $40 a bottle for a wine with a million-case production run (by way of comparison, that's on the order of quantity of Yellowtail Cabernet)?  No vintage date, no appellation, no terroir?  No thanks.

Yet, this is exactly what the big houses do.  Consider Veuve Cliquot (owned by LVMH) -- their production is around 1.5 million cases annually, when you take into account all of their wines (base nonvintage, rose, demi sec, vintage, and Grande Dame).  The vast majority of the wine is made with purchased grapes (Champagne has about 19,000 vineyard owners, and the big houses own very little land).  Most of their wine carries no vintage date.  It's been stretched and manipulated through dosage to meet the requests of a focus group.  It's a product, in the truest sense of the word -- the planned, plotted outcome of a very rigorously designed process.

Sounds a lot like the story of Woodbridge, doesn't it?  Except, at least, Woodbridge is vintage-dated; they allow for some small variance from year to year.  It might be interesting... perhaps.  Or at least different.

It gets worse, though -- even the grapes the big houses buy tend not to be very good.  They pay by weight, not quality, for their grapes.  Good grapes for sparkling wine tend to be just a hair under-ripe, and low on water -- hence, light.  If you are a farmer with two plots of land, one with heavy, wet grapes that are not ideal for sparkling wine, and one with perfectly under-ripe grapes, and someone offers you money for weight, what would you give them?  I'd save the good stuff for someone who paid for quality!

So why is this stuff $40+ a bottle?  Is it worth it?

My answer would be a resounding "no."

So what's the alternative?

Récoltant-Manipulant ("Grower-Maker") Champagne.  The other 10% of the market.  Where the good grapes tend to stay.  You can tell a Récoltant wine by the initials "RM" on the Champagne code (generally on the bottom of the front label).  These are wines made by people, not corporations.  Wines with a sense of place, not ones that are poked and prodded into bland nothingness.

And, even better, these are not wines that are more expensive -- in fact, due to a lack of marketing costs (sponsoring polo tournaments and regattas is expensive, it turns out!) RM Champagne often costs substantially less than the big-house products!

Often, an RM wine will even carry the name of the village where the grapes were grown -- there's several hundred in Champagne, and some even have a cru (Grand or Premier) status associated with them.  I find, personally, that the pinot-heavy wines of Bouzy are excellent -- very lively, with gorgeous cherry notes.  For blancs de blancs, wines made only of Chardonnay, Le Mesnil-sur-Oger is excellent, with focused citrus and biscuit notes.

Note that I'm not recommending a specific label here -- the RM's available in my market may not be the RM's available in someone else's.  We're talking about wines with a total production in the thousands of bottles, so even with as small a slice of the market as they have, there's a lot of producers out there.  And, that small slice is growing -- it's around 10% now, while 10 years ago, it was 3%.

The best thing to do, really, is explore.  Come to your Champagne with an open mind, forget what you "know" about the big houses, and discover what terroir really means in sparkling wine.  So buy a bottle with an unknown name, a little "RM" on the bottom of the label, and the name of a town half a world away, and preferably one with the words "Grand cru."  Taste.  Enjoy.  Be a part of the revolution in Champagne.  Say "no" to wine as a product, and "yes" to wine as an expression of place.

¹ This is lifted pretty much wholesale from Terry Thiese, who is the visionary leading the trend to RM Champagnes.  Good writers borrow, and all that,  but I felt I had to credit him.