The culture and marketing of wine

[chiguire]

I'll be the first to say that I am intimidated by wine. I have a solid grasp on beer styles, but wine eludes me.

I have been trying to improve my wine knowledge and exposure, but it seems like the way wine is prevents me from doing so.

Let me explain.
My wife does not drink, so when I drink at home, it is without her.
This is fine for a bottle of beer, but I have experienced oxidized wine and it is not good. So, opening a bottle of wine for dinner is tough, because I am either committed to a bottle for the night, or I have to drink it soon there after, and in reality I usually only drink a couple times a week...(at least that is what I tell myself )

Drinking wine at restaurants is expensive, but I do it from time to time.
Good wine is hard to find in small bottles.

So... I like wine but the wine industry makes it hard for me to enjoy it
Why isn't wine served on tap somewhere for a reasonable price?
Why are there not smaller bottles of wine?


Any ideas, input or insight?

 

[akueck]

I've been to "wine bars" which serve wine by the glass (down to 2 oz pours) and keep the wine fresh by pushing it out through a tap with argon. Pop the cork, put in a special plug, and push the wine out. Keeps the wine fresh long enough to finish the bottle (which admittedly isn't usually more than a week). So these places do exist, at least in some areas.

At home, we have the Vacu-Vin stoppers. Replace the cork with a stopper and pump the air out of the headspace. These usually keep for at least a week, sometimes longer. You can also try the wine saver sprays (usually a mix of several inert gases), but they are consumable.

Why is wine not served in smaller bottles? I'll venture a guess: wine is poured from the bottle into a glass. Beer (in America) isn't. I think this is a cultural phenomenon: Belgian beer is very often packaged in larger bottles, for example 500 and 750 ml. And you'd be insulting the beer by drinking it out of the bottle. Lots of German beers are the same. American light lager (Bud/Miller/Coors) only winds up in a glass if you're getting it out of a keg, bottles and cans are consumed right from the package. Can't really share that kind of drink easily. If you're going to make single-serving packages for beer, a 12-oz bottle makes sense. But since you're serving wine in a glass, not a bottle, it doesn't make economic sense to package it in 4-oz bottles. Just get a bigger bottle and pour a glass out of it.

On the flip-side, I've seen wine packages that look like juice boxes that do come in smaller sizes. So things are trending that way, just not with bottles. And you can drink it with a straw!

 

[wildoates]

I'd like to bottle some of my mead in smaller bottles...if I had them. Since you don't see them very often and my bottles are primarily scavenged, I use what I get!

 

[chiguire]

Thanks, akueck.

I'll have to get some wine saver tops like you mentioned. I guess I did not realize that they were so affordable.

There is a wine bar here in Tucson, but they don't serve on tap, they just pour from the bottle I think. They seem to have a decent selection and I have had a couple glasses there. I always feel weird asking the server questions about wine for some reason (I know this is irrational). Beer just seems more approachable to me.

 

[PitBull]

I'd like to bottle some of my mead in smaller bottles...if I had them. Since you don't see them very often and my bottles are primarily scavenged, I use what I get!

Have you tried beer bottles? They definitely do not look as nice as 375 ml wine bottles, but they hold two 6-ounce glasses of wine. Plus beer bottles hold pressure if you decide to naturally carbonate your mead into a sparkling mead. Unfortunately, crown-top bottles are getting hard and harder to find. Even a lot of imports are using the weaker twist-off tops.

I tend to scavenage bottles too. Friends and relatives get a full bottle of wine/mead in exchange for a bunch of empty wine or crown-top beer bottles. Nothing like a little incentive. Also check Craig's list. Yesterday I scored 8 dozen (unwashed ) 750 ml wine bottles from a waitress for $3/dozen.

 

[Medsen Fey]

From the pictures, there looks like a place re-opening in Tucson called elle bistro that will be using the tap dispensers with inert gas for wine. One evening in a place like that can give your palate a tremendous education.

Wine can be easily approachable, especially in the internet age. Simply take glass, fill it, and raise it to the lips. Makes some notes on the flavors and sensations you identify (see the "virtual tasting" thread to get some ideas). Write down which ones you like, and which ones you don't. Ask questions about things you liked (or didn't). Look up ones that you like or which you are interested in and read more.

If you don't have a fancy wine bar around, a wine club in the area may be a great alternative. Folks can get together and split up some bottles (and the cost) to taste all sorts of different wines.

At home, I use Private Preserve, which you can get from many home brew places, to flush the bottles and then stopper them and keep them in the fridge. Most wines will still be good for a couple of weeks doing that.

I'm by no means any kind of wine expert or connoisseur, but I have learned a lot by trying different things and doing a little reading. Understanding different styles of beers requires the same kind of process, so I suggest just going about it in a similar way. The one important thing I recommend is to disregard how "the experts" rate the wines - trust your own taste buds instead. They won't let you down.

 

[Braxton]

I definitely agree that wine is less approachable, for all the reasons you've listed and more. I have a grasp on the general styles and regions at this point, but I certainly haven't tried many wines; they are expensive, often intentionally aloof, and like you I don't have many people around to try them with.

Probably the most accessible beverage I've come across is tea. Inexpensive, little equipment required, variable serving size. I still love tea more than all the rest.

As a somewhat related aside, I've always been a bit disappointed that mead marketing seems to imitate wine marketing. I'd like to see some mead company act more like a small craft brewery. "This is EXTREME mead! It'll blast holes through your tastebuds!" And so on. Crispin Cider company has recently released a Trappist Cider that I see as a step in this direction. Trying to get the younger, hipper crowd instead of the stodgy old well-off wine drinking crowd is an excellent way for a fringe beverage like cider or mead to enter the consciousness of the mainstream.

 

[AToE]

Well, aiming for the hip young crowd is something BNektar does (look at the spelling for example), but they're a rare one in mead.

Big bottles is much much more economical for producers. Many craft beer companies focus on larger bottles, look at Rogue for example, or Unibroue - also as was said earlier, these bottles are not meant to be the serving vessel, wheras a small beer bottle is fine for most styles sold in them. Drinking mead out of a beer bottle would be doing it a pretty good disservice most of the time, and even if people pour into a glass, the cost just went up (quite a bit) just due to the packaging.

I hate seeing wine go bad when I don't want to get tipsy too. Wine preserving spray bottles of gas are the way to go to avoid this.

 

[BrewinNColorado]

This year at the paired tasting even for the Mazer Cup, there was a braggot (the maker escapes me at the present) that was bottled in cans. I thought it was a great way to reach out to the beer drinkers.

Michael

 

[Braxton]

Wow, braggot-in-a-can. That is pretty cool by my book. I can easily imagine a meadery-brewery collaboration braggot as well.

Good call on the drinking mead straight from the bottle thing, that often would not be appropriate. Depends a bit on the style of mead, I guess, I definitely drink some carbonated hydromels straight out of the bottle at home (and feel only slightly guilty while doing so).

 

[wayneb]

Yup - Braggot in a can. The guys doing it are Thunderhead Brewing, in Kearney, Nebraska.
http://www.thunderheadbrewing.com/golden_frau_sightings.php

 

[Chevette Girl]

If you're trying to educate your palate, see if there are wine tastings you can attend. Our LCBO (liquor control board) hosts things like this from time to time.

Actually, one of my friends hosts wine tastings from time to time, I'm the only home brewer, everyone else brings a bottle of something they like, want to share or are curious about, and we all have a little of everything, I bring my brew log book and write down all their comments about my submissions

And I've also got a couple of friends who've been getting into wines enough to take courses on it, what the heck is it called now...Sommelier, that's it... to both educate the palate and be able to identify and describe what they perceive.

 

[akueck]

I'm surprised to hear such consensus on the "wine is unapproachable" front. There are many more (broad) styles of beer than there are wine, using many more ingredients. Within-style variation is at least as large in beer as in wine (compare English IPA to east cost US IPA to west coast US IPA for example, then consider Loire Sauvingon Blanc vs New Zealand).

Wine-by-the-glass is admittedly harder to come by, most restaurants have a limited selection they'll sell in less than a bottle. But the basics for ordering wine and beer you've never tried are the same: "Hey what is this like?" If you live anywhere near local wineries (which exist in I think every state in the US), go in and ask for a tasting. The more questions you ask, the more likely you are to have the pourer bring out "something you'll love!" from the back.

 

[AToE]

My issue is more my own comfort level when talking to people about wine. I look like a guy who could be a beer expert, but I look really out of place talking wine (young, shaved head, beard, lots and lots of tattoos). I know it's not really an issue, I just get weird vibes from people sometimes, so I wind up just buying things at random and trying to understand what I'm tasting by myself.

 

[andrewschwab]

This topic brings up a good point.
MARKETING, are the meads better to market to the younger (mid 20's-40 crowd) These are the younger folks who want something different then parents did BUT also have an income to back it up...
To me it seems this is a good place to start, the older folks would take to much time and money to get them to even try let alone switch (buy on regular basis)...

It would be nice if there was a "group" that all meaderies paid a few cents into for every ???? sold. This group would work on the marketing research etc.. That would then be released to the mead makers.
Example: Look at the almond board. THEY waaaaay marketed themselves. There is a set amount per pound that growers pay in to this board. In return the marketing board did just that marketed almonds. Those guys sell out no issue. They can't grow enough nuts...

 

[Jestig]

Don't know about everyone else, but never saw going for just one age group. Mead is its own entity. Its an alternative to wine and beer, which means you can go after both types of drinkers. For the beer drinker, mead on tap, kinda like Red Stone Meadery. Then you can do the split bottles for the wine drinkers. Most people are more likely to spend 10 bucks on a small bottle versus 20 bucks for a wine bottle of something they have never heard of, or have never tried. With that being said, seems like you would have to advertise in both directions, not just one.

 

[fatbloke]

A lot of the "relevant" points have already been raised.

Yes, the "grape wine" industry is more mature. They have a massive, if spread out marketing industry that follows them around.

There's also the issue of the containers that "grape" wine comes in. Some of them are original as they're new and that's more about selling more of a particular type of wine (but also includes a bit of innovation - which often comes from the "new world" wine industry).

Some of the more established markets, will only supply their wines in "industry standard" containers, mainly because of what they have to pay for newer types of machinery to put the wine in different, more "modern" containers.

There's also the issue of whether "it" has been bottled by the original maker, or whether it's a "co-operative" type affair that bottles in more than one size as there's a bit of blending going on.

On top of that, there's the "snobbery" that is attached to wines from some locations. Like if you can claim to be producing a "Bordeaux" then sure as hell you're gonna bottle it in "bordeaux" industry standard containers, as well as having, not only the info required by regulation/agreement/law on the labels, but if you try to use a totally different design, then often "it's" vilified by the other producers (and so called "experts") in that region.

It's all about "branding". For a given area/region. Once you get passed that, then you might be lucky to find that they will bottle in differing sizes of containers - but more often than not, you'll be lucky if something you like is available in anything other than 750ml bottles (or less frequently 375ml bottles).

Of course, you may have seen all sorts of sizes but those are often bespoke containers for a specific reason i.e. contractual agreement to provide a certain "name", but in smaller bottles for marketing/branding purposes - think of those tiny 162ml champagne bottles used for corporate events etc etc.

So the knock on of that, is that you might have to either (as is the case with me) drink a whole bottle if you open it, or if you are lucky enough to live in a place where the market is big enough, to find either the "wine saver" gas sprays in "home brew" sizes or the pressure dispensers as mentioned above that allow you to connect a gas supply to a bottle and dispense through a pump....

Here, they tend to open a bottle, serve as necessary but also bin it if it goes "off" - damn! the mark up on wine by the glass here is probably enough to be able to sell only 2 glasses without making a loss......

Just my 2 pence worth.....

regards

fatbloke

 

[chiguire]

Thanks, all, for the good and diverse insights.
Very good input.