Wine professionals naturally want consumers to trade up and explore. But when expertise becomes prescription, the industry risks alienating the very people it hopes to engage.
After many years in the wine industry, one thing has become abundantly clear to me: it is a fairly insular world. Most people I have worked with in wine, myself included, began their careers determined to absorb as much product knowledge as possible. We wanted to hold our own with more experienced peers. Because wine is a technical subject, that desire to prove our expertise can become ingrained in the way we behave.
The problem starts when you’ve reached a reasonable level of knowledge and start getting excited about discovering new wines, hidden gems and outstanding producers – you really want to shout about it to everybody you know, and particularly to the final consumer.
At the beginning of your career, industry peers will invariably warn you about the real cost of wine and the fact that when you buy a wine at the cheaper end of the market as a consumer, the actual value of the liquid in the bottle is only a fraction of the retail price, due to taxes, costs, packaging, marketing budgets and margins. So most industry professionals constantly try to encourage their customers to trade up to more expensive wine, so that consumers get a better liquid and everybody involved in the supply chain benefits commercially (i.e. makes money).
That becomes ingrained in your mindset as a wine professional, which is dangerous. If you are passionate about wine and have a reasonable knowledge of it, chances are you will be dedicating a fair amount of your personal money to buying wine, trying new producers, regions, grape varieties and esoteric wines. So it makes total sense.
But for the vast majority of consumers, wine remains a fairly elitist and daunting world. Faced with the ‘wall of wine’, very little time and increasingly diminishing disposable income, most consumers go for whatever looks good, is on promotion, or something they’ve had before. If they can’t find it, they will buy into another category.
The temptation for wine professionals and marketeers is to push consumers towards something more interesting (often more expensive), partly to share their passion and hope some of it will rub off on them. But this equates to telling them that what they are drinking is wrong.
I remember when BrewDog first launched: their communication focused on deriding other beer brands, essentially saying, “the beer brand that you drink all the time is cr*p.” Which is patronising. The wine industry might be a tad more subtle, but professionals are effectively doing the same thing: telling consumers that what they are drinking is muck.
My main learning as an industry insider is simple: we need to spend less time telling people what to drink and more time understanding why they drink what they drink. That means meeting consumers where they already shop and learn, listening to the language they use, and treating their choices as insight rather than error.
There is a plethora of consumer events — such as the BBC Good Food Show at the NEC, Wine Alive, or Showcase tastings in Majestic stores — where industry insiders can show their wines. These provide a fantastic insight into what people think of wine. You give them an opportunity to try your wines for free, so they tend to open up. They describe what they want in simple terms; they are often apologetic about their limited wine knowledge, but they will tell you what they do and don’t like. In other words, they are telling you what they want, not the other way round.