Wine: Tom Doorley
Wine, like every other product, is subject to marketing, a discipline (if we can call it that) in which I have worked. Back in the 1990s I worked on the Jacob’s Creek account and found myself helping to convert the then conservative Irish palate to Australian wine.
Recently, I was reading a paper from a pretty distinguished American university that considered the future of the French wine industry. The background was, of course, the huge growth in the market for New World wines over the past three decades and — to my surprise — a huge drop in the number of French people drinking wine. As in drinking wine, ever.
French people are supposed to have wine in their very veins, and, in a dilute form, in their children’s beakers. Well, it’s not so. When we went to Paris to meet the couple for whom our youngest was working as an au pair, they had gone to a great deal of trouble to buy wine to serve us with dinner. They had also departed from habit and bought some cheese!
Anyway, the university paper pitched what they called cépagisme against terroirisme in a ludicrously simplistic division of the wine industry. The division, crudely, was between wines that have the name of the grape, or the most significant grape, on the label, and those that have the name of a place instead. Chardonnay as against Mâcon, for example. The conclusion of the piece was that, in time, grape variety will win over geography.
Well, I can’t see Bordeaux AOC wines being labelled Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc/Malbec/Petit Verdot/Carménère to reflect what some of them contain. Equally, but in a very different context, I can’t imagine anyone being persuaded to buy a GevreyChambertin just because the label has the additional words, Pinot Noir.
But varietal labelling is useful for two categories of consumer: the huge group who are not particularly interested in wine and are likely to say things like ‘I like Shiraz’; and those who will cut their teeth on Chilean Merlot before moving on to Bordeaux. Cèpage and terroir are both useful in selling wine.
In time, the grape variety will win over geography