Sometimes it takes a while for a thought to penetrate, but this thought, “the demise of the food wine”, is penetrating big time for me right now.  Three separate blog posts brought this issue front and center for me.

The first of them, “Châteauneuf That’s Easy on the Jam”, by Eric Asimov, appears at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/dining/09wine.html?hpw. To pick one sentence out of the article that encapsulates Asimov’s point of view:  “If you like fruit-bomb wines, you will love the ‘07 Châteauneufs.”  Asimov himself prefers other vintages, vintages stronger on tannins and acids, over these fruit bombs.  But, he acknowledges, Parker finds the 2007 vintage “a truly historic and profoundly great vintage.”  Anyone care to hazard a guess which vintage will do better in the marketplace?

The second article was a review of one of our wines, our 2006 Seven Artisans Meritage, by Dan McGrew, which appears at http://dogswine.blogspot.com/2009/12/seven-artisan-meritage.html.  This favorable, if not overwhelmingly flattering, review, makes these points, none of which I would disagree with:  “Overall this was a better wine with food than it was by itself. There wasn’t quite enough depth for it to standby itself, but if you have a steak nearby it would be a good match”. This wine, high in tannins and acidity, was in fact meant to go with big foods, where it does go very well.  (Though I do believe, particularly with a little more age, this wine will do quite well on its own.  Time will tell.)

The third review, also by McGrew, was of the pricey 2001 Caymus Special Selection, which can be found at http://dogswine.blogspot.com/2009/12/caymus-special-selection-2001.html.  The gist of the review:  “With the standing rib roast the wine seemed almost too ripe and came close to being overbearing and cloying.  I would have preferred more acid and a less sweet finish, but these are small matters.  As a stand alone bottle of wine it would be hard to beat, but as a dinner companion it left a few things out of the mix.”

Comparing the Seven Artisans with the Caymus, the two wines are pretty much on opposite ends of the spectrum in two regards.  First, price, since the Caymus probably costs ten times what our Meritage does.  But second, and more pertinent for present purposes, one (ours) is big on the tannins and acid, which makes it a good food wine.   The Caymus, in contrast, is short on those, which may make it a better standalone wine, though it comes up short when paired with food.

Which brings me, at long last, to my topic, the demise of the food wine.  I don’t mean “demise” in the sense that people don’t like them, because they do.  I mean “demise” because they’re at a big disadvantage in the marketplace.  Think about it.  How do wines get purchased?  A distributor who’s deciding whether to carry your wine takes a swig of it, and within a second or two passes judgment on it.  No opportunity to linger with it over some prime rib.  No opportunity for a wine to divulge its more subtle allures.  Whatever stuff you’ve got, you’ve better strut it out but fast.  As between the low tannin, soft, jammy wine bursting with up-front fruit, and the more food-friendly, higher tannin and acid, wine, which one is going to win that taste-off?

Assuming you can get your food-friendly wine into the distributor, when the distributor reps go out into the market, bottle in hand, to market the wine to their retail accounts, what happens?  Déjà vu all over again.  Two seconds to show your stuff, and it’s on to the next wine.

Most consumers don’t get an equivalent opportunity that often, but when they do, it’s déjà vu for the third time.  Big jammy fruit beats out the food friendly wine every time in the wine equivalent of speed chess.

And that’s how it works out there in the real world.  So, as a wine producer, you have a choice:  do you make a wine that shines at the end of the meal, or one that shows its best at first blush?  Or, phrased another way, do you want to make a wine that’s easy, or hard, to sell (because that’s what it comes down to)?  My personal preference is to make the wine that’s in it for the long haul.  But my personal preference is getting trumped by the need to move product and bring cash in the door.  At this point, I think a judicious use of a little Syrah or even Petite Sirah, to “brighten” up the front end of our Merlot-based wines, is looking more and more likely. Unfortunate, yes, but, as they say, “It’s the way of the world.”

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 8:07 am and is filed under Wine Sales and Pricing, Wine Tasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.