In an age when the 24-hour news cycle forces even the smallest, most inconsequential items to become “newsworthy” there are other things to be found on the web that just cry out for analysis and commentary.
The wine industry has certainly contributed to this climate, perhaps due to the fact that there is a mystique that has surrounded it for upwards of 5000 years. I’m confident that no other beverage the human race has ever produced, either by accident or design has filled so many memories positively.
Perhaps because of this, those who would try to create such memories inorganically are always of interest to me. Whether it’s winemakers styling their wines to appeal to a certain demographic (see: Mondovino) or the hiring of consultants to study what color labels (or cute animals) will appeal to the broad wine buying public at large.
And yet the Australians seem to have cracked the palatary secrets of the coveted Chinese wine market.
It’s not that I think the Aussies have could not have come up with something representative of what they believe the Chinese want to drink, I just think it’s bad business to make decisions based on the current trends. Yes, China is an emerging market for wine but one need only look at the rest of the world and see how tastes have changed.
Heck, lets just look at my preferences. When I first started buying wine I did so like many do, filling my cellar with age worthy California Cabernet, respected vintages of Bordeaux, etc. Now years later, virtually all the wine I drink is bought and consumed in days, not years. Not only that but I’m obviously drinking certain wines with certain foods.
Maybe the scientists in Oz are saying that the Chinese diet is not nearly as diverse as that of other parts of the world. If that’s the case, then yes, maybe they can better craft wines that appeal to the population at large.
But the landscape is littered with say movies with $100M price tags that bombed, while the studio heads searched for reasons why a movie with lots of explosions, starring Bruce Willis and appealing to the masses did not hit their projections. Could it be because the script was lousy, the director a hack or just that the public had tired of formulaic drivel?
And like with films, the enjoyment of wine is purely subjective. What I like you might hate and vice versa. The true pleasure of wine is in the experimentation of seeking out what is not the most obvious.
Good wine finds its audience, bad wine never does and the rest of it is about as predictable as a video poker machine…
