Lessons from Unified Wine & Grape Symposium 2008
The 2008 Unified Wine & Grape Symposium was held at the Sacramento Convention center on January 29-31. The event is organized jointly by the American Society for Enology and Viticulture and the California Association of Winegrape Growers to bring growers and vintners the latest information relevant to the industry.
Among the speakers was Jon Fredrikson, who sees the American wine market continuing to grow from top to bottom, according to Bob Krauter at Capital Press. U.S. consumers spent $30 billion to snap up 314 million cases of wine last year, a 4% increase over 2006. Sales for wine costing $12 per bottle or more increased 20%. However, 100 million of the cases were foreign wine, and sales of imported wines grew faster than for domestic labels.
Domestic wines are particularly weak at restaurants, where imports capture 43% of the market, according to Joshua Greene, editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits magazine. Greene sees the restaurants as a crucial market-share battlefield and points to sommeliers as keyplayers. Jim Downing of Sacramento Bee quotes Greene as saying:
“Their challenge is to find a wine that they’re as excited about as the chef is … about the flavor of his vegetables from the farmers market.”
Krauter quotes Greene regarding the sommeliers and wine directors:
“This is a part of the business, that to a large extent, has been abdicated to imports.”
Greene suggested two ways for American wine makers to strike back:
1) Produce more light reds and whites.
2) Focus more on grape variety and wine-making techniques to create what he calls “authentic” wine than on processes to maintain consistency.
Specifically, Greene points to the increased interest among sommeliers for food-friendly naturally fermented wine. Jeremey Parzen quotes him as follows:
“It’s a risky way to make wine,” he noted. “You can’t always make wine commercially like this, but there’s a growing market for it. The question is how to make a wine that’s balanced, has concentrated flavors, and a distinct expression of its place… and then figure out how to make money doing it.”
(Parzen also has notes from a speech by Darrell Corti at the symposium.)
Krauter fills in with another Greene quote:
“It flies in the face of the way wines are made in California. People talk about the way wines are grown, but a lot of people, at least at this level in restaurants, are looking at the way they are made,” Greene said. “When you talk about the way wines are made in California, there’s a lot of processing that’s going on.”
Fredrikson noted what should always be kept in mind by wine makers, especially those who seek to sell to the broader public that may not be in tune with the ins and outs of wines:
“We way overestimate the knowledge of the American consumer,” Fredrikson said.
Two years ago Fredrikson predicted that America will surpass France and Italy as the world’s number one wine market by 2010. It’s overtaken Italy and now has its sights set on France.
The 2009 Symposium will be held on January 27-29.
Speaking of sommeliers, Wall Street Journal has an article today on one in Brussels, Daniel Marcil. You may or may not agree with the article’s opening paragraphs:
A good sommelier is something of an all-around showman — one who, in putting together his wine list and serving his customers, has the artistic vision and organizational skill of a big-name director, the hands-on logistical abilities of a stage manager and the dramatic flair of an actor.
But he’s also something of a throwback. At a time when more and more people are interested in wines, restaurants seem to be taking less of an interest in having experts serve them. Aside from the top-tier temples of gastronomy, where the sommelier remains a fixture, a lot of places leave the wine counseling up to the maître d’ or waiter, who may or may not be a connoisseur.
And here are a couple of questions and answers from the article:
…I work with around 30 or 35 different purveyors, some of them I meet with every week, some I buy from just once. I don’t want to have someone just bring the wines to me; it’s part of my job as a sommelier to actively seek out the best wines wherever they are — two wines here, three wines there.
Doesn’t that take a lot of time?
It’s a lot of work, a lot of tasting. I have to taste new wines almost every day. I would say that for every 35 or 40 wines that I taste I choose maybe one. That doesn’t mean the others are bad. Usually I’m just looking to fill a blank spot on my wine list, a region or an appellation that I don’t have.
…
Give me your immediate reaction: screw-caps.
I’m for them. Totally for them. I’ll tell you what I tell my customers: In most cases, wines with screw-caps keep their original character and freshness much longer than the same wines with corks.
While I’ve managed to overcome my bias of years past against screw-cap wines as being cheap and inferior, I still value the ritual of uncorking a bottle. I’m by no means dead-set against screw-caps, I just prefer cork.
[...] took a more clinical approach to the much-talked-about talk, like this round-up in Pressing Matters (clever name for a wine blog, [...]
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