Wine & its Consumer

Wine is no longer the bastion of the select few and is being enjoyed by consumers worldwide. Mature markets understand wine better and new markets allow us to bring wine closer to the consumer through innovative ways. But just what does it mean to enjoy wine?

In the late 1990s, as part of a study, people in the US, who enjoyed drinking wine occasionally were given wines. The same wines were given to a group of sommeliers. While it wasn’t clearly established that the sommeliers did a better job of identifying the wines, the adrenaline secreting glands in the Amygdala — a part of brain that is linked to pleasure — did seem to be more stimulated in the group of wine professionals.

However, the results of this study were put to test recently, when students at Stanford were administered a set of 5 wines and were made to believe that they were all different, ranging between $5-50 . The higher the price that was told to the students, the more they seemed to enjoy it. Even more recently, Dr Jamie Goode spoke of the concept of Veblen goods in his blog: he was talking about Bordeaux Grand Cru and shared that these were products, that, in the world of economic theories, have migrated to the category, ‘Veblen goods’, that is, products whose demand increases even as their price increases. Such goods, often belonging to the realms of luxury, defy all theories of supply and demand and are free from market volatility.

I would like to quote the ancient Malay proverb, “You cannot love what you don’t know” and this is my stance on the subject. While it is all good to demystify wine, one has to consider that maybe reducing wine to a simplified drinking-by-numbers exercise would make it no more exclusive than an experience of drinking canned juice.

Wine appreciation is an art unto itself, and like all other arts, it is incorrect to assume that breaking an expression down to its constituent elements will still retain its essence as a whole. While wine may deliver to even the most uninitiated of imbibers, it shall surely not be as meaningful as it is to someone who spent time tasting wine at various
occasions.

One last question remains: what about simpler wines? Not all doodling is worthy of being considered art and not all wines require serious contemplation before or after every sip. The Nielsen report on ‘Do Labels Matter’ presented in Oregon, USA, in February 2008, cited that today, a variety of wine bottles can be found on supermarket shelves, more than any other product. With such choice, the confusion is inevitable and some education is a key prerequisite for enjoyment.

So what does this spell for the future of wine as a marketable entity? As prices for fine wines have risen over the years, people have had to practise more caution before putting down their money for prized bottles. This has made self-education a necessity. The trickle-down effect will ensure that knowledge about wines spreads and this awareness, in turn, will further serve to improve general quality across the board.