Good Grape Wine Company

November 8 2009

News, Notes and Dusty Bottle Items – Club Paradox Edition

Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass …

The Wine Success Paradox

My wife and I get together with a few other couples once a month to drink wine.  It’s good, clean fun with each of us taking monthly turns hosting and selecting the monthly theme for our “wine club.”  Every month, inevitably, in the midst of our Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot, Riesling, or Cab, we end up talking about sensory evaluation – what the heck are we tasting in the glass? 

This past Friday night, there were looks of dumbfounded incredulity when I said I thought the Road 31 Pinot Noir we were drinking had a nose showing “mushrooms soaked in cherry coke with some tar on the edges.”  This observation led to a conversation with one of the members of our club who, again, revisited his difficulty with learning about wine, a monthly occurrence.  Chris is a CPA who runs his own business and specializes in tax accounting with a special expertise in parsing the U.S. tax code for small businesses.  I have to note, I find it mighty odd that a guy who intimately understands the tax code has a hard time understanding what he is tasting, yet I don’t blame him for this shortcoming.

I’m reminded what the wine world too often forgets or takes for granted – the number of “wine enthusiasts” pales in comparison to the “wine interested” and it’s the job of everybody who has made their way down the learning curve to ensure that the wine interested stay interested and turn into enthusiasts.

Marketers use the AIDA model – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – as a means to convey the cycle through which people traverse on their way to consummating action.  To me, at least related to engaging in a new pursuit, it’s an incomplete analogy, because “success” isn’t accounted for.

When I first got into wine, I took up golf at the same time, making a very conscious decision to tease out the truths of both.  Plain and simple, my interest in golf waned and got lost quicker than a 3-pack of balls caused by my physics-defying 7-Iron slice.  I was bad at golf and my ability to get better didn’t look very good, at least relative to wine where I was really enjoying myself and learning, and growing.  I gave up golf, putting my clubs in the corner of the garage.

In wine terms, I’m inclined to revise the AIDA model to be inclusive of the following:

Attention—Interest—Desire—Action—Understanding—Success = Passion

Just like my golf game, I think it’s easy to forget that virtually no one has made their way down the path to wine enthusiasm, beyond wine interest, if they haven’t had a measure of success.  And, you can’t have success without understanding.

To me, the two biggest qualifiers to wine success are seeing the industry beyond the “lifestyle” that is perpetuated as marketing shtick and understanding what you are drinking.  In doing so, consumers get a more holistic view of the wine world and they understand what they are putting in their mouth.  It seems so simple, right?

There are a lot of folks who couldn’t care less about French wine classification, but everybody needs to understand industry environmental factors and what they taste in order to graduate down the path of wine success.  It is core to wine appreciation to have context and to be able to stick your nose in the glass and smell some nuance.

Just a thought, but the unspoken paradox in the world of wine is the implication that knowledge, in and of itself, is most important.  To me, all the wine 101 books in the world don’t mean a thing if somebody has an interest in, but cannot identify flavor components in wine and they don’t have the appropriate context to place the wine situationally.

I gave up on golf because it looked too hard to get to a level of competency.  Fixing my slice was too daunting.  How many “wine interested” people have given up on wine because they couldn’t get to a level of competency, sensory or otherwise?

… Speaking of Wine Enthusiasm

Two weeks ago I wrote two posts with suggestions for improvement for Wine Enthusiast magazine.  Amongst many suggestions, I elaborated on what I perceive to be a need to ratchet down the “lifestyle” and provide more context for how the industry operates. 

Over the course of the nearly four years of writing this blog, I’ve taken a fair number of shots at a fair number of targets, liberally sprinkling in constructive criticism. In doing so I’ve received my fair share of return criticism from people who didn’t appreciate or disagreed with what I had to say.

Of the numerous “nasty grams” I have received, one that I might have expected that never came would be from Adam Strum from Wine Enthusiast.

Instead, Strum, bar none, has been the one person who took the feedback with a spirit of professionalism and open-mindedness.  Having shared several emails privately with Adam in the midst of and after writing the posts, I was dumbfounded that he was not only receptive to my suggestions, but he was going to review them for potential action.

To wit, last week Strum wrote a post at the Wine Enthusiast blog soliciting feedback on the appropriate mix of lifestyle content in Wine Enthusiast magazine, titling his post, “Wine as a Passion/Wine as a Business.”

In brief, I think our wine media fails most wine enthusiasts and I’m not alone in that thinking.  If you’re interested in adding your opinion to the matter and giving it to somebody who is listening, mosey over to the Wine Enthusiast blog here.

Liquid Memory

Mike Steinberger, the wine columnist for Slate magazine, wrote a book this year called, Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France.  Despite his book being good, presumably, he knows what it’s like to receive a crushingly bad book review.  Because of this it makes his recent review of Liquid Memory by Jonathan Nossiter all the more credible (and interesting).

I’m an information hound and consume massive amounts of media.  I cannot recall, ever, one author calling another authors work “execrable,” as Steinberger did in his October 30th column.

I’ve only made my way into about 20 pages of the stultifyingly boring book, “Liquid Memory,” but you can be sure I’ll read it through just to see if I find it as wretched and “deserving to be execrated,” as Steinberger and Merriam-Webster note. 

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