In through the Out Door with Tim Hanni

I’m convinced that Tim Hanni, the first American Master of Wine, now turned wine industry Provocateur General, is a teensy bit of marketing moxie away from radically changing the status quo in regards to how we view, review and consume wine in the U.S.

In everyday terms, his proverbial house is fit and structurally sound, but needs some curb appeal, maybe a fresh coat of paint and some blooming flowers.

This fact is in plain sight to me, even if it’s not to most.  Spend any amount of time with him and you realize that his ideas regarding understanding palate preferences (not to mention food and wine pairing) are grounded, smart, pragmatic and, most importantly, needed.

Unfortunately, they fly in the face of prevailing wine wisdom.

And, in contrast to Gary Vaynerchuk, who carries a similar populist, “understand and trust your palate” torch, but a much bigger platform with attendant distractions, Hanni has the measured bona fides, absent the marketing acumen and mini-mogul status.

You wish they could change places for a week (or three).

In a global wine industry that markets almost entirely to a small set of educated customers while forsaking the engine of volume (the reasonably uneducated wine consumer), Hanni shines a light on that contradiction and indicates that, yes, “The wine business has it backwards.”

In doing so, Hanni is also the subject of journalistic affronts that glance surface deep without seeing an underlying intent – an intent that is obscured by his own tangential thinking that leaves holes in his message causing a general bewilderment.

One recent wine writer, after taking a third-party article completely out of its subtext, similar to watching “Waiting for Godot” as performed by the cast of “Rent,” went so far as to suggest that Hanni was disingenuous in at least one of his advocacy projects for general consumer wine empowerment while intimating that his approach had its own self-interested motivation.

Harrumph.

Similar to Clark Smith and Fred Franzia in a “devil may care” against-the-grain approach to skewering sacred cows, Hanni focuses on the consumer side of the equation whereas Smith focuses on technology and Franzia focuses on the economies of wine from ground to shelf. 

All of them dress their message in a communicative format that is ill-suited for a broader platform of understanding and acceptance, regardless of inherent truth.

Hanni, in particular, interviews on a plane of consciousness that is 40 IQ points higher than his interviewer; his seemingly self-written press releases from his various business interests are difficult to parse with no nugget to grasp onto as an angle and the web sites for the same business interests look like Stevie Wonder grabbed a box of crayolas.

Despite this, there’s a lot to like regarding his twin passions:

1)  The element of umami as an integral bridge between food and wine pairing, opening pairings possibilities

2)  Understanding what kind of palate you have in order to understand an inherent wine profile

The cause for my examination of Hanni and his work is likewise two-fold:

1)  I’m investigating an agricultural fertilizer/fungicide/pesticide that is 30% glutamic acid trying to determine if anybody can substantiate that when sprayed on wine vines there is uptake that can affect grapes – principally red wine grapes that offer an inexplicable lip-smacking quality. On a sidenote, this would make a great Master’s thesis instead of blog research, and I’ll probably never get straight answers.  Hanni is something of the wine / umami expert so I’ve been following his work on the subject.

2) I saw a hackneyed press release for the Consumer Wine Awards organized by Hanni and others.  The results are nothing if not eyebrow arching – using an opt-in consumer panel of self-professed regular consumers of wine, the top three wines were technically sweet wines with a Barefoot Moscato leading the way with a score of “97.” Meanwhile, one of my favorite value wines, the Toad Hollow unoaked Chardonnay barely made the medal cut with a score of 80.  Robert Parker perennially scores the Toad Hollow in the 90-91 range, which is about right in my opinion.

Hanni’s point with the consumer wine awards (with eye opening scores for sweet wines) isn’t to do a Three Stooges eye poke with the conventional wine industry, but instead isolate the fact that modern wine marketing focuses on a consumer whose palate isn’t necessarily broad-reaching coupled with an over-emphasis on critical acclaim, whose collective palate similarly eschews wines that appeal to a “regular” palate, a palate that, in many cases, likes sweet wine.

As a substantiation of his hypothesis, Hanni has devised a tasting questionnaire called the, “Tasting Budometer” that takes consumer palate preferences around coffee, use of salt and wine drinking in order to classify palates and make recommendations based on current consumption habits.  His methodology then classifies palates into four categories.  By understanding and classifying palate preferences we can then understand that one man’s Parker is another man’s Dan Berger and the translation to understanding who is making recommendations becomes much easier, with an inevitable rise of a peer, consumer class for sweet wines.

It just all makes sense if you can wade through the pseudo-science, backdoor logic and the Brady Bunch popcorn trail from beginning to end.

All of this isn’t intended to be a wet kiss for Tim Hanni.  What I am saying, however, is Hanni’s ideas are good, they are well-founded, they are smart and they need some marketing in order to be packaged into a message that can find a broad audience. Oh, the irony, huh?  In navigating widespread misperceptions about his ideas while he tries to isolate and point out that the wine industry’s conventional wisdom and marketing are askew in order to find a bigger audience, I’m saying Hanni needs to refine his message in order for it to find a bigger audience.

The net-net is, bad marketing notwithstanding, Tim Hanni has a problem with the wine business and is reaching out to consumers. Meanwhile, the wine business has a problem with consumers. The problem is, you see, Hanni and the wine business need each other and neither is willing to admit it.