Monday, April 6 2009

Can You Hear That Thunder?

Boing! Boing! Boing!

I love reading the British newspaper Financial Times for a variety of reasons. First, it's got good journalism and a soothingly neutral and cool quality to its prose. Second, I don't understand high finance at all, but sometimes they come through with an article simple enough for even me.

But the real reason I love it is the lifestyle/weekend type stuff. They manage to maintain journalistic integrity while exploring the benefits of hedonism, and that's my kind of fishwrap. Case in point, Jancis Robinson's latest column on how Australia Went Down Under. From previous heights as an unstoppable juggernaught exporter of desirable, low-priced wines, it's fallen of the edge of the world. According to Robinson:

Throughout the 1990s Australia's wine reputation continued to build so steadily that wine exporters around the world saw Australians as the all-conquering heroes. Exports increased tenfold in that decade. It was as recently as 2004 that Australia overtook France as principal supplier of wine to the UK and, briefly, looked set to push Italy into second place as most important exporter of wine to the US.

But today, interest in Australian wine in both the UK and US seems to have evaporated as rapidly as a puddle in Alice Springs. In the US, where Australian wine is a relatively recent phenomenon, the reasons seem to be twofold. The staggering success of Yellow Tail, with its kangaroo label, spawned so many imitation "critter" brands, as they were known, that at the bottom end of the market, Australia came to be seen as ubiquitous and vapid.

In the upper reaches of the US wine market, Australia enjoyed a brief period in the sun when the powerful critic Robert Parker espoused a series of quite different labels cooked up especially for American consumers. The wines were typically black as pitch, made from extremely late-picked grapes and notably alcoholic. ( . . . ) What was curious about these wines, many of which garnered rave reviews, was that so many of them were unknown in their homeland, so they had no support among Australian wine lovers, and many Americans who bought them found they did not perform as well as expected.

Jancis nailed it on the head. They were making a very specific style of wine, thinking they had the consumer firmly by the palate. If you've ever had the miserable misfortune of drinking Yellowtail (my opinion, some folks seem to like it) you'll know what that style is: unnatural levels of tannin, fruit, sugar and alcohol, wine that tastes like it began with a trip to the chemistry section of the winelab and didn't make it out alive, albeit coming out as an unnaturally perfumed corpse.

But why did they make these wines? Because Robert Parker told them to? The answer is a little bit more subtle than just the pernicious influence of a dead-palate like Bob. The Australian wineries made these types of wines because they had no empathy for their consumers, and no passion for wine.

Yep, that's a pretty bold and damning statement. But examples of companies doing the same thing are all around us. Case in point: Microsoft. Once upon a time they built a pretty great gaming console--in fact, it's pretty much one of the best products they've ever made. They got it because the people who worked on it were gamers themselves, with a passion for the product and empathy for the needs of the users--they could see how it would be used, what would make it great and what they needed to do to make it fantastically cool--and that lead to success.

A little bit later someone else made an insanely great media player (disclosure: I own three). Microsoft leapt into action to build a competition-killing player. But instead of letting people with passion for the product, people who had empathy for the consumer design it, it was the firm hand of management and marketing that dictated the design and features of the player for 'market domination' and 'strategic positiioning'. And Microsoft made the Zune, a player that stinks so bad it's nearly become a code-word for junk among the cognoscenti.

I see a simliar trend in a lot of consumer wines for sale in North America. Me-too Critter brands, over-processed and unnatural tasting wines, popular red varietals grown in climates far, far too cold for them, processed heavily and sold for ridiculous prices they don't deserve and a never-ending escalation of ripeness and alcohol. It's as though the folks in charge of wineries are deliberately trying to cripple the consumer's palate with blunt-force trauma by flavour.

Robinson, with typical British politesse tries to pull out something positive to show willing:

. . . contrary to the popular myth that Australian winemaking is about as romantic as a car assembly plant, there is a host of great, increasingly subtle, wine made by people every bit as driven as Europe's finest vignerons.

That's nice. And I hope some day the average consumer will see some of those decent wines, at good prices. I'm not holding my breath.

But I am still making my own wine! I just made a Merlot that's going to top out at about 12.9% ABV--not 15%, 16% or 17%, but a good solid twelve-nine. And it's going to have ripe fruit, but it won't taste like jam and it won't pour like thirty-weight. And best of all I'm going to have all the fun of making it, ageing it, sharing it with friends and family and drinking it as it evolves over time. And best of all, there's never going to be some cutesy animal on my labels.

Well, unless you count my cat . . .

A face only a mother could love. Wine's not bad, though.

Posted by Tim AT 7:05PM

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