It is hard to say whether the Chinese wine market is flat, falling or making a slight recovery right now, but if it’s the latter, maybe we should all take a deep breath and reconsider our approach as an industry. Exports of Georgian wine to that vast country are apparently going up, but most of what’s being shipped is not amber wine from qvevri amphora; it’s semi-sweet red, with around 40 grams of residual sugar per litre. The same wine that is being sold in volume to Poland and Russia, a pair of markets that are among the more vibrant in a sluggish landscape.
I suspect that most people reading this will grimace. We all know how wine ought to taste and, unless it’s from north-east Italy, red wine should not be sweet. And we’d really prefer our white and rosé to be dry too. Because that’s what we have been taught to appreciate - and the kind of stuff we’d like other people to drink too.
Not to their taste
We (the wine industry) shipped a torrent of weedy red Bordeaux to China with the message that it was healthy and sophisticated, and a vigorous effort to 'educate' the Chinese to understand and appreciate it. There is no evidence that this worked or that they ever fell in love with it - any more than they were seduced by the riper, but still often very ordinary dry red wine from Australia and Chile that followed in its wake. All we do know is that they are now drinking less than they were over a dozen years ago.
Two thirds of Americans have never developed a taste for wine and over a third of the French population have lost theirs. When asked, many people say they don’t like the ‘taste’ of wine, which raises the question of the type of wine they are talking about.
So, maybe it’s time to look back at the way Britain, the US and Australia were all turned onto wine in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s through German Liebfraumilch and ‘hock’; Laski ‘Riesling’ from former Yugoslavia; Mateus and Lancers rosé from Portugal, and Anjou Rosé, Entre Deux Mers and le Piat d’Or from France; Palfrey Pearl and Ben Ean Moselle in Australia; and Hearty Burgundy, Cold Duck and Riunite Lambrusco in the US. And the one thing these had in common was that they were all more or less sweet.
The grimacers I mentioned in the second paragraph will probably be pulling another face at the memory of these primitive beverages. Many will probably breathe a sigh of relief at the relative refinement of modern wines.
Sweet successes
Then they’ll read about the spat Constellation is having with a small winery over the 20g/l of residual sugar in its million-case-selling premium Meiomi Pinot Noir - the same level of sweetness, by the way, as you’ll find in 19 Crimes Snoop Cali Red. The Spanish multi-regional red Felix Solis sells in some markets as Mucho Mas and as the Guv’nor in the UK, is a tad drier than those US wines, but it still has 18 g/l which has helped it become the biggest-selling wine in Majestic, the UK’s largest wine retailer.
If that level of sugar raises eyebrows, this wine is cleverly made and blended and, like the Meiomi-drinkers in the US, most of its fans don’t consider it sweet. Unlike some of the buyers of the popular Jam Shed Australian Shiraz which, as its name implies, has a whopping 27g/l. And then, of course, there’s Barefoot Moscato which, with its 73 g/l, is a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic.
Most of the wine chatterati would prefer not to talk about these wines, just as they treat the Moët & Chandon Ice (45g/l) in the duty free shops of almost every airport, as though it were an underdressed, uninvited attendee at a smart social function. If we make them feel unwelcome, hopefully they'll simply leave.
There are two other ways to look at all of these sweet and sweetish wines. We can either scheme to remove them forcibly from the scene. Or we can acknowledge the role they play in a wine market that is currently shrinking.
'Populist' approach?
When I say that I support the second of these approaches, I know I’ll instantly be cast - by some - in the role of ‘populist’. And, if I were still doing the job of wine critic that I gave up 20 years ago, the charge might reasonably stick. But now I’m wearing my hat as a wine business analyst and, whilst I passionately believe in ingredient/nutrition transparency that allows buyers to know what they are getting, I’m frankly agnostic about the style and quality of the stuff in the bottle. I guess I'm like an observer of the movie industry who focuses more on what is or is not filling the cinemas and keeping the studios afloat and actors and crews paid, than on the quality of the script, direction and acting. Of course sugar is unhealthy, but if people knowingly want to ingest it, in the form of cakes, chocolate, Aperol, Baileys Irish Cream or wine, that's their prerogative.
The film industry analyst might not choose to go and watch some of the most popular blockbusters, and I might not want to drink any of those best-selling sweet wines, but neither of us would wish they'd never have been produced. And, dispassionately, I believe that if we removed all the sweet and semi-sweet wine from the market, our industry would be in an even less healthy state than it is today.
Which brings me back to those semi-sweet red shipments to China, and the way we should approach building new markets in India and Africa. We can either do what we did in China: presume that consumers there will naturally develop a taste for dry red and white - with the help of a bit of ‘education’ - or we can learn from our own experience, and start them off with the modern equivalent of Blue Nun, Hearty Burgundy and Mateus. Maybe they’ll ‘progress’ to drinking the kinds of red and white we approve of. Maybe, like many of their middle-aged US and UK counterparts, they’ll simply move up to drinking Meiomi and Mucho Mas/The Guv’nor. In either case, they’ll be keeping vines in the ground and winemakers and distributors employed.
And for someone who cares about the wine industry, that kind of matters.
