For most wine professionals, little is more annoying than the distraction caused by someone else wearing scent while they are trying to taste.
Historically, however, perfume and wine have a lot in common. Both are potentially highly complex human inventions that excite emotions and have improved people’s lives for millennia - at least eight in the case of wine; probably over four for scent. Cheap examples are treated with contempt, while the finest have an aura of mystique.
Skilled perfumiers like Masters of Wine and tea blenders are celebrated for their extraordinarily developed senses. Top-flight perfume and wine can command apparently ludicrous prices. Both perfume and wine benefit similarly from association with celebrities. But there’s one huge difference.
Sniff before purchase
Perfume companies don’t expect potential customers to buy their scent without deciding for themselves whether they like it. Every day, across the world, millions of people are busily sniffing away in department stores, specialist shops and duty-free outlets. The idea of a perfume retailer not having tester-bottles is as hard to imagine as a bookshop that prevents browsers from perusing the first pages of any of its volumes, or a French fromagerie refusing to offer small slithers of various kinds of cheese.
When it comes to wine, however, the routine expectation is that customers will pay prices that, in a restaurant certainly, may run into hundreds of dollars or euros without any clear idea of what they are going to get.
And, as with perfume, whatever they choose, it will most likely be experienced more or less voluntarily by a number of other people.
Where it isn’t forbidden by local laws, big brands with substantial marketing budgets may occasionally pay supermarkets to be allowed to hand out tiny plastic vessels to shoppers, but for a broader chance to taste before purchase there’s no alternative to shopping at a specialist retailer. Some of these have a handful of open bottles either open daily or at weekends, but there is a laudable exception on the shape of Jacques Wein-Depot in Germany where apart from regular themed tastings, customers can sample over 200 wines free of charge every day in some 340 shops.
By-the-glass
In the on-trade, experimentation usually involves a by-the-glass programme that requires the purchase of at least a sixth of a bottle at an often unattractively high price. This year, I’m grateful to Jane Anson for informing me that, for the 13th time, until April 15, Duclot, the Bordeaux merchant run by run by Jean-Francois Moueix has teamed up with 31 French restaurants to propose 14 Grands Crus Bordeaux at cellar-door prices. Often, the offer is for a bottle or magnum, but in some cases diners can order wines by the glass.
Coravin and Cruvinet/WineKeeper machines have proven that fine wines like these can be stored efficiently, and those supermarket samples prove that a tiny amount can be enough for most people to decide what they think. A British company called EcoSIP offers 50ml pouches for use at home, while another, etasting, has 20ml samples for WSET students.
Of course, like the 500ml bottles I believe would be a logical step for the wine industry, on-premise wine preservation systems are currently pricy. But also like those bottles, this is only because they remain niche products; argon is not that expensive. I’m sure that, were a large enough chain of stores to approach Greg Lambrecht, the inventor of Coravin, he’d come up with a more affordable option, just as St Gobain and its competitors would slash the price of smaller bottles if orders were large enough.
Restaurants could sell small taster flights with 37.5ml samples that would make the whole wine experience more fun and more memorable for their customers. In my ideal scenario, as is the case with the Duclot Bordeaux initiative, these would be subsidised by the producers, generic bodies and distributors who stand to benefit most from people choosing to drink wine rather than other beverages, and more specifically, styles and regions with which they are unfamiliar.
Maybe, instead of seeing scent as a distraction, more wine professionals could give a little thought to the perfume industry. Its revenues may be only around a sixth or seventh of the wine sector, but I suspect the perfumiers feel a lot less embattled right now than the winemakers. They - and Jacques Wein-Depot - could teach us a lesson or two.
