international travel deals: We're Fragmented! (It's a Good Thing!)

Thursday, February 23, 2012

We're Fragmented! (It's a Good Thing!) - The Wine Country

The Wine Country: We're Fragmented! (It's a Good Thing!)

We're Fragmented! (It's a Good Thing!)

by Randy Kemner, ProprietorIt?s impossible for me to answer, ?What?s the hot trend in wine??? I?ve known for some time that there is no dominant type of wine consumer, at least in The Wine Country.? Our customers love a little bit of everything.? One wine industry publication referred to this as the ?fragmentation? of the market.
Domestic wine sales are double that of French wine here, but all our imports together make up sixty percent of our total wine sales.? Most wine purchases are made by people seeking dry wines, yet our number one, two and three individual wines are sweet Italian imports.
Consumption of California wine is at an all-time high in America, led by a surge in Moscato sales by new wine drinkers.? Cabernet Sauvignon continues to draw customers in solid numbers, even though interest in Pinot Noir has continued its amazing climb during the past decade.? Chardonnay still dominates white wine sales, but many consumers have shifted to the crisper, lighter white wines of France, Italy, Austria, Spain, Germany and New Zealand.

There is a movement in some domestic wine circles to dial back ripeness and sugar in wine, creating less alcoholic wines with more finesse instead of raw power.? Yet there are those for whom high alcohol, power, dark color, oak and a full body are essential qualities in a good wine.
I?ve observed that few of our customers buy full cases of the same wine?they?ll purchase cases of wine, of course, but their 12 bottle cases are made up of a wide variety of wines, not unlike the diversity of food in your supermarket cart.? One customer told me this past month, ?I get tired of the same thing over and over.?? It?s true that too much of a good thing is still too much.

Nowadays we Americans don?t want to spend as much money for our wine as in the spendthrift years before 2008.? But we still want quality; there is a bottom below which we don?t want to go.? It was recently reported that sales of Two Buck Chuck have held steady at 5 million cases per year, which surprised the author considering this recessionary period.? That?s not surprising to me because wine drinkers still want to drink good wine?you are just smarter and wiser when shopping for it.
Wine purchases are still influenced by media reviews and scores from wine journals, but as wine consumers become more experienced, they become more confident in their own tastes and even rebel against the styles of wines that garner big reviews in these publications.? A reviewer who tastes thousands of wines a year will favor wines that are big, robust standouts rather than crisp, lacy dinner wines.? Wines are evaluated in a vacuum, apart from the way most of us actually drink wine.

At a multi-course meal at Santa Monica?s excellent Melisse restaurant recently, there was some wine-killing grapefruit slices in one dish.? We were drinking aged Meursault and Volnay, both by the fabulous Comte Lafon.? Our hosts, Carl and Pam Taylor, commented that the wines couldn?t be at their best with such a diversity of flavors.? ?Perhaps (less-expensive) Vouvray and Beaujolais are better choices with so many different tastes on the table,? observed Carl, who is very astute at matching his wine with his food.
Earlier that day we had a woman at our Saturday tasting who raved about a Santa Barbara Pinot Noir she had just tasted.? ?It?s really good with chocolate,? she said.?? Another told me, ?I just like to drink wine.? I don?t want any food with it.??