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How Restaurant Wine Lists Are Sexist

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Just because you want an Old Fashioned, doesn’t mean you need to be old fashioned….

Bad headline, on an otherwise good column. The list itself is not sexist. This piece is really about how the wine list is given to a table. The crux of this chef’s frustrations mirror mine – there’s only one list that everyone has to share, which doesn’t give patrons enough time to decide before the server tries to take a drink order.

The sexism, of course, stems from its history, which I’m glad the author included:

The one-wine-list convention harkens back to before the 19th-century creation of the modern restaurant concept, and as mentioned has everything to do with patriarchy. At Spanish dinner tables, for example, the head of the table (read: the father) would be given a traditional Spanish carafe of wine called a Porrón, which sported a long, tapered spout that facilitated reach and aim as he poured wine, at his sole discretion, directly into the mouths of his sons.

You’ll note I said, “sons,” because the mother and any daughters were not at the table – they were serving the meal.

Later, as haute cuisine took hold in France and then in America, stuffy maître d’s in long white aprons would present the head of the table with a menu and a wine list, and the lady would receive a food menu with no prices listed (she presumably should not worry her pretty little head about such things). 

Now if there’s sexism in the way the actual list is created, then that’s a story I’d really find interesting. 

How Restaurant Wine Lists Are Sexist

Two wineries plan to produce a crowdsourced wine

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What are the chances that two wineries, one in California and one in Washington, come up with an idea to crowdsource a wine and launch within a week of each other?

When I saw Columbia Crest launch their project earlier this week, I had a mixed reaction – part of me laughed and part of me wanted to pay attention. Then a few days later I noticed La Crema doing something very similar. My first impression was maybe there’s a business connection between the two. But here’s proof in this LA Times story that it appears to be a coincidence. Or maybe they hired the same marketing firm who’s keeping mum. 

In my day job we use crowdsourcing for a few reasons – to learn something new from many individuals or get them to provide information we can’t gather on our own, and as a way to engage our audience. But in the world of marketing – especially social media marketing – its primary focus is on engagement.

Wineries are not going to learn something new from those participating – except their customer preferences (aka market research). But they will get customers to engage with their projects, learn about their wines and forge a personal connection to the winery. The outcome is an entire customer base when their new crowdsourced wine is in the bottle and ready for purchase.

It’s a smart marketing gimmick with a measurable ROI that can also help brand recognition. But I worry the old saying “too many cooks spoil the stew” may create something nearly undrinkable (or maybe they’ll get lucky). I just hope there are other strategies in place to convince customers their other bottles are worth purchasing if this one doesn’t turn out too well. Then again, enjoying a bottle of wine is always greatly enhanced when you have a personal connection or positive memory associated to it. In that case, maybe the actual quality isn’t as important.

In the meantime, the projects will be fun to watch. Maybe there’s enough of an audience out there not as cynical about marketing strategies as I can be.

Two wineries plan to produce a crowdsourced wine

So That’s Why Trader Joe’s Wine Is So Cheap!

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This question originally appeared on Quora. Answer by Chris Knox, Wine Shop Manager, Wine Buyer 

I can’t vouch for a single word this guy says. But I thoroughly enjoyed his closing paragraph for the zeal in which he takes away all of the winemaking majesty. 

So the summary is this – to make $2 wine one must compromise all sense of integrity and quality, own tens of thousands of acres of vineyards in the worst possible wine region possible where land is incredibly cheap and yields are exceptionally high, use machines to execute every part of a homogenized system that substitutes manipulation for hand crafted quality, and own every step of the winemaking process including bottling, packaging and distribution, all while giving the finger to the entire wine industry and plowing down anyone who gets in your way.

So That’s Why Trader Joe’s Wine Is So Cheap!

What We Really Taste When We Drink Wine

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For most of us, a wine’s context—its color, its label, its story—affects us as much as its flavor.

In advance of a blind wine tasting class I’m taking later this week, I found this story of particular interest. Especially this:

In one of the most prominent studies of how expectations can influence taste, Gil Morrot, a wine researcher at the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Montpellier, and his colleagues found that the simple act of adding an odorless red dye to a glass of white wine could fool a panel of tasters (fifty-four students in the University of Bordeaux’s Oenology program) into describing the wine as exhibiting the qualities associated with red wine. The tasters thought they were tasting three wines, but they were actually tasting only two. There was a white Bordeaux, a red blend of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, and the same white Bordeaux colored with a red dye. When Morrot looked at the tasters’ responses, he found that they used similar descriptions in their notes on the red and colored-red wines (chicory, coal, cherry, prune, cedar, and the like), and markedly different ones when describing the white (floral, honey, peach, grapefruit, pear, banana, apple).

What We Really Taste When We Drink Wine

How to Make Mass-Produced Wine Taste Great | Magazine | WIRED

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A typical ­bottle of Napa Cabernet owes more to lab-coat-­wearing chemists than to barefoot grape stompers. Here’s a look at the secret ingredients and behind-the-scenes manipulation that go into crafting the perfect pour.

Wired has a good piece today on Paul Draper’s quest to pressure other winemakers to list all the ingredients on their labels. Among other reasons, doing so, the industry fears, will take the romantic luster out of their products. But that’s not the link I’m posting on top of this page.

As much as I’ve been reading (and trying the wines) of the In Pursuit of Balance group – who avoid many of the ingredients that would appear on the labels of mass-produced wines – I’ve never really taken the time to study the logistics of making wine at bigger operations.

But Wired was smart and keyed to this piece I missed back in April that I’m now sharing with you. It’s a good infochart that breaks down the increasing wine consumption numbers, along with the additives and other tricks that go into wine making.

But as noted in the Draper article: 

“For thousands of years, wine has made itself with guidance by man, rather than being made by man,” says Draper. The greatness of a wine should be driven by the grapes and the earth they come from, not what a tinkerer can do with them in the lab.

History has his back. In Bordeaux, vigneron is the term for a grape cultivator, the man who works the fields and tends the vines. But, notes Draper, “In French, there is no word for winemaker.”

How to Make Mass-Produced Wine Taste Great | Magazine | WIRED

Wine + Tech: Three Right Ways That Wine Brands Engage Online

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Over 80% of wine’s social media mentions go unanswered by wine brands. For most wine brands, that’s a massive fail. But those brands who do tap into the bandwidth of tech’s tools, data sets, and platforms are capitalizing on customer engagement, loyalty and, yes, sales.

Another interesting tidbit:

The top 20 wine bloggers have a combined audience that is larger than Wine Spectator online.

I love that wine is intersecting more with social and digital media, and it’s not just because I’m here experimenting with my own online writing. In my day job, I’m a digital editor at a news organization, so it feels like –  for the first time – wine is starting to enter my world a bit (whereas mostly, I’ve been dipping my toes into its world).  As technology constantly evolves, this will be a fun space to watch.

Seeing these discussions at events like the recent Wine Industry Technology Symposium and the upcoming Digital Wine Communications Conference really excites me. And I’m impressed to see – as noted in this Forbes pieces – how much mobile is part of the conversation. The best skill anyone can have in navigating the digital world is understanding how to take control and find the best ways to leverage each specific platform.

A Post Script… 

Also worth noting along side this story is  this speech by Vintank’s Paul Mabray. David White, over at Terroirist, shared it earlier this week. While not a short speech (it’s 74 pages), it was a great read – giving smart and easy-to-understand insight into how the wine industry should be using social and digital platforms.

Wine + Tech: Three Right Ways That Wine Brands Engage Online

IN PURSUIT OF BALANCE | WINERIES

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The folks behind In Pursuit of Balance, a group of wineries focused on “balanced” California pinot noir and chardonnay has updated their winery list.

I’m a fan of several on the list already: Copain (did you see the photo I posted this morning?), Flowers, Hirsch, LIOCO and Littorai. And a few more have been on my must try list for a while: Matthiasson, Peay, Red Car, Sandhi and Wind Gap. That’s not to say the rest of these aren’t worth your while. I’d be happy to get my hands on any of these bottles.

For those unfamiliar with the group, among their mission is to seek wines that are “profound vehicles for the expression of terroir.”  (You can read their manifesto here.) These are mostly smaller, family-owned wineries who take pride in what they do, with immense respect for the land.

And to me, without even talking about the complexity or brightness or acidity or fruitfulness of the wine, it’s that combination of understanding the nature and the people behind the wine, that add an extra, even more enjoyable, dimension to what I’m sipping.

IN PURSUIT OF BALANCE | WINERIES

Wine needs its Nate Silver: Can we quantify and more accurately describe how alcohol tastes?

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Robert Parker and that fancy sommelier might not know more than you. They might not even tell red wine from white

Over on Twitter, @TheAcademicWino posted this fascinating Salon piece (or rather an excerpt from a new book by Adam Rogers titled Proof: The Science of Booze ). The Salon headline immediately piqued my interest. Not because I’m a Nate Silver fan (nor am I not not a fan – apologies for the double/triple negatives here), but because his name implies data… which in turns screams exactness. And in the digital journalism world – which is currently abuzz with the * need * for more databases – coming up with an original idea for the wine world, that is both accurate and precise, has not been easy.

I’d love for the wine world to neatly fit into a box that we could wrap with a bow. Something we could present as an amazing app that novice and expert wine drinkers could use to discover delicious wines, or help pair the right vintage to a specific palate. A former colleague (and brilliant developer) is just as eager as I am to create such a thing.

Yet this study seems to confirm the impossibility of completing such a task. And rather than the science or preciseness in understanding how wine tastes – it’s rather  more about the language that sommelier’s and other wine experts have developed:

 The wine world is full of strange (and often delightful) labels and combinations. [Tim] Gaiser admits that those could fool anyone, even a master. For him, the trick is finding ways not to eliminate subjectivity in tasting, but to share that subjectivity. “My strongest belief about wine is that it’s not precise,” Gaiser says. “We do everything we can to give structure to the experience.” More likely, he’s filtering experience through memory and a trained vocabulary.

So the researchers conclude this:

“We tentatively suggest that the verbal skills, which are developed around wine, perhaps lead to a somewhat similar overestimation of confidence in expertise,” the researchers write. They’re hinting that knowing many words to describe wine makes people think they’re better at identifying it than they really are. 

And as much as I want to find a way to make my day job and my passion unite in a lovely little app, it’s the very reason I’m passionate about wine, which may prevent it: Wine is experiential. It’s about communication. It transcends data and science.

If we can’t quantify happiness, how can we ever quantify wine.

Wine needs its Nate Silver: Can we quantify and more accurately describe how alcohol tastes?