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Have all the good wines been shelved? Small producers don’t find room on supermarket shelves |
Where have all the good wines gone?
The Wine Press looks back on two years of battering its taste buds in search of wine heaven, and shudders at the thoughts of its trips to hell
THE wine in our shops had changed. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find enjoyable or even interesting wine on the supermarket shelves. Two years ago this column set out to investigate this phenomenon.
The film Mondovino had set out some of the arguments – small-scale wine makers who employed traditional wine-making methods were being pushed out of the market, by mass-produced New World wines. Diversity was being stamped out and wine turned into a standardised product – a sort of liquid version of takeaway fast foods.
Contemporary wine writers facilitated this process. They were eager to push whatever wine was available and judged wine solely by it’s taste. How a wine was made was of no importance. Never mind the additives: taste the fruit was the outlook.
Our column was going to be different: we would report, not promote, reveal and not conceal. We were going to finger the bad and give a thumbs up to the good. First, we intended to scour the shelves for class wines made by small producers and then place them in front of a wine panel in a series of blind tastings.
We soon discovered that small producers and supermarket shelves were not compatible.
For over a year our panel members taste tested hundreds of wines, New World against Old World, traditional methods versus modern production techniques. We placed wine from small producers head to head with mass-produced industrial plonk, and most importantly, expensive against cheap.
Most panel members could make a distinction between an oaked Australian Chardonnay and an unoaked French version of the same wine.
Conversely, a few mass- produced bargain bottles, tasted alongside a far more expensive wine (handcrafted and carefully produced by a wine making genius), threw the panel into confusion.
Often they could not identify the supposedly better-made wine. Worse still, when asked to pick a favourite, they usually plumped for a cheap one.
Our early articles – often described as rants – tore into supermarket wine buyers and national wine writers. The former were destroying traditional winemaking and lessening choice, we wrote, while the later were ignoring, or even co-operating, in the destruction.
A few members of the wine journalism establishment were quick to respond. A Times wine writer wrote that her Christmas break had been disrupted by a friend, responding to an article in the New Journal, phoning to ask if it was still all right to drink supermarket wines. She had no reservations; Supermarket Wine Rules, she declared.
A few months later, reacting to a growing criticism of supermarket wine from all sections of the wine industry and some consumers, she informed her readers that there were plenty of good tasting wines on the supermarket shelves, as long as you knew where to look.
But the majority of shoppers had tired of playing hunt the bottle and had decided not to bother searching the shelves.
Instead, they choose to buy Jacob’s Creek and other big name brands or, like our panel members, opted for the latest half-price offer.
There was a perceptible and growing trend for all wines to taste similar. Michael Broadbent, a Master of Wine with more than 50 years’ wine-tasting experience, confessed in this column that he found it increasingly difficult to identify the origins of many modern wines.
We decided to change direction and look beyond the wine shelves. Our second year would be spent interviewing wine experts, speaking to professional wine buyers and, most importantly, meeting hundreds of wine makers from all over the wine-producing world.
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