Does wine need vintages?
Tuesday 17 November
Do we really need vintages? Most Champagne don’t and they’re doing quite nicely.
This was the challenge laid down by Robert Joseph at Winefuture last week and he left listeners mulling over it.
He asked producers why they thought they could get away with being so inconsistent. He has a point. While most wine geeks are interested in the vintage and how the rain/sun/hail affected the taste and structure of a wine; most couldn’t give a monkeys. They want consistent quality year in, year out. If the 2009 isn’t as good as the 2008 and they are the same price, how can that be understood by the average punter?
OK, many wine laws require the vintage to be stated on the bottle but it really wouldn’t make any difference to the consumer if Casillero del Diablo or Hardys had the vintage on the bottle or not. Plus, if you had a poor year then blending from older stocks (like they do in Champagne and in some parts of the new world), you would be able to deliver greater consistency. That’s all consumers want and what they expect from a brand. Joseph said: “The wine industry has no idea at all about brand identity…Consumers like simplicity and consistency: everything that wine doesn’t stand for.”
What do you reckon?
Until not very long ago, many European wines below a certain price (probably equivalent today of about 5 euros) did not indicate a vintage even if they were Appellation Contrôlée or equivalent. Even today in my French supermarket I still find the occasional non-vintage AC wine. Ironically this was more of a problem in the past when vintages varied more than today.
In general, I agree with Robert and think that having no vintage would be a good thing for certain large brands. However, there does remain one problem with not stating a vintage and that is for wines which should be drunk within a year or two of vintage. In some retailers one has no idea how long the wines have been hanging around. This could be solved by a bottling date and/or a use by date at present indicated by very few producers.
- by Wink Lorch, winklorch@winetravelguides.com
I agree that for high-volume brands of wine, it makes no difference at all whether they put a vintage year on the bottle. Basically because the industrial mass-produced product is more or less the same year after year!
However, for smaller quality wine producers it IS important. Consumers of this type of wine care about the weather, the terroir, the state of the grapes, etc and (IMHO) need and like to have as much information as possible.
- by Fabius, http://vinosambiz.blogspot.com