It's Started!

Well I guess I new this moment would come?

The trend for selling wine by varietals ie, putting the name of the grape on the label, soon killed off in the lower to middle price brackets regional identity in countries like Australia and Chile.

The reason for this is of course that the main flavour of the grape is more important than where the wine actually comes from. So the buying criteria seems to be. "I like Aussie Shiraz I like 3 for £10. Don't really care where in Australia it comes from. My geography of Australia is rubbish anyway" OK all well and good. At least there are three defining choices here. Country of origin, grape variety and price. What is happening now is that those three are being chopped down to just two.

The marketing of wines by varietal has become so popular and it seems effective that wine is now being marketed by the name of the grape alone. For instance in the very bottom categories of Rioja some producers are relegating the name of Rioja to almost the small print and emblazoning the label with the name of the grape variety which is 'Tempranillo' The name of Rioja used to be enough in itself but not anymore it seems?

A lot of these wines are also starting to taste very much the same from one country to the next.

We sell a lovely mid priced Viognier from Sicily. It is delightful but tasted blind one would be hard pushed to tell whether it was from Sicily, Italy,France or wherever?

Does this matter? Many would say not. But I believe it to be the slippery slope to the total homogenisation of wine and I say again. Drinking wine cannot be just a simple matter of how do you want to take your alcohol?