Wild Yeast May Tame Blockbuster Wines
If wines with alcohol levels approaching port don’t sit well with your taste buds or sobriety, scientists at the Australian Wine Research Institute at the University of Adelaide may have just the solution you’ve been looking for.
It’s a strain of the Metschnikowia pulcherrima yeast that produces less alcohol from the same amount of sugar in grape juice than the predominant yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Anyone who’s bought more than a couple bottle of wine over the past several years has seen alcohol levels creeping up. Wines with 12.5 or 13 percent alcohol were once commonplace. Now they’re at the low end of the alcohol spectrum, with both red and white varietals pushing and even exceeding 14 and 15 percent.
Though this alcohol inflation has mellowed somewhat in recent years, with growers and winemakers employing various techniques to reduce alcohol levels and produce wines of greater elegance and restraint, some of these techniques can adversely affect the flavor of wine, especially when consumers tend to gravitate to robust, fruity, ripe-tasting wines.
The M. pulcherrima yeast was isolated from 50 strains of wild yeasts, then tested on Chardonnay and Shiraz grapes, reducing alcohol levels by almost 1 percent in the former and 1.6 percent in the latter. In terms of flavor, however, results were more mixed, with Chardonnay developing much higher levels of ethyl acetate, producing the dreaded “nail polish remover” effect. Shiraz, on the other hand, responded more favorably, with initial tasters reportedly finding it fruitier and more complex than wine produced with the S. cerevisiae yeast.
Of course, you could dilute your wine with a little water or just drink less, but that doesn’t sound like very much fun.
The Nose Knows More Than You Think
The nose really does know, at least according a recent study conducted by researchers at the Rockefeller University in New York.
The human nose was previously thought to be able to recognize some 10,000 different smells, a figure apparently derived from an unsupported 1927 study. But scientists have long been skeptical of that number, and the university’s Andreas Keller decided to put it to the test. He gave a group of volunteers three vials containing 10, 20 or 30 of 128 various odor molecules; two of the vials were identical, one was the outlier. The volunteers’ task was to put their beezer in it and identify the odd smell out, a task they repeated 260 times with different combinations.
The result—dispensing with a lot of complicated math—was that, on average, the proboscis can discern at least one trillion different smells. That’s a lot more than 10,000.
For wine drinkers, whether casual guzzler or professional taster, that just reinforces the importance of training your honker to recognize the subtle (and not so subtle) aromas of wine. The palate, by comparison, is a blunt instrument, capable only of recognizing five basic flavors—sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.
Of course, there is a catch. (There’s always a catch.) Even if the sensitive, highly trained human snout can discern dozens or hundreds or even thousands of different aromas in a wine, the human vocabulary may not be nearly so capable. After all, even if you can smell a trillion odors in a glass of your favorite vino, how many different ways can you say “dumb,” “rotten egg,” “wet wool?”
Fine Wine and Craft Beer: Friends or Foes?
The notion that consumers of fine wine and craft beer inhabit separate planets and that appealing to either is a zero-sum game is all, well. . . wet, according to a recent report from the industry group, Wine Market Council.
The Council’s research focused on so-called “high frequency” wine drinkers, who drink wine at least weekly and buy more than 85 percent of all fine wine sold despite comprising only 35 percent of all wine drinkers. Of that group, 89 percent often pound down a cold one or two, with 41 percent of that group opting for craft beers, generally defined as coming from independently owned brewers producing less than six million barrels of suds a year.
(On a side note, they also like the hard stuff, with 93 percent also drinking spirits, and 33 percent of those drinking liquor as often as wine.)
What that suggests, reports the North Bay Business Journal, is that there is an influential core group of consumers thirsty for high-quality beverages of all types—whether wine, beer or spirits—and that wineries shouldn’t confine their marketing efforts to already-committed wine drinkers.
This becomes especially important with the coming maturation of the “Millennial” generation (age 20 to 37), whose youngest members will reach the legal drinking age in a year and as a group are second in number only to “Boomers” (70 million to 77 million).
Millennials are the driving force behind the boom in craft beers, with studies showing that 50 percent of them have already imbibed the good stuff. They have a taste for fine wine too, one that mimics that of Boomers, currently the chief wine consumers. That also like shopping on-line, so the future of wine marketing will likely look a good deal different that the past.
Bad Reviews For Wine Reviewers
“Flinty.” “Leathery.” “Hauting.” “Vegetal.”
These are all terms wine reviewers use to describe what they’re drinking. Does anyone—beside the writer—really understand them?
Apparently not, at least according to a recent survey done for an online wine merchant. Some 55 percent of respondents said wine critics’ legion of fancy descriptors were confusing and did nothing to help them understand what a wine actually tastes like, while two-thirds said they didn’t get any of the aromas touted on wine labels.
It gets worse.
While only one-third of those responding to the poll found wine reviews helpful, almost half said they were “pompous.”
It turns out that wine reviewers may be every bit as confused as consumers. French researcher Frédéric Brochet asked more than 50 wine experts to describe a glass of white and a glass of red wine, without telling them that the “red” was actually the same white wine dyed with food coloring. Which didn’t stop the “experts” from describing it with terms typically associated with red wine like “jammy” and praising its “red fruit.”
Another Brochet experiment gave another batch of so-called experts a glass of what they were told was cheap table wine and a second glass of allegedly Grand Cru Bordeaux. They were, in fact, the same mid-level wine, though that didn’t stop the critics from describing the “cheap” wine as “simple,” “unbalanced” and “flat” and the “grand cru” wine as “fresh,” “complex” and “flavorsome.”
If the experts don’t know what they’re talking about, how can they be of any help to consumers? Well, according to the poll, they could start by dropping the pomposity and grandiose language and start using words with real meaning that consumers can understand, like “fresh” and “peachy.”
Or maybe it’s already too late. After all, only nine percent of poll respondents said they consulted a wine critic before buying a bottle.
Ouch!
Bulk Wine Bulks Up
Bulk wine is a steadily growing part of the New World wine export market and will likely continue in the future, according to a report recently issued by Rabobank, a Netherlands-based agricultural business bank. For the first decade of the 21st Century, the report states, bulk wine exports have gone from comprising one-fifth of all wine exports to almost one half, while bottled wines have declined from more than 75 percent to less than 60 percent.
The reasons for this rise in bulk wine exports are many and varied. One major reason is what Rabobank calls “the democratization of wine,” increasing consumer demand combined with improved production, shipping and marketing methods. “New World wine companies in particular have brought keenly priced, increasingly well-made and well-marketed wine products into the reach of more consumers around the world,” the report notes.
While the benefits to consumers of better-made, better-marketed, more affordable wines are obvious, the benefits to bulk wine producers, retailers and even the environment are equally impressive. Improvements in the containers and transportation of wine have made bulk wine shipping “a safe and reliable alternative to shipping masses of glasses across the world,” according to the report, not to mention one that allows producers to “save on transportation costs, import duties, glass and bottling costs, working capital and even foreign exchange exposure.”
With the glass bottle accounting for an estimated 40 percent of a filled bottle’s total weight, bulk wine shipments (in containers like the 25,000-liter “flexitank” bag) require less energy and fewer resources than traditional case-bottle shipments and are an economically sensible way to “go green,” while helping reduce a producer’s carbon footprint.
Given bulk wine shipping’s potential savings in the costs of production, transportation, fees and taxes, and energy, both retailers chasing value-conscious consumers and producers selling their own branded wine products should find that “selling more wine at more affordable prices” is an eminently smart business strategy.
Gazing Into the Crystal Ball
Predicting the future is hardly an exact science. After all, 20 years ago, who could have foreseen that we’d all be walking around with tiny computers in our pockets with more processing power than the bulky desktop computers that filled our offices?
But several people have given it a try, and the consensus on the future of wine drinking in the U.S. makes for interesting reading. There’s little question that the future belongs to the “Millennial” generation, defined as Americans between the ages of 25 and 34. They’re a big group—some 76 million strong—that spends around $172 billion per year. They also like wine. Sixty-six percent drink wine regularly, compared with only 26 percent of the U.S. population at large, according to a Wine Markets Council study.
A couple of oft-repeated generalizations about Millennials stand out. One, they have eclectic tastes, both in wine varietals and where those varietals are produced. Sweeter whites like Moscato are increasingly popular with this group, as are New World wines, especially imports. They also like bubbles. According the wine industry trade publication Impact, 21 percent of sparkling wine drinkers are Millennials.
Other wines that have seen impressive retail sales growth over recent years are rosés and red blends, the latter suggesting that these new wine drinkers are less tied to the Cabernet-Merlot-Pinot Noir status quo.
A second generalization is that Millennials are accustomed to communicating via social media and using websites like Yelp and Angie’s List, crowd-sourcing wine recommendations rather than relying on the words of a handful of “experts.” Facebook and other social media will become increasingly important to promote wines and gain brand recognition.
Millennials are also more environmentally conscious, so expect wineries pursuing this generation to “bottle” more wine in boxes, Tetrapaks and other “green”-tinged packages.