Vine Wise

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The Wish List

Columnist

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Richard L. Thomas
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Now that we’re about halfway through the year, I thought it might be fun to finally answer a question I frequently get when speaking to various groups about the wine industry. I’m often asked about my wish list for the industry and what I hope to see happen in the near future. Here are my answers. They’re not listed in any real order of importance, but here goes:

More screwcap wines. This, along with a couple of other items on the list, is about convenience and lessening the intimidation factor of a cork. It’s very difficult to ask someone to try wine for the first time and expect them to even know how to get into the bottle. Try finding a corkscrew in Iowa. From a practical standpoint, very few wines are better with a cork—and screwcaps also eliminate the possibility of a corked wine. What other industry would sell a product that has about a five percent chance of being bad? Insane!

More and better Chateau-la-boxes. Bag-in-box has come a long way since the first ones were released in the 1970s. Back then, we put bad wine in a bad package; today, it’s better living through chemistry. Bags-in-a-box today are convenient, easy to use and the quality is very good.  Want a glass of wine but don’t want to open a bottle? Go to the bar or refrigerator and simply pull the little lever. Want a second one to feel better? Repeat the above. When it’s empty, you can use the bag from inside the box as a blow-up pillow for camping—ain’t recycling great! Boxes also take up far less space than cases of bottles and they travel well. Remember, the more convenient you make a product, the greater the chances of people using it. It might also be time for those of you who thumb your nose at wine boxes to actually try them again before criticizing. We won’t think less of you for drinking bag-in-box—and we might even like you more if you share.

Get rid of the fancy glasses for everyday use. Remember when our parents and grandparents used jelly jars? They worked just as well as $30 stemware for 100 percent of the wine then—and still would for 98 percent of the wine today. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that maybe 1 percent of today’s wine might taste better and another 1 percent for those people who might be able to tell the difference. If professional wine judges can’t even rate the identical wine the same most of the time (see last month’s column to explain this), are we common folk supposed to think a wine might taste better if we blow $30 on a glass first? Don’t forget to add $50 to pay for the wine that it might help. Stemware is more elegant, but if you try to tell me the stem exists so your hand doesn’t warm the wine excessively, I’d probably say you aren’t drinking fast enough. Beer drinkers can use 1-pint canning jars to drink from, so we should be able to use jelly jars or water glasses. Remember, we’re trying to appeal to the masses.

More environmentally friendly packaging. I’d like to see lighter bottles instead of those big, fat glass bottles that require a weight lifter to pour. Also, six-bottle cases in place of the current 12’s, so as we get older, we don’t get a hernia. And please, eliminate styrofoam packing and those damn peanuts! What’s the fascination with thick glass bottles? The answer is perception. It’s been shown that if the package looks very high-class, then the consumer thinks the wine is better. However, when that same wine is tasted blindly, less expensive wines generally taste better to the average consumer. This is the opposite end of the same problem that plagues screwcaps and bag-in-boxes. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s all screwed up.

Less $40+ wines and more and better $10+. It’s well-documented that price and quality aren’t very frequently related. Price is usually a reflection of some outstanding marketing or, more than likely, availability. The less available a wine is, the higher its price—it feeds into the egocentric wine drinking group that pride themselves on having certain wines that their friends don’t have. A wonderful game of one-upsmanship in the high roller world. The high-end wines are finding out that they’re not recession proof anymore, so will some prices come down or will we find some well-aged wines still for sale in three or four years when the economy finally rights itself? (Caution: that’s not an economic prediction!)

More Sonoma County wineries using Sonoma County on their label. I keep saying it’s time to stop being ashamed of saying you’re from Sonoma County. In fact, the wineries should thank God they’re in paradise. Napa owns Cabernet Sauvignon, however, and always will. Do you know how many people don’t have a clue about what county most of our appellations are in? Maybe that’s how the wineries want to keep it—but I don’t see why.

No more ego-driven appellations or appellation battles. Aren’t 13 enough to cause adequate confusion, or shall we stroke another winery’s dreams? I’ll admit that Sonoma County isn’t the only county—nor California the only state—to be plagued with a far greater number of appellations than it really needs. I could write a thesis about how dissimilar many appellations are rather than how similar they are. One example would be to convince me that Alexander Valley near Chalk Hill Road is the same soil, climate and terroir as the Cloverdale area. Or how about Dry Creek near the dam versus Dry Creek near the confluence of the Russian River?

Enough said. Better get out there and do your homework.