One of the last professional events I attended before being felled by this fever was put on by VinExpo and the Bordeaux Board. Seems like they did a wee survey on 20-25 year olds and wine.
Two groups of 10 people in five countries in the US, France, Japan, Belgium (Belgium?! Yes, this is the EU's home, but are they big enough to be a player?) and the UK.
100 people all-together.
I have a masters in dance therapy not in biz, but still this method, basing observations on 20 people per country, would have never passed as research when I wrote my thesis.
What the VinExpo/Bordeaux folk thought were the key findings:
*Wine has a healthy image.
*All countries agreed wine isn’t a young drink.
*People who drink wine tend to have jobs….(they’re kidding, right?)
*They all want wine’s image to be younger and to take the myth out of the wine culture. They liked varietal wines. They like wines that are ‘light and fruity.” (Hey, what about that best seller Yellow Tail? That’s the antithesis of light and fruity. No?).
*They want wine that is “more trendy,” and it seems as if all of these tots in all of these countries found buying wine confusing.
You can probably tell already that the old trust-no-one-and-nothing in me is a little suspicious that these precious findings are going to be handed over to the EU and that woman I don’t trust with a vine, Mariann Fischer Boel as another reason to dumb down the wine industry--allow irrigation, chips, stupid grape varieties---in other words, give a commercial overhaul to centuries of vine wisdom. Really who cares about making wine easier to 20-25 year olds? My generation did just fine (aren’t we the biggest wine buyers these days) all on our own. We didn’t have to be fed some medicine in a teaspoon of applesauce. It is so disrespectful to think wine has to be pablumized just because someone happens to be just emerging from their teen years.
But there was one fascinating piece of trivia in this study. It came from Japan.
“It has become fashionable to offer your girlfriend a bottle of wine made in the year she was born.”
Now, that’s a trend all of we ladies want to see more of.
True. I'm not that old, but for a good bottle of wine, I'm willing to lie, say I had plastic surgery. Whatever it takes. Yes, I'm that kind of girl.
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