Fresh, tasty, authentic, vine-ripened… wine?

Tasty, home-made, hand-picked… food products seem to have adopted a whole range of product descriptions, presumably after the lengthy customer research which food marketers can afford. In some cases (see pic) these are presumed to be such potent messages that they dwarf even the flavour or the brand of the product. If they’re “hand-cooked”, who cares what they are? 

So. if these food marketing messages are such customer magnets, could some of them possibly work for wine?

 Home-made
I have never understood why a biscuit made at home would necessarily be better than one made in a biscuit factory. After all, the biscuit factory is dedicated to making biscuits, whereas a home must also function as a hotel, storage facility and entertainment complex. The biscuit factory has skilled, experienced biscuit makers; home has me.

And who would want a home-made television, say, or home-made shoes? Or home-made condoms, with their concomitant product, home-made fingerless washing-up gloves? No, I think we can do without “home-made” products, and that absolutely applies to wine. No-one is going to pay for home-made wine. There are far better, dedicated places to make wine than in someone’s home. Unless you’re talking about the Bordeaux home of the Rothschilds.

Vine-ripened
Unlike tomatoes, wines do not make a song and dance about the fact that the obvious place to ripen their grapes is on their vine. Effectively, all wine is vine-ripened. It’s hardly a selling point. It only raises the issue of where and how the other tomatoes are ripened.

Tasty
This childish epithet has always troubled me. What are the alternatives? Tasteless? And its crude simplicity would sit particularly unhappily with the supposed sophistication of wine. Imagine grand Burgundies and distinguished clarets, all shelved under a sign shouting “Tasty!” With perhaps a little shelf off to the side for Pinot Grigio.

   
Essential
Wine is essential.
Move on.

Hand-picked
The idea of hand-picking takes on completely different connotations when it is on food packaging as opposed to a UKIP leaflet. And of course hand-picking is equally attractive for wine, where the mass-production alternative has a vehicle trundling along the lines, effectively hoovering the grapes off the vines – along with any birds, small rodents, insects etc who happen to be in the vine at the time. “Tasty”. Whereas at Domaine de la Romanée Conti, the grapes are not only hand-picked, but hand-sorted and individually examined for health. So hand-picked wine? Yes please – if not at £3,000 a bottle. 

   

Fresh
What, like Beaujolais Nouveau? 

 






 
 

Specially selected
Not just ‘selected’, like everything else on the shelves. Funnily enough, when this epithet appears on wine labels, “specially selected” is always in the cheaper ranges, never the good wines which discerning customers specially select for themselves. 

Responsibly sourced
Have you been sourcing wine irresponsibly? Buying it from the corner shop? Buying wine from the property said to be ‘next door to’ the celebrated vineyard? Ordering one of those ‘mystery’ cases, which ‘might’ contain bottles worth some phenomenal amount of money, but will probably contain the bottles which couldn’t otherwise be sold? If you don't source your wines responsibly, you deserve all you’ve got coming.

("Handcrafted, responsibly sourced salad"? Give me strength…) 

Authentic
What actually is it that makes a pasta “authentic”? Italian flour? Italian eggs? Combined in a factory in the Midlands, but by someone called Elena? By these loose kinds of criteria, pretty much all wine is authentic wine. Unless it has another term attached, like “Chocolate”, “Fruit” or “Alcohol-Free”.

Or, of course, if it’s fake. It’s not just expensive wine which gets faked; the authorities once uncovered a line of fake Jacob’s Creek. The bottles could be distinguished because they had misspelt ‘Australia’ as “Austrlia” on the label, a mistake many of us might make after a few bottles of Jacob’s Creek. No wonder they didn’t attempt to fake Trockenbeerenauslese.



Market

Ah yes, “market” produce, always a winner. Market fruit, with its attractive manhandled bruising; and market vegetables, quite possibly past their sell-by date but you wouldn’t know because they haven’t got one. Call any corner of a modern city a Market and you’re quids in, as long as you take your produce out of its hygenic plastic wrapping and display it on a slab of wood.

But what kind of market might we be talking about for wine? Perhaps one of those weekly affairs in a little French town, with local wines for just a few Euro? Oh yes! Count us in! Just beware of “market” wine labelled with a bit of brown paper and only the word VIN in felt-tip. They’ve probably just soaked the labels off some fake Jacob’s Creek.

PK