Restaurant Critic Jay Rayner disputes the ‘bollocks spouted by wine connoisseurs’ and suggests that diners ignore them and buy ‘the cheapest wine on the list’.
By the same thought process then we should ignore those restaurant critics that spout utter balderdash about some restaurants and eat McDonald’s or the local kebab shop instead. Or perhaps we should just have the Tesco basics, Sainsbury’s cheapest food available because we don’t want to pay a little more for something that is a little or much better. Really – I don’t think so!
But maybe Jay has a point to make, albeit rather harshly.
Are wine and wine brands making the most of the opportunity to engage more with its consuming public and what it needs from this favoured alcoholic drink?
Wine is the favourite according to the WSTA (Wine and Spirit Trade Association 2016) with over half of consumers in every UK region choosing wine as their drink of choice.
It is also the preferred drink of choice for more 25-34 year olds than ever before.
The wine category also contributes £17.3bn in economic activity to the British economy supporting nearly 270,000 jobs and contributes £8.6bn (WSTA.co.uk) to the public purse annually.
So whilst supermarkets dominate the volume wine business selling approximately 56.4% (Marketline 2015) and on trade is around 18.1% of all wine trade the value skew towards hospitality and catering is much more significant.
But despite these enormous figures wine brands outside of champagne and supermarkets are unknown. In cricket terms they don’t trouble the scorers!
Rather flippantly Mr Rayner was reported to say ‘drink the house wine in a restaurant and the expensive wine at home’, which I suspect is what many consumers do already, so it is not exactly new. But saying it is possibly half the solution.
Most consumers are looking for an experience when they go out to eat and spend their hard earned cash. And just as the food has to come up to scratch and play to what the customer wants, so does the atmosphere, service and wine. Each has a part to play an integral part of the experience.
There are significant opportunities to improve revenue by persuading consumers to trade-up their wine choice.
Further, there are significant opportunities in persuading those consumers to stick with wine as a choice and not switch to other drinks. Language, serve, variety, fun with a little education all have a part to play. In short some engagement.
It is critical that the language of wine is engaging to those consumers – it must never be ‘tell and do’, it has to be inviting, selling not prostituting itself and giving substantive reasons as to why it is worth that extra.
If entertainment is the reason that wine is playing a part in the diners dinner and that is the language and tone that need to be used.
There are more convenient ways in which wine can be sold and served. Using the wine preservation systems to offer different serve sizes – 50cl carafes for example and wider wine selection by sizes less than a bottle are a great way of getting your consumers involved more. It is also one of the fastest growing formats of wine bar on the high street.
Focusing on a style of the moment as The Cadeby gastropub in Doncaster has done, with its Malbec (published in these columns 4.10.16), providing it is done with the idea of giving some sense of entertaining customers more with a tad of education.
What can be done with wine tastings? They do not need to be 3 hour lectures but only a part of an evening. I run tastings, which are of just 15 minutes or 30 minutes and can feature any type, style of wine on almost any list. But more than anything they give consumers a way of tasting that gives much greater pleasure.
At a recent tasting with a sales team of 10 staff, the tasting includes a feature of wine tasting which is to pull a small amount of air through the palate to develop the flavours of the wine in the mouth. It is a wine tasting professional’s way of working – we all do it. The staff enjoyed it hugely and could never believe that you could taste so much by just doing that one thing.
We are coining a new word ‘edutainment’ – part education part entertainment – remember you heard it here first.
The wine trade has begun to change its way of running tastings with consumers more involved than ever before. The latest example is Barullo, which is a mix up of Argentinian wine, Michelin star restaurants tango dancing, graffiti artists and lots more.
So Mr Rayner, if your motive was to bring greater theatre, entertainment and integrity to wine service in restaurants then bring it on. If your motive was just a negative throwaway ignoring the many wine engaging innovations that are already happening, active and live in the on-trade then please re-consider and join us in ‘edutainment’.
Alistair Morrell
Hospitality & Catering News, Wine Content Executive