Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. And in times like this, when consumers are loathe to spend money, it becomes more necessary than ever for wineries to figure out ways to encourage them to do so.

As a critic I’ve seen almost every way there is for wineries to attract attention to themselves. They’ll resort to oversized bottles so heavy you have to use two hands to pour from them. They’ll put more and more outrageous things on the label. Critters and various colorful modes of transit (trucks, wagons, bicycles) seem mercifully to be on the way out, but on the way in are larger point size for type, greater contrast of colors on the label, and more psychedelic use of gold. It’s the label as roadside billboard. Of course, bottles wrapped in tissue paper suggest that the wine inside must be very special indeed, as is the case with bottles that come in wooden boxes.

There is a cottage industry of packaging redesigners, to whom despairing marketing and sales people turn in roughly the same way a worried man might go to a psychic for consultation following a broken love affair or economic crisis. “[T]hey are hoping that some magic combination of prices, adjectives, fonts, type sizes, ink colors and placement on the page can coax diners into spending a little more money” is how the New York Times yesterday described how restaurateurs are trying to lure in cautious diners. The same can be said of wineries. Production people come up with their own “magic combinations.” If you can’t sell your Cabernet Sauvignon, what about a Malbec instead (grabbing onto Argentina’s coattails)? How about a cleverly-named proprietary bottling incorporating the owner’s children’s names, or something French-sounding?. There’s as much psychology involved in buying decisions as anything else. One restaurant cited in the Times article “not only excites the taste buds but goes to work on the mind.” This is crucial because flavor occurs, not in the taste buds, but in the brain, which is the seat of our sexual fantasies.

We humans, it turns out, are as irrational as invertebrates when it comes to choosing our delicacies. “[T]he psychology of the menu”, a complex interplay of graphic design, word and image association and subtle tricks played on the mind (e.g. cost sans dollar sign is said to be less threatening, so that 9 is friendlier than $9) represents the summitry of the restaurateur’s — and the P.R. agent’s — art. “The hidden persuaders,” in Vance Packard’s term (the title of his 1957 book), provided pre-”Mad Men” evidence of hidden tactics advertisers used to sell products. The ultimate in subliminal was said to be barely perceptible (to the naked eye) images of writhing nude human torsos in airbrushed ice cubes floating in cold, refreshing glasses of cognac and other spirits — images that the eye missed but that the reptilian id did not. There are wineries right here in Northern California that are not above mixing eye candy in with their message. The handsome young man from Livermore and the hot young woman from Napa Valley, both of whom are used in their company’s pictorial ads (and you know who they are), come to mind. What’s surprising is that the wine industry does not use sex appeal more than it does. Perhaps it’s a form of prudishness, or maybe the industry just feels it’s “above” pandering to that denominator. But if the suggestion of salaciousness can sell everything from Volvos

to coffee

to clothes

to iPods

it can certainly sell wine. I’m not suggesting that we start having young winemakers in bikini briefs and thongs appear in wine advertisements (although that could be pretty cool) and I certainly wouldn’t want to see old winemakers scantily clad. But the wine industry is stuffy and tight-cheeked when it comes to portraying its own image and it could have more fun and try new things. And by the way, a sincerely meant message from this blog:

In my business I see a lot of spin, not only from the usual suspects — wineries and their P.R. reps — but from other parts of the industry. The cork producers send me material showing how green their forests are and accusing alternative closures of all sorts of nastiness. The screwtop people send out press releases saying you’ll never get TCA from a Stelvin. Now, the bottle industry has crashed the spin-control party.

The bottlers heretofore have been quiet, but I suppose it was only to be expected they’d speak up now, what with the Recession forcing so many people to buy their wines in boxes, PET containers and so on. It’s the A.B.G. movement — Anything But Glass — and it’s freaking out the bottle manufacturers.

Yesterday, I got an e-blast informing me how much wine consumers prefer glass over everything else. The email had a link to the Glass Packaging Institute’s website, which reported on a brand new survey headlined

98% of American wine consumers with a preference prefer wine packaged in traditional glass bottles… reaching nearly 100% for younger wine consumers, ages 21 to 35.

According to the poll, when consumers were asked “Which type of container do you prefer when you drink or purchase wine?” 97.6% replied glass bottles. When asked “Which container do you consider best for recyling?” 73.2% answered glass. And when asked “Which container do you think does the best job of keeping the original flavor of the product” fully 95.3% replied glass.

The problem with these questions and answers is that they don’t tell the whole truth. If the 97.6% who prefer glass were asked if they preferred to spend $10 for a 750-ml. bottle as opposed to $18 for a 3-liter bag-in-a-box, which is the equivalent of $4.50 per 750-ml., what do you think their answer would have been? If the 73.2% who think glass is more recyclable than a box or PET container had the truth explained to them, their answer would have been quite different. (Is glass more recyclable than cardboard or aluminum? I don’t think so.) As for the 95.3% who think glass keeps the flavor of wine better than a box, they’re not only wrong, they’ve never had a bottled wine finished with a moldy cork.

Years ago there was a best-selling book called “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.” Its basic premise was that you can prove anything you want to in a poll. Here’s the money quote: “For any given issue, there is a whole range of possible opinions, not just two. The more complex the issue is, the greater the range. Nevertheless, most pollsters try to fit all opinion into the neat categories of agree/disagree, favor/oppose. These simple categories…make for powerful headlines, but they mask the color and depth of public opinion as it truly exists.”

That’s what I think is happening in this bottle survey. The pollsters asked the people simplistic questions — questions whose answers they knew they’d get — and the public replied exactly the way the pollsters knew they would. Then the pollsters present the “findings” as evidence of glass’s superiority, and of the public’s “strong” preference for it. I don’t think the public has a powerful feeling against boxes and such — especially younger ones — which is why boxed wine sells in far greater quantities than bottled wine.

By the way, I’m not saying I don’t like bottles. I do. Nor am I saying the best wines don’t come in bottles. They do. I wouldn’t want to see bottles go away. All I’m saying is that it’s awfully easy to bamboozle the American public with polls, be they about politicans or packaging.

Shameless self-promotion

I came across this blog that calls steveheimoff.com one of the 5 best wine blogs. The others: Vinography, Wine Library TV, Asimov’s The Pour, and Dr. Vino. Quite a prestigious list! Thank you very much, Clinton Stark. I’m honored.

People call people like me “gatekeepers.” Beyond the obvious definition of a person who controls passage through a gate, the more modern meaning of gatekeeping is a cultural one: according to Wikipedia, gatekeeping is “the process through which ideas and information are filtered for publication.”

In the wine industry, in addition to writers and critics, gatekeepers include any professionals who interface with consumers and can influence what they buy: sommeliers, restaurateurs and wine shop personnel.

I have always taken my position as a gatekeeper very seriously. But I’ll be the first to admit we don’t always do a very good job at giving consumers true, useful information about wine they can use to bust through stereotypes. I was reminded of this yesterday when I wrote my post about screwtops and somebody commented that screwtops would be a lot more acceptable to diners if sommeliers pushed or at least didn’t oppose their use. That led me to think, What else are we gatekeepers not doing enough (or doing too much of)? Here’s my top 10 list of things that gatekeepers could do a better job of letting people know:

1 screwtops aren’t just for cheap wine
2. the relationship between price and quality is not as absolute as most people think
3. just because a wine comes from a single-vineyard that is designated on the label means nothing
4. a high score does not reflect a wine’s affinity for food
5. a particular varietal that comes from a region famous for that varietal can be terrible
6. the weight of the bottle is meaningless and can be misleading
7. ditto the beauty of the label
8. ditto the faux wax seal which is often just an excuse to charge an extra $15
9. a wine described as “dry” can actually contain residual sugar that interferes with food pairing
10. the official alcohol reading on the label can be seriously off

I’m sure I could come up with others, but then it wouldn’t be a Top Ten List.

I’ve written about and praised Boisset’s PET bottle and so has my magazine, Wine Enthusiast, which earlier this year awarded Jean-Charles Boisset the “Innovator of the Year” prize at our annual Wine Star Awards.

Now Boisset has won yet another prize, the coveted AmeriStar Award for Beverage Packaging.

“The Boisset Family Estates’ Beaujolais Nouveau PET bottles are shatterproof and include a convenient screw cap for anytime, anywhere consumption,” the presenters said, also praising the package’s green, recyclable qualities.

Screwtops have come a long way in a short period of time. I also read today in Decanter that screwtops now make up 15% of all the wine sold in the world.

When California wineries widely started bottling in screwtops, about 5-6 years ago, I used to note that fact in my reviews. Generally, I conceptualized these into two categories:

1. If the wine was inexpensive and good, I’d say something like “Good value in a screwtop.”

2. If the wine was expensive and good, I’d say, “Don’t be put off by the screwtop; this is really a good wine.” I  felt the need to reassure readers, because I knew that consumers were freaked out by screwtops. They thought they reflected a cheap, nasty wine.

It was a couple years ago when I finally stopped referring at all to screwtops in my reviews, because so many people were using them, on so many different kinds of wines, that it no longer mattered.  Screwtops had entered into the realm of normality; it didn’t seem relevant anymore to even point it out.

How far will the screwtop revolution go? This seems to be the situation: Any unoaked white wine is as likely to be in a screwtop as not, whether it’s Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc or whatever. Pinot Noir is quite likely to be in a screwtop these days, and not just cheap ones. When it comes to Cabernet Sauvignon, I’m hard pressed to think of any that are in screwtops, beyond Plump Jack. Randall Grahm is one of the few who’ve moved to put all their reds in screwtops, and his Bonny Doon wines really set a pace for style. It wouldn’t bother me a bit if everything was in screwtops, because at least you’d be guaranteed never to have a corked bottle.

I’ve asked a lot of owners of cult wineries if they would ever consider using screwtops, and usually they look at me as if I’d suggested they take off all their clothes and run naked through downtown San Francisco. Like, “Are you crazy?” Those who are in touch with their customer base must get feedback suggesting consumers don’t want a $100 Cab in a bottle that resembles Boone’s Farm. I’ve also been told by distributors that they hear from restaurateurs and merchants that screwtops are a no-no for expensive wine. This just shows it’s the job of us wine writers to educate the public.

I don’t know why people are so resistant to change. When you think of it, the wine industry is a very conservative place. People talk about change all the time, but there’s really very little change at all. Somebody will use a new clone, or a new technique, but the same old varieties dominate the market, bottled with the same old corks, which, as a technology, are 18th century anachronisms.

Do Millennials care about corks vs. screwtops? Probably not, and they’re the future. It’s not hard to imagine corks going the way of linotype machines within the next decade. Screwtops are greener than corks, imposing less of a carbon footprint on the world. One of these days, people will wonder what took the wine industry so long to get with the program.

I don’t usually recommend or even mention specific for-profit schemes in the wine industry (and Lord knows, everyone’s trying to figure out how to create a viable company these days). But I got a press release the other day for something called eProvenance, a French-based company that claims to have discovered significant problems in wine shipping, wherein as much as 7 percent of wines (which would exceed the percentage of cork-tainted bottles) moved around the world suffer from being exposed to temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius (86 F) for long enough periods of time to effectively ruin the wine.

eProvenance says their business goals “are to improve the distribution channels and share best practices, as well as provide the ability to verify and communicate the high-quality provenance to consumers.” To all of which I say, amen.

The truth is that poor shipping is the dirty little secret of the wine industry. This is something that all people who deal with a high volume of wine understand all too well. And I don’t think the average, or even the above-average, consumer has the slightest idea of how damaging temperature extremes, particularly heat, can be to that expensive bottle of wine.

I myself used to not understand it, until one day when I was talking with a noted collector, T., who lived in Southern California but had a vacation condo in Hawaii.  (This was back when I wrote the Collecting Page for Wine Spectator and the nation’s leading collectors returned my phone calls in exchange for the ego trip of seeing their names, and sometimes pictures, published in that magazine.) T. flew out to his condo, opened a few bottles, and found something wrong. He checked, and, sure enough, the power had briefly failed — it was just a matter of hours — but it was long enough, he told me, to kill his wines.

Of course, you and I might not have detected anything wrong with wines that had experienced a few hours of temperatures above 70 degrees, but T. was known for the sensitivity of his palate. On the other hand, there is little doubt that a wine that has been in the back of a UPS truck all day long during a summer heat wave (when the temperature inside that metal oven can soar above 130 degrees) will be effectively baked. (When this happens, I ask the winery to re-send me new wine to review.)

The eProvenance people drew up this chart of a shipment that went from Bordeaux to Brazil.

Basically, you want the line to be near the green zone. Anything above the green zone is too hot; as you can see, there’s a lot of line above the green zone.

I’m not sure that there’s ever going to be a solution to this problem. Even if wineries the world over stopped shipping their wine during their warm season — which is obviously not going to happen — they might be shipping it into someone else’s warm season. Even with companies like eProvenance, it’s likely that tens of millions of heat-damaged bottles will continue to be bought and sold around the globe. And with hot places like India, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Emirates now developing a taste for expensive French and California wines, imagine how much more extreme heat those Lafites, Harlans and Crystals are going to be exposed to.

The funny thing about all this is to imagine a rich “collector” who shows off his latest trophy wine at a dinner party. Nobody likes it, and for good reason: it’s baked. But no one is secure enough to admit it, so they all ooh and aah about how fabulous it is. The lesson? Res ipsa loquiter: the thing speaks for itself.