handtomouth

As our national wine consumption continues to dry up, there is a good deal of talk about how to get more people to enjoy wine, and how to convert imbibers from beer or spirits to wine.

One of the ways to empty the wine lake, some argue, is to make wine styles more populist, more down-to-earth and less stuck up. Once they are turned on to wine through these “casual” wines, they’ll begin to explore the wider wine world. We have no shortage to cheap and cheerfuls on the shelves today, do these wines make converts of previous beer drinkers?

It’s a contentious question. Christian Eedes of Wine Magazine has recently said: “It is entirely fallacious to argue that by promoting plonk to Joe Public that he will inevitably trade up to fine wine. By way of a music analogy, that’s like insisting that today’s Britney Spears listener will tomorrow be savouring a Chopin piano concerto.”

Sure, this musical development over one day is unlikely, but what about a lifetime? It would be a horrible state if all Spears and Williams fans only listen to these artists for the rest of their days. We all have in our music collections LPs, tapes and CDs of bands we loved a decade ago. Their dust accumulation suggests the reasons why we loved them so much are now obscure. Possibly they now sound simple and lack complexity?

But is a musical analogy an appropriate one? You could just as well use a motoring analogy, and here many a driver of an underpowered rust bucket certainly wants to trade up to a sports car. Yet I would be happier to use an analogy with food, arguably closer in nature to wine.

It’s likely that the novice cheese eater, first introduced to supermarket gouda, will soon try cheddar, even brie and feta, maybe even blue cheese one brave day. It’s also likely that this cheese eater will enjoy more that one of these new cheeses, and that he may find that the cheap gouda that he started with is no longer as satisfying.

Interest is key. Certain people may never like cheese much after the gouda incident, they just aren’t interested in the food. Similarly with cars and with music. But where there is interest, there is often development and experimentation.

Eedes ends his article by summarising Tony Jordan’s (a leading Australian wine figure) opinion that the important challenge is to promote wine culture, and this is best done by giving people knowledge about wine. On this point, it’s easily more rewarding to write about Chopin than Spears.