Box Wines
A wine blog with news and reviews of affordable wines

A Neuromarketing post, Wine Tasting Trickery, explains why wine tasters (even the Box Wines blog) don’t just follow their taste buds.

This illustrates the challenges that box wines have to overcome - even if they taste exactly the same as a wine in a bottle with a natural cork, they are likely to be downgraded if the tasting isn’t blind.

Health Magazine ran an article in their October issue, “The best vino to go.” The subtitle was, “New boxed wines are honestly worth drinking.” The article doesn’t say much other than giving an explanation of how the bag-in-box concept works and extolling the longevity of box wines. They mention Black Box Wines and FreeRange Wines as a couple of good alternatives.

There’s nothing too spectacular about this article, but it’s nice to see mainstream media making the point that today’s boxed wines aren’t the plonk of a decade or two ago. In particular, Health should reach a large group of consumers who want to take the “glass a day” approach to red wine for heart health.

Shiraz and Syrah wines are often distinguished by their peppery character. As it turns out, this spicy flavor has a rather pedestrian, chemical nature. According to How to pepper up a bottle of Shiraz by Tim Atkin, “The compound responsible for the peppery aromas and flavours in Syrah/Shiraz has been identified. In case you’re interested, it’s called alpha-ylangene.”

Atkin also comments on the distinction between Shiraz and Syrah:

Syrah and Shiraz are used more or less interchangeably in South Africa - but the more a non-French wine tastes like something from the northern Rhône Valley, the more likely it is to be called Syrah. Conversely, that’s why a handful of producers in the Languedoc-Roussillon are perfectly justified in labelling their vins de pays as Shiraz, despite grumbles from their compatriots. The wines have much more in common with the Barossa Valley than they do with Hermitage or Saint-Joseph.

The only danger I see in this discovery is that unethical wine producers might try and “spice up” a wine chemically rather than letting nature take its course. A little alpha-ylangene, anyone?

We’ve reported on the stunning win of Charles Shaw Chardonnay at the California State Fair, where the wine (popularly known as Two Buck Chuck) took the Best in California and Best in Class awards. Some might consider that an example of how an unbiased blind tasting can find a deserving bargain wine to be superior to much more costly wines. The LA Times, though, calles it a “gaffe.”

The Charles Shaw win may sound crazy, but wine industry insiders familiar with the organization and structure of competitions aren’t surprised at the results. Dozens of wines at each competition win gold medals, double-gold medals, best-of-class awards and other hyperbolic distinctions. And there are dozens of competitions around the country, making it possible for any wine, even Two-Buck Chuck, to win prestigious-sounding awards.

“I can see how it happens, giving Charles Shaw a double-gold, particularly with Chardonnay,” says Gary Eberle, owner of Eberle Winery in Paso Robles. He judges at three competitions a year. “You are sitting there as a judge, you’ve tasted two flights of 10 Chardonnays that are very austere — and I like those wines — then a wine comes along with a touch more fruit, a little more rounded, and it stands out. And you hang your hat on it as a judge.” (From Wine competitions: a few gaffs [sic], a lot of golds.)

The article notes that tasting is an imperfect science, and that many judges have minimal qualifications. Wineries often enter many competitions, and count on luck and random variations to pick up at least a few medals. And there are indeed plenty of medals to win. “In addition to the Charles Shaw, the judges considered 68 of the wines to be so extraordinary that they were awarded double-gold medals, meaning a panel unanimously agreed that the wine was gold medal quality. An additional 230 wines were awarded gold medals; 823 wines received silver medals; and 407 wines won bronze medals. In all, 10% of the wines entered in the competition received gold or double-gold medals, and half walked away with some kind of medal.”

Admittedly, one doesn’t often see wineries making a big point of their bronze medals. But at that one competition alone, almost 300 wines walked away with gold! Nearly 70 scored a double gold. So, the next time you see a wine bottle touting a gold medal or two, you might want to discount that as a major indicator of distinctive quality.

Do wine competitions actually make major errors? It seems inevitable that a small number of judges tasting dozens of wines in a short period of time will make a few poor decisions.

One reality is that the best wines may never get entered in the competitions - less costly wines are often entered in the hope of snagging medals and boosting sales.

The LA Times article reports that Andy Perdue, editor in chief of Wine Press Northwest, assembled a panel to taste 250 gold-medal winning wines. The panel found 15% undeserving of the gold medal status. While I suppose that this finding might give one pause about any gold medal claims, I think it can be viewed in a positive manner: 85% of the gold medal winners were independently verified as deserving. Presumably, even some of the 15% rejected by the review panel weren’t that bad; the rejection might have been due to subjective preferences, bottle variations, etc.

My conclusion? Take the gold claims with a grain of salt, but if the wine is a gold winner in multiple major competitions, odds are it’s actually quite a decent wine. If the odds of a gold medal wine being really gold quality are 85% for a single winner, I’d estimate the probability of a double gold (in two different major competitions) winner being gold quality go up to a percentage in the high 90s (97.5%, by my calculation). Of course, all wine competitions aren’t equal, but multiple wins should usually be a good indicator of quality. Be sure to read the fine print, though, to see what was won where.

My advice: go for the golds, the more, the better.

Box Wines readers who found the study that showed “better” wine made food taste better, too (even though the wine served to all diners was identical!) might find this post at Neuromarketing interesting: Wine and the Spillover Effect. The post describes in more depth the marketing implications of wine labeling and presentation, and offers some suggestions for future research along the same lines.

The more interesting aspect of the research, though, is the demonstrated spillover effect. In each case, the presumed characteristics of the wine affected the perception of the food; despite both wine and food being identical, a wine thought to be inferior made the food taste worse and the customer less likely to return. This demonstrates the power of small variations in the customer experience to have unpredictable effects on satisfaction and sales.

It’s a fairly lengthy post that further highlights the importance of presentation of wine as part of a restaurant experience and how seemingly insignificant details can have a big impact on the diners’ perception of their overall dining experience.

The Power of Wine Labels. We probably didn’t need more proof that wine drinkers’ evaluation of wines is subjective and readily influenced by factors other than the actual characteristics of what comes out of the bottle. Now, though, we find that not only is the perception of the wine itself changed by what they think is the wine’s origin, but even that of the entire meal and the restaurant where it was served. A study by Cornell University demonstrated the power of a wine label:

Forty-one diners at the Spice Box restaurant in Urbana, Illinois were given a free glass of Cabernet Sauvignon to accompany a $24 prix-fixe French meal. Half the bottles claimed to be from Noah’s Winery in California. The labels on the other half claimed to be from Noah’s Winery in North Dakota. In both cases, the wine was an inexpensive Charles Shaw wine.

Those drinking what they thought was California wine, rated the wine and food as tasting better, and ate 11% more of their food. They were also more likely to make return reservations.

It comes down to expectations. If you think a wine will taste good, it will taste better than if you think it will taste bad. People didn’t believe North Dakota wine would taste good, so it had a double curse – it hurt both the wine and the entire meal. “Wine labels can throw both a halo or a shadow over the entire dining experience,” according to Cornell Professor Brian Wansink (Ph.D.), author of the book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. [From Fine as North Dakota wine.]

Another study tested 49 MBA students at a wine and cheese reception. The subjects given wine labeled from California rated the wine 85% higher and the cheese 50% higher.

It’s amusing that they chose Charles Shaw wines (aka Two Buck Chuck) for the test, as it is perhaps the cheapest wine in the U.S. On the other hand, perhaps that makes it perfect for a blind test. Does anyone think that Charles Shaw Chardonnay would have won the top prize at the California State Fair wine competition if the labels had been shown to the judges?

This simple study has a lot of implications. It shows the uphill battle that winemakers face if their label or origin isn’t perceived as prestigious or as connoting high quality. This is a particular impediment for boxed wines seeking to promote themselves as high quality products that are equivalent, if not better, than their bottled peers. The Cornell researchers didn’t test this, but we have little doubt that had some diners seen the wine poured from a bottle and others from a box, the split would have been at least as dramatic as the California/North Dakota divide.

This research also shows the importance of wines to a restaurant. Those restaurants that stick a small selection of mass-market wines on their menu as a seeming afterthought may be missing out - the study shows that the perception of the wine carries over to the entire meal and even impacts the probability of a diner returning to the restaurant.

Here’s a contrarian story for wine enthusiasts… One advantage of the gradual industry conversion from natural corks to synthetic corks and screw caps, not to mention Tetra Paks and bag-in-box packages, would have to be less destruction of cork trees, right? Well, according to the highly authoritative Scientific American, the opposite is true:

The quercus suber, or cork oak, which grows on both the European and African sides of the Mediterranean, provides the raw material for practically all the 20 billion wine corks used every year.

The way cork is harvested — shaved off the sides of trees like the way a sheep is shorn — means forests continue to thrive as they give up their valuable bark. In Sardinia, the only region in Italy that produces cork, the forests are a haven for wild boar, a species of hawk native to the island and Sardinian deer. The highly endangered Iberian lynx roams the cork forests of Spain and Portugal, the global leader in cork production; in North Africa the forests provide a habitat for Barbary deer.

The concern is that if the market for wine corks is greatly reduced, the cork forests would no longer be viable as economic properties. They might be destroyed and replanted with a more profitable product, like the fast-growing eucalyptus.

So, a strange alliance has been formed:

Cork producers and environmentalists are fighting back. Aiming to cash in on the demand for ‘green’ products, they have started to produce corks certified ‘environmentally friendly’ under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) scheme, an ‘eco-label’ system already widespread for timber products.

Backers of the FSC scheme hope ‘green’ wine buyers will prefer a bottle with the FSC label. Cork makers hope it can guarantee their future by differentiating their traditional product from the upstarts. [From Plastic, not axes, threatens cork forests]

It seems a bit like PETA-friendly leather jackets, but the wine business sometimes produces strange bedfellows. So, do your part - help save a cork forest by cracking open a bottle of wine (but only if it has a natural cork)!

We’ve heard that wine is good for your health, and this was certainly true when a District of Columbia home invasion was turned around with a glass of wine.

It started around midnight on June 16 when a group of friends was finishing dinner on the patio of a District of Columbia home, authorities and witnesses said. That’s when a hooded man slid through an open gate and pointed a handgun at the girl’s head.

“Give me your money, or I’ll start shooting,” he said, the witnesses told The Washington Post.

Everyone froze, they said, but then one guest spoke up.

“We were just finishing dinner,” Cristina Rowan, 43, told the man. “Why don’t you have a glass of wine with us?”

The intruder had a sip of their Chateau Malescot St-Exupery and said, “Damn, that’s good wine.” (Full Story)

The robber drank some more wine, had a bite of Camembert, and put his gun in his pants. He then apologized, requested a hug, and left. The group locked the door and dialed 911.

Who needs an expensive security system - instead, just have a nice glass of wine at the ready!

This came in via email, sorry I don’t have the original credit:

Sally, a young businesswoman was driving home from one of her business trips in Northern Arizona when she saw an elderly Navajo woman walking on the side of the road. As the trip was a long and quiet one, she stopped the car and asked the Navajo woman if she would like a ride. With a silent nod of thanks, the woman got into the car.

Resuming the journey, Sally tried in vain to make a bit of small talk with the Navajo woman. The old woman just sat silently, looking intently at everything she saw, studying every little detail, until she noticed a brown bag on the seat next to Sally.

“What in bag?” she asked the old woman.

Sally looked down at the brown bag and said, “It’s a bottle of wine. I got it for my husband.” The Navajo woman was silent for another moment or two. Then speaking with the quiet wisdom of an elder, she said: “Good trade”.

Good news for vineyards, bad news for wine lovers: the Australian wine glut is over, and we can expect higher prices and fewer bargains. According to Glut Reaction in The Age,

Following drought, frost, fires and water problems, the national harvest looked like being cut by 50 per cent. Every grape would be needed…

The wine glut was over. The 2007 national wine grape harvest was 1.3 million tonnes, down 29 per cent, or 560,000?tonnes, on 2006. After three record or near-record vintages, it felt as though the industry stopped dead in its tracks. To help make up some of the shortfall, more than 5000?tonnes of table grapes - sultana, gordo blanco - had to be seconded to help the cask market.

Particularly hard hit will be very cheap wines that, with the oversupply of grapes, were able to present wine drinkers with high quality wines at prices cheaper than bottled water.

Wine drinkers shouldn’t lose hope entirely, however. The wine glut in Europe is still going strong, so French vintners may pick up some of the slack if Australian supplies start to tighten.