Natural Selection

How do we choose which wines we buy? Does the answer lie deep in our evolutionary history? Short answer – probably not. Long answer…

Right from the moment our mother bounces us on her knee, we're taught not to judge a book by its cover. It’s a sound piece of advice aimed at stopping mummy’s little treasure growing into a nasty little bigot – but the truth about prejudgment is that, judiciously applied, it’s actually very helpful.

In our early days on the savannah, if we saw a lion, we assumed he would attempt to deploy his sharp teeth and claws towards making us his lunch. Such prejudice would be frowned upon these days because it's a leophobic stereotype – but nevertheless it was a useful assessment for our ongoing survival. If we were smart, we quickly and quietly made like a southpaw and left.

Our judgments in the wine store are similar – we make choices based on past experiences. While the consequences of a poor wine selection may be less dire than failing to appreciate the intentions of the aforementioned carnivore, the point is our prejudices steer us towards certain types of wine and away from others, quite often to our detriment.

Vinously speaking, we’ve all had our happy successes and spectacular failures. Depending on whether our experience was good or bad, the whole grape varietal is then coloured by it. Maybe our thoughts go something like this…"Hmmm, let’s see… beef tonight…cab sauv? No, too harsh… and it stains my teeth….merlot? A bit bland, plus there’s that movie Sideways that says it’s rubbish…pinot noir? Can be a bit watery but usually a pretty safe bet…shiraz…My favourite – chocolate and raspberry jam…"

The conversation differs for all of us, but even an experienced wine buyer has only a more sophisticated version of this internal monologue. If this little pep talk helps you decide your varietal, how do you proceed once that’s nailed down?

Unless you’re in the 99th percentile of wine drinkers who regularly read wine reviews and can separate wine by region and sub-region, you only really have the label to go on. Oh, and those spurious little trophy stickers – which I will distrust until I see the gold medal for Appallingly Integrated Oak that the Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay must have won.

So what, apart from the bare essentials like name and origin, can we tell from the label?

What if you’re faced with 5 similar bottles of similar price, none of which you’ve tried or heard of? If you’re anything like I was starting out, you’ll probably go for the one with the prettiest packaging or funniest name. But as I found out, buying off the label is caveat emptor, because it’s mostly just good old-fashioned branding.

Retail psychology is a complex field, flooded with buzzwords like ‘perceived self-image,’ but here’s my take on what the winemaker is trying to make you think about their wine, based on the label design. But be warned, even when you know these tricks, it’s hard not to fall victim to them. It’s battered wine drinker syndrome – we always want to see the best in wines.

The first category of label I’ll call the French chateau label. This is white and clean with a hand-drawn, old-fashioned house or building on it. It has a classical cursive script or an upper-case serif font. It’s designed to look like a Margaux or at least convey a sense of being an established name. Considering we didn’t have much of a wine industry at all until the 1970s, this insinuation is dubious for all but a few New Zealand producers. Though the building might have been there for ages I guess...

The opposite of this Franco-fraudulence is what I call the parochial Kiwi label, which usually features a fern somewhere and a liberal application of garish colours. This label represents the perky New World upstart, trading off our country’s youthful exuberance to try and corner the everyday drinkers that don’t want to be seen taking wine too seriously. The good news is it’s cheap; the bad news is its often only one step removed from the goon bag.

Then there are the landscape labels, like Palliser Estate and Wither Hills. These labels try to sell you a sense of place and purity. These still have a sense of nationalism about them, but they’re a step up from the parochial ones. I secretly suspect the parched slopes of Wither Hills are meant to make you thirsty too. These landscape labels are very common in New Zealand and some are excellent examples.

The next level of perceived quality is the ‘just writing’ label that mostly occupies the super-premium market in the Southern Hemisphere. In the style of Penfolds Grange and others, the theory is that the ‘just writing’ wine’s reputation should speak for itself and need no visual aids to persuade you. Te Mata Estate is a good example of the hierarchy of labels: they use landscape labels on their everyday $20 Woodthorpe range and then switch to the ‘just writing’ labels on their Elston and Cape Crest whites and their flagship Bullnose and Coleraine reds to suit the inflated price tags. In fairness to Te Mata, their wines are rather good, but I’m on a roll now so fairness is out the window.

Another thing you’ll notice is that wines usually employ colour schemes that tell you something about the depth of the wine. Red wines are especially fond of this, as the colour of the wine is not always evident looking at the bottle. The colours used often roughly reflect the colour of the wine: pinot noirs usually go for a maroon colour scheme (by no coincidence also called burgundy), while shiraz usually has a deep purple in there somewhere. This is actually quite helpful as it helps you to spot it on the shelf.

So while a pretty label is not a guaranteed reflection of the quality of its contents, if you do pick out a dud, at least you can always put a candle in it and put it on the mantle as a monument to your unwavering superficiality.