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Old Parn’s Wine Awards 2011, part 2

In which your host doles out some more awards, in his customarily otiose manner, including those for best wine retailers — and your own favourite posts from 2011

A week or so ago, I dusted off my red carpet (sorry about those stains — I’ve no idea where they came from) and presented Old Parn’s Individual Wine Awards. You’re a sucker for a bit of that award night glamour, aren’t you?

Which is, of course, why you’re back for today’s second instalment. So let’s get on with it. Mandolin-strummer, step forward; do your strummy thing!

(NO, NOT LIKE THAT. I MEANT ON YOUR MANDOLIN, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE. GET OUT OF MY SIGHT.)

Wine retail awards

Best online wine selection

The Wine Society — if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ll’ve gathered that I love the Wine Society as though it were a small, adorable puppy. A small, adorable puppy that brings me lovely, lovely wine. Brilliant.

Best online wine communicators

Naked Wines — These guys are doing something different. For this I love them as though they were all small, adorable puppies that by their very existence somehow subverted the notion of puppyhood while simultaneously also selling some rather good wines.

(Let me know if the puppy analogies cease to be illuminating at any point.)

Naked Wines is firing a champagne cork into the arse of the stodgy, stolid wine world — by according prominence to the wines that normal people like, rather than wines that the establishment recommends. I’m not saying the establishment’s recommendations have nothing going for ’em, incidentally. But there’s a balance that needs redressing. And it’s a thing of joy to see those Naked folk redressing it.

Best supermarket for wine

Waitrose — Are you surprised? Really? Are you? REALLY?

Best value wine retailer

The Wine Society — Yes, again. I’m not going to apologise. I don’t know of any other wine retailer, online or offline, whose selection of £4.50–£7 wines has such a goddamn high hit rate.

Your Favourite Posts

Finally, here’s my token nod to democracy. Here are the five posts from this ol’ blog of mine that received the most traffic in 2011. I realise that it’s an unjustifiable leap of reasoning to deduce that these are your favourites. But I’m all about unjustifiable leaps.

(Ow. I just twisted my ankle.)

So. Here are 2011’s most trafficked posts:

The Shit Written on Wine Labels
Wine Writing is Broken
Le Froglet Wines (the horror! the horror!)
Five reasons to swear — about wine or anything else
Benjamin Darnault Picpoul de Pinet review

Well. That’s is (I promise) for the gratuitous end-of-year list posts. Thanks for bearing with me through the oscillations of 2011, and let’s clink our glasses in that vulgar way we do in honour of 2012. In daringly Mayan-defying style, I have a feeling it’s going to be good.

Wine’s image problem is about far more than supermarket pricing

In which Old Parn outlines his own opinion as to why a love of wine is so often associated with snobbery

The question that’s flapping around the wine world like a startled goose is, ‘Why won’t the British treat wine seriously?’ — and, in parallel to that, why does wine have such a problem with allegations of snobbery?

Well, that flapping goose has woken me up, too. So here are my thoughts.

First up, I think it’s a little too easy to blame supermarkets for the situation in which wine-lovers are stereotyped as snobs.

Guy Woodward (in the Guardian piece I linked to, above) writes:

‘It’s a situation that several supermarkets have helped to create. By directing consumers to the “3 for £10” promotions, stores are hardly encouraging us to discover new wines. The wine industry’s own trade body, the Wine & Spirit Trade Association, has even criticised such “deals”, arguing that they stymie consumer education.’

But I’m not sure that supermarkets’ pressure to hit the lowest price points is really responsible in a fundamental way for perceptions of wine snobbery. After all, supermarkets have surely also remorselessly driven down the price of meat and beer (Guy’s two examples of segments not afflicted by perceptions of snobbery).

So why is wine a target, while meat and beer are not (or are much less so)? It can’t be as simple as supermarket pricing, the issue on which Guy’s article focuses pretty much exclusively.

Incidentally, I absolutely agree with everything Guy says about wine pricing in supermarkets. I just don’t think this is the root of wine’s problems with snobbery.

To which I think there are at least three major contributing factors he doesn’t mention.

Wine’s history

Historically, wine has been associated with privilege in a way that beer and decent meat have not (to anything like the same degree). I’m not saying this association is fair. I’m saying it exists. Powerfully. Not especially because wine was historically expensive, but more because it is associated with Oxbridge cellars, arcane drinking societies, aristocratic dinner parties — in a way that beer and decent meat are not.

That gives wine a hill to climb that others don’t have to contend with.

The lack of a ‘story’ for wine

People have been told a story that allows them to understand and relate to the benefits of spending more on better meat (and allows them unequivocally to feel good about doing so).

The story is that animals get to lead a better life. The customer is supporting a small farmer, not a big corporation. There’s a human touch. Local meat feels more connected to the customer. And so on.

Yeah, sure, the more expensive meat also tastes better. But that’s not actually the main thrust of the story. The emotional story of animal welfare, conservation and support of farmers is the more emotionally compelling factor. Even if it’s not always true or accurate.

Wine is not yet successfully and consistently broadcasting an emotional story that’s as good as this. It could. But it’s not. Notice that Naked Wines is making progress on this — getting customers to relate to wine stories, to see what being a small wine producer (and supporting those producers) actually means.

The relative weakness of wine advocacy

This links with the story argument, above — but goes further.

Neither the decent-meat lobby nor the beer industry persistently shoot themselves in the foot in the way that the wine industry does. I’ve written before about my belief that wine writing is too often insular and exclusive. If wine wants to shake off its snobbish stereotype, the industry needs to make a concerted effort to stop blathering on with terminology nobody understands and implying that there is a hierarchy of enjoyment of wine, the upper echelons of which are reserved for the cognoscenti.

I’m not saying there’s not a hierarchy of enjoyment of wine, incidentally. You may think there is. But implying this is powerfully alienating to people who feel like they’re far from cognoscenti.

Anyhow. Lots of the success of the decent-meat lobby is down to its use of charismatic, passionate advocates to put across its story in an immediate and accessible way: Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and all. People who are selling the lifestyle and the benefits, not just the product; who talk to their audience in language that is free of jargon, who seem like ‘one of us’. And, yes, people who have a very high profile.

Now, I realise it’s all very well for me to say ‘the wine world needs advocates like Jamie Oliver’ — when it’s not exactly easy to propel oneself into a position of that kind of influence. I’m not pretending the wine world can just create charismatic, popular advocates — like that. Nor am I saying, incidentally, that every single advocate that currently exists for wine is rubbish. Obviously that’s not the case.

Not one of the above three factors has a quick’n’easy solution.

What I am saying is that, combined, they are (in my view) hugely implicated in the allegations of snobbery with which wine is beset. And that whilst supermarket pricing may play its part, I’d say that the wine industry deludes itself enormously if it lets itself believe that this is the only — or even the principle — cause of its snobbery woes.

Naked Wines launches Marketplace. (Disruptive young scamps.)

In which Old Parn laboriously and digressively Deals The Scoop on a new marketplace venture by online wine retailer Naked Wines

Okay, so what’s Naked Wines up to?

A Naked Marketplace, that’s what.

Now, there comes a time when dignity and good sense tells you, ‘Stop right there, Parn. Don’t you think that enough easy, easy puns have been made using the ‘naked’ part of Naked Wines? What I’m trying to say, for the love of the risen lord, Parn, is this: DON’T FUCKING BEAT THAT ROTTING HORSE CARCAS ANY FURTHER. Yes, I know it’s a verbal open goal. But sometimes you just have to walk away from an easy open goal.’

That’s what good sense tells you. (Good sense, I might add, would be a shit premier league footballer.)

So. Yeah. Naked puns are cheap as dirt. I know this. But, come on. It’s a NAKED MARKETPLACE. Can’t I please just make one little innuendo?

No?

Fine. Be like that.

So I’ll be serious. Let’s see how much fun that is, eh? Soon, mark my words, you’ll be begging for more naked gags. Bitches.

(Here you see why Old Parn never got out of the starting gates in his early ambition to be a journalist. Because we’re SEVEN PARAGRAPHS IN and you still have no sodding clue what the story is. But we’re amongst friends, here, aren’t we? Besides, TRADITIONAL MEDIA IS DEAD, innit? Like that horse I mentioned, before.)

OKAY. So here’s the scoop. Naked Wines is launching a marketplace via which the customer can ‘bid’ for wines direct from the producer. Naked sits there (like Apple in the App Store — indeed, with nakedness and apples, this is all getting rather Edenic, don’t you think?) — simply providing (in theory) a forum within which these negotiations and purchases take place.

(Naked will take a 10% cut. Which is a good whack less than Apple, I might add.)

What does this actually mean? It means that producers can find a market without going through the usual channels of importers & retailers. Instead, they just go through Naked. Cutting out a bit of the middle-man (for argument’s sake, let’s say his torso and a bit of his pelvis). So — the idea is — savings for the customer and the producer.

Indeed, you could pursue my metaphor and imagine that the wine producer and consumer sit down together and good-naturedly get to know one another over a fine dinner made from the torso and pelvic meat of that unfortunate middle-man we mentioned earlier, with a side dish of beaten horse. All washed down, natch, with a glass of the red stuff.

(I imagine so, anyway. Though none of my wine books or resources suggest appropriate wine matches for either horse-pulp or human meat, so I can’t be sure.)

Now, there’s a bunch more info about this that I haven’t told you (no, no; instead, I’ve wasted your powers of concentration of images of pelvis-chewing and equine violence. Shame on me). Indeed, I have a very nice press release right here that Naked Wines’ very own Fran Krajewski disarmingly suggested I might like to take in order that I might ‘throw it into the bin later’.

Oh, Fran!

So — if only to give the lie to poor Fran’s pessimism — let me rattle through a bit more bumph about this Naked Marketplace.

In a way, think of it like Amazon Marketplace. Anyone can list something on there; Amazon brokers the deal. Because marketplace items may be either very scarce (not available via any other retailer) or bargainously cheap, the customer gets a bit of that thrill of the hunt, I suppose. Snapping up a good deal or a rare delight. Tracking down a virtual wildebeest, as it were, and dragging it back to the cave. (Um.)

So (with each paragraph, my natural affinity for an MBA course at a top business school becomes ever clearer) — the wine producer states an asking price for the wine. The customer can then either agree to pay that price, or can make a lower bid. Say, offering £8 for a wine priced at £10.

A bunch of other customers are all doing the same thing. So what we end up with is a reflection of what people are willing to pay for this wine. The producer can see this — and can make the decision as to the ultimate selling price, knowing exactly how much demand exists at that price point.

So hypothetical producer might choose to stick at a higher price for fewer sales, or go with the lower bids for more sales. Obv, dude. And, assuming the lower price is chosen, the customer gets her wine for less moolah.

I’ll be fascinated to see how this mechanism works in practice. At tonight’s demo (Rowan Gormley presenting to a packed room of wine bloggers), I couldn’t see much of the actual user interface (which I suspect will be key in rendering the whole process simple-seeming and unintimidating). But given Naked’s fairly decent record of simplicity and plain-talkin’, I hope this side of things will be well-managed.

But enough slathering and waffling. Get your bad arse on over to the Naked Marketplace and see for yourself. It’s launching tomorrow. Which is (by the time this is posted) ALREADY TODAY.

And that’s it. Not a naked pun (or, alas, even a naked nun) in sight.

I hope you’re happy.