Every time I go to a restaurant, nice or not, I look at the wine menu and there are all of these choices. Not being a connoisseur, it is always incredibly difficult to pick a glass of wine – ok I know when to pair with white or red, but I don’t know which grapes to pair with what food and what will a few extra bucks or a different country get me?
It’s almost an intractable problem (and I’m glad when there is a house wine), which got me thinking – why does it pose such a challenge? I guess I’m not educated enough but I don’t think I’m much less educated than your typical wine wannabe, so I’m sure other people have this problem! To go on a tangent for a sec, I am under the impression that specific years from specific wineries are good, so even if you knew a 2008 Gewurztraminer from a specific winery in NoTL was good, a restaurant probably wouldn’t have it in stock anymore! How do you know which wines on the menu are good? Are you supposed to have ever wine review memorized?
This problem got me thinking, in what other market is there so much (too much) choice for a consumer? The only one I could think of is the car industry. You can buy a compact, sedan, SUV, truck, convertible; from manufacturers like Toyota, Ford, GM, Chevrolet, KIA, etc. And then there are other distinguishing characteristics like colour, style, cost. But typically it’s not tough to figure out what car you want. Why is that? I can think of a couple of reasons:
- The price is usually the determining factor
- The feature set and comparables between each car is clear
- The manufacturers spend a lot of money on advertising and building up a brand if the car is available in your market.
With wine, I don’t think the first two points are differentiators, every glass is still within the $10 to $15 range and I don’t know enough (nor can I taste) the specific tones in the wines. I wonder whether the problem with wine could be solved if wineries did a lot more marketing. With the branding in the vehicle industry, I would never consider buying a car from a manufacturer in Chile or France (assuming they can be serviced properly once bought). If Inniskillin or Jackson Triggs bought advertisements on HNIC or Oprah, would consumers go into restaurants and just order glasses of wine by seeing their names? Certainly that would solve the problem that I have at restaurants.
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