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Inquiring Winemaker TIM P A T TERSON Big, Dry Reds: Just a Fad? Highlights T he big, extracted, tannic, alcoholic, dry reds that rule the wine world have been called many things by their detractors: awkward, clumsy, overblown, freakish, flammable, undrinkable. But the cruelest cut of all may be simply to note that in the grand historical sweep of things, they're just a passing fancy. That's only one of the implications of the latest salvo from Tim Hanni, a master of wine and longtime nemesis of conventional wine wisdom. Hanni has been known to get up before an audience of wine educators and open with, "The biggest threat to the wine industry today is—wine education!" This time he's brandishing a fistful of consumer research studies that suggest there's a huge potential market of folks out there who would love to drink sweet wines—if only the industry had enough sense to offer them. Vinters_GrapePress_Jun09.qxp 5/8/09 11:47 AM Page 1 BUY YOUR NEXT GRAPE PRESS MEMBRANE FROM A COMPANY THAT KNOWS PRESSES! • Wine consultant Tim Hanni has released research suggesting that the wine industry is making a big mistake by ignoring sweet wine drinkers. • Hanni and other researchers have identified physiological and behavioral differences among wine drinkers that run counter to the current emphasis on dry red wines. • While sweet wines dominated wine drinking for hundreds of years, it is unclear whether producers or consumers are prepared to turn things around today. While Hanni is perfectly happy to climb out on a limb by himself, this time he's hardly alone, as a recent one-day symposium about sweet wines at the University of California, Davis, indicated. (See "The Case for More Sweet Wine" at winesandvines.com.) The tenor of the day was captured with the title of the opening talk by Darrell Corti, one of the country's leading authorities on fine wine traditions, "Sweet Wines: The Finest Wines in the World?" Vintners Supply Company has been supplying replacement wine press membranes since 1996. Our membranes are manufactured in Germany by technicians with years of experience in manufacturing and servicing grape presses.We stock replacement membranes for most any make and model of grape press. Please contact us for a no obligation quote. If we do not have it, we can make it! Consumer phenotypes and industry prejudices For years, Hanni's mantra has been that the wine industry should put consumers and their preferences at the center of their outlook, rather than adopting arbitrary definitions of good and bad wines and figuring out how to convince consumers to get with the pro- gram. For the past two years, Hanni has been working with Dr. Virginia Utermohlen, a researcher at the Cornell University Taste Science Laboratory, on a long-term study of wine consumer at- titudes, behavior and physiology. Their preliminary findings were issued in a report in December, both a $500 version with lots of juicy details and a free summary available at timhanni.com. The study made use of online survey data from 1,200 wine drink- Toll Free: 800-366-6809 • Fax: 707-584-7955 E-mail: membranes@vintnerssupply.com www.vintnerssupply.com St. Helena, CA 94574-0153 P.O. Box 153 56 Wines & Vines MARCH 201 1 ers responding not only to questions about wine preferences but about how people take their coffee, if they drink it at all, how much salt they like on their food, and so on. Previous work by numerous researchers has shown a strong correlation between these simple food and beverage preferences and human taste bud physiology: The black coffee crowd, for example, with its tolerance for bitter- ness, tends to have fewer, smaller and less sensitive taste buds than