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WINEMAKING Wine Consumer Breakdown 35% 15% 25% 25% Sweet Hyper-Sensitive Sensitive Tolerant Source: Tim Hanni I decided to check this one out myself, so I gave Posert a call, and here's what he said: "When I came out here in 1965 to work for Wine Institute, we were all being trained to like dry wine. It didn't suit me; I liked sweet- er wines. I was told I must not have enough taste buds, or I was from the South and used to Coca-Cola, or that it was just a question of time and I would learn, my palate would become educated. "Decades passed. "No one was ever able to explain to me why a person who had been at as many tastings as I had couldn't like big, tannic wines. So, I gave up thinking about it. Then I took Tim's test, which showed I had a sweet palate. It was like therapy. It's not my fault; the industry should change for me." Much of Posert's career was with the Robert Mondavi Winery and its spin-offs like Opus One. Of his former boss, Posert says, "Robert was a great salesman, and Napa is a great place to make wine, and he made Napa famous. But he made it famous for the kind of wines he liked to drink." But can you sell it? Posert and I had fun speculating about what might have happened if the man who made Napa famous hadn't been Mondavi but My- ron Nightingale, the great Beringer winemaker of the 1970s and 1980s, a man with a pronounced sweet tooth and a sweet wine named after him still in production at the winery. But that's not what happened. The really unknown part of the case for sweet wines isn't the physiology, or the consumer polling data, or the historical record. It's whether a significant portion of the wine industry can be con- vinced to make a bet on sweet wine—even a tenth of the bet cur- rently placed on big reds—and whether sweet wine consumers— now stuck with drinking White Zin out of paper bags so no one will notice—would really shell out money for higher priced, aspi- rational sweet wines. Hanni thinks they would, citing the fact that for centuries peo- ple did just that, as well as observing that lots of people are happy to pay extra for sweet in other contexts—an extra buck or two for flavor additives in coffee, or $12 appletinis. Plenty of others in the industry have their doubts about whether either producers or consumers are likely to change their ways, no matter how many surveys say they should. Pour yourself a glass of Riesling, and stay tuned. Tim Patterson is the author of Home Winemaking for Dummies. He writes about wine and makes his own in Berkeley, Calif. Years of experi- ence as a journalist, combined with a contrarian streak, make him in- terested in getting to the bottom of wine stories, casting a critical eye on conventional wisdom in the process. To share a comment about this article, e-mail edit@winesandvines.com. Wines & Vines MARCH 2011 59