2005 Wine Trends…Who Drives them?
Paul Greggut is a longtime, experienced wine writer from Seattle. His wine column appears in the Seattle Times. Paul has come up with an interesting list of wine trends for 2005
I find two of his predictions very interesting and I hope he’s right about them:
-A trend change toward lower percentages of alcohol in dry table wines.
-Renewed consumer interest in un-oaked, food-friendly white wines.
There is an interesting question connected with this issue. Who drives trends in the wine industry? Is it the consumer who drives the move toward lower alcohol wines and less oak in wine? Or is it the trade…meaning winemakers who decided it’s time to try something different? Chicken or the egg? Who’s the chicken and whose the egg here?
Anyway, my answer, which is not very exciting, is both. I think it’s a combination of forward thinking winemakers and the high-end wine drinkers who move trends forward. The unoaked trend for example is something that will be pushed mainly by winemakers and to a degree the press. They do this for their own satisfaction and because they get an inkling from what they are hearing from their best customers and other wine drinkers that such a wine will be welcomed. The snowball builds from there.
I’m hoping the snowball for unoaked, lower alcohol wines gets bigger and bigger as Paul suggests it might
Paul Greggut is a visionary!