Do Consumers Have a Natural Knowledge of Wine Quality?
Posted on Mon 13th Jul 2015 at 14:40
Do you ever wonder how much your customers know about wine, and how likely they are to appreciate what you sell them?
Research detailed in a recent edition of Harpers suggests that members of the public are just as likely to pinpoint good wines, and reject bad ones, as seasoned experts. Writing about research he conducted in Australia, Steve Charters from Burgundy’s School of Wines & Spirits Business describes how the experiment asked respondents to rank a series of unknown wines out of 20. The wines were from an unknown region and it was only after the experiment that expert and public opinions were compared - so it’s unlikely the non-experts would have tried to modify their behaviour to impress the others. The results are extremely interesting. In essence, the consumers had the same reaction to wines that the experts do - both teams liked and disliked the same wines. The chief difference was that the experts gave higher and lower scores, whereas there was a smaller differentiation in point score between wines consumers like and wines they did not. As Charters notes: “Consumers can quite easily spot poor quality or faulty wines. Where they have problems - and probably taste less confidently - is in distinguishing between acceptable, good, very good and outstanding wines”. Nevertheless, the fact that consumers can identify the same qualities in wine that experts can should give hope to all retailers. If you can gain a reputation for consistently providing good quality wines, and build on this by providing the education needed to deepen consumers’ appreciation of what’s good, then you will form a lasting relationship with happy customers. In store tastings are a great way to begin this journey, why not contact specialist Macedonian wine importer Signature Wines to discuss bringing the unique flavours of Macedonian wine to your audience?