Consumers are put off by “global warming wines”

Can we tell if glob­al warm­ing is good or bad news for the wine business? 

Éric Giraud-Héraud. Not really, no. But in order to answer cor­rectly we need to put things into con­text. If we look at the cur­rent mar­ket, glob­al con­sump­tion is stable – even on the rise. Yet this tend­ency does not bene­fit every­one. Bor­deaux wines are an example of an eco­nom­ic crisis, partly explained by a change in what con­sumers want and the choice of products on the market. 

Indeed, we have noted a struc­tur­al change in red wines for sev­er­al years. We see an increase in alco­hol con­tent, decrease in acid­ity and degrad­a­tion of aro­mat­ic com­plex­ity. In addi­tion, wines are often more con­cen­trated and dom­in­ated by aromas of stewed fruits. 

We showed that this does not meet the expect­a­tions of con­sumers of Bor­deaux wines. Yet over the past dec­ade, pres­sure from wine-spe­cial­ised con­sult­ants and oth­er short-sighted advisors, many wine­makers opted to con­cen­trate their wines and arti­fi­cially increase the degree of alco­hol when they didn’t need to, yet. This move­ment was fur­ther amp­li­fied by what we call wine “park­er­isa­tion”– named after the Amer­ic­an wine crit­ic Robert Parker. 

In the end, though, the demand is dif­fer­ent. As it turns out, wines which pre­ma­turely mim­ic the effects glob­al warm­ing are no longer in demand and the eco­nom­ic risk of such decisions is already kick­ing in.

What is the impact of these developments? 

In 2015, we con­duc­ted an exper­i­ment­al study with 250 con­sumers to try to under­stand what was hap­pen­ing. By using the meth­od­o­logy of exper­i­ment­al mar­kets, we meas­ured con­sumer will­ing­ness to pay for a wine in dif­fer­ent, con­trolled situ­ations (related to wines and their labels). Put simply, we invited a large num­ber of con­sumers rep­res­ent­at­ive of a pop­u­la­tion. They were asked to “reveal” their will­ing­ness to pay for each pre-selec­ted wine. To avoid bias, the wine was ran­domly drawn in a bal­lot box and if its cost was lower than the price the con­sumer was will­ing to pay, then he or she agreed to buy the wine in ques­tion. We per­formed this exper­i­ment with a well-known wine from Bor­deaux. The main grape vari­ety of this AOC is Mer­lot, which is vari­ety strongly affected by glob­al warming.

What were the res­ults of this study?

The study was car­ried out in two stages. First, with experts in sens­ory ana­lys­is of the ISVV, we selec­ted 30 wines before keep­ing only three of them (I am not at liberty to reveal their names). Then, 250 con­sumers were recruited to test the selec­ted wines (col­our, odour, taste) before reveal­ing their final willingness-to-pay. 

• Wine A: a tra­di­tion­al wine of the AOC. Even though it had the low­est mar­ket price, it had a good com­plex­ity, and low alco­hol con­tent of 13.5%. 
• Wine B: a wine regarded as a “glob­al warm­ing wine”, which is con­cen­trated, pro­duced with low yield, and con­tains 15% alcohol.
• Wine C: an inter­me­di­ary between A and B on the range of all the characteristics.

Res­ults: con­sumers were will­ing to pay sig­ni­fic­antly high­er prices for wine B than wine A. Wine C came out some­where in the middle (which was not clear at first). There­fore, the only pos­sible inter­pret­a­tion was that the con­sumers pre­ferred con­cen­trated wines with high­er alco­hol con­tent, and thus that con­sumers prefer “glob­al warm­ing wines”!

Were you sure of your conclusions? 

No. We thought that there might be a “flat­ter­ing” effect to this wine B and that we needed to test what we call “pref­er­ence sta­bil­ity”. This would mean that the con­sumers took pleas­ure in drink­ing this type of wine at the time of the exper­i­ment, but that over time this demand might change. We there­fore moved on to the second stage of the exper­i­ment. We gave wines A and B to the con­sumers and asked them to taste these on four dif­fer­ent occa­sions dur­ing one week­end, i.e., twice per day. Then, without giv­ing fur­ther inform­a­tion, we told them to come back and see us to reveal again their will­ing­ness-to-pay for wines A, B and C. The res­ult is as fol­lows: the will­ing­ness-to-pay for wine B col­lapsed while the price for wine A stayed the same. Wine C kept its inter­me­di­ary pos­i­tion, with a slight decline in will­ing­ness-to-pay. We thus observed that con­sumers grew weary of wine B, which more or less gives some idea of the con­sequences of glob­al warm­ing on Bor­deaux wines if we are not careful.

What com­mer­cial con­clu­sions can we draw from this exper­i­ment? 

In 2015, there­fore, we man­aged to meas­ure and char­ac­ter­ise the eco­nom­ic risk that glob­al warm­ing can rep­res­ent: con­sumers grew weary of char­ac­ter­ist­ics and no longer sought them. This effect is sys­tem­at­ic­ally neg­lected by pro­fes­sion­als in the wine sec­tor because they make snap judge­ments, or even naïve decisions. We would need to per­form this exper­i­ment again with oth­er wines and pop­u­la­tions to sup­port our con­clu­sions; but by using only one exper­i­ment­al mar­ket we did nev­er­the­less show that (for this type of wine, at least), con­sumers do not neces­sar­ily demand a high degree in alco­hol, con­cen­tra­tion and con­sist­ency. The past dec­ade has con­firmed this through the mar­ket crisis for some red wines, the rise of rosé wines, and the devel­op­ment of com­pletely new mar­kets such as organ­ic wine, or alco­hol-free alternatives. 

Wine­makers must there­fore devel­op the taste of their wines by draw­ing inspir­a­tion from research stud­ies and innov­a­tions in the field of oen­o­logy if they want to win back their markets.