An organic rant
A discussion gives me a headache and makes me very angry. By Kate
I had another out of body moment this week. Not caused by an onslaught of numbers discussed in a foreign language as described in a previous blog, but there were unintelligible words being spoken all the same.
I do not often find myself at round table discussions concerning the wine trade mostly because I do my utmost to avoid them. Every now and then I get a pang though and thoughts along the lines of “ I really should” start to hover, resulting in an acceptance of an invitation. Shortly followed by exasperation and gloom.
I accepted the latest invitation because the topic was wines of Chile and I am making a concerted effort to find the best available in that country (along with its neighbour Argentina South America is much harder work than on any other continent, in my experience.
So there I was, on Friday morning, flustered and out of sorts anyway (thank you Bakerloo line for being closed for essential maintenance and thank you too, gas works, meaning that roads are arteries of agony) as I was very late, walking into a room where people were speaking jargon gibberish.
This was very much a discussion of the business of wine; wine as a commodity and the free market where, thanks to the strength of the multiple retailers, the public now, on the whole, believe it is their inalienable right to drink wine that can be bought for under £5 a bottle. To be fair to the discussion, no-one round the table was happy with this situation but the indignation of some was rather droll given their part, during the boom years, in the ‘sell, sell, sell’ at any cost madness.
At the height of the frenzy producers were selling below cost just to get a listing with big supermarkets and all sorts of corners were cut in efforts to slash wine production costs. The intrinsic quality of the wine and the true cost of such wide-scale and irresponsible production – when measured in terms of impact on the environment and on wine drinkers - were never discussed. There is still not much discussion on the subject.
The wine business is watching, with dismay, as rising production costs (which will keep rising. This is the world we live in now and the only way, when it comes to prices, is up) mean a falling away of business. What did they expect? When you have built your market on bargain basement prices alone, you have done nothing to encourage loyalty or understanding of what the product is. When those prices are no longer bargain basement, you simply no longer have a market. They have moved on to who ever is stupid or desperate enough to still try to play that game.
Everyone is now very sorry about all of this. Of course they are. Yet there were still one or two there who were contemptuous of my comments concerning organic and biodynamic wines, at which point I felt myself start to float away from my body and found I was looking down on the proceedings, thinking “what the fuck am I doing here? This is not my world”.
I think we run a very simple business. We look for wines that we love passionately. We feel this way about them because we know they are made in a way which benefits instead of harms the environment. We know that, alcohol aside, they are not stuffed with toxic residues. And they taste, we believe, sublime. When we find these, we list them.
Then we do the very hard, never ending task of selling them. As all food or drink in the most ideal of worlds should be sold. By doing the sheer graft involved in educating people so that they understand why something costs more and they know how to taste the difference.
We do not desperately chase a perception of what we think the market wants and then pander it to frantically. If humanity is to be bundled up in that term and treated like fractious infants (quick! The Market is very unhappy and they want overly confected wine at £4 a bottle right now or they will scream and scream and drink Barcardi Breezer instead!) then really, doesn’t any business which does so deserve everything coming to them? And its coming. Make no mistake.
There were assertions that ‘my customers are not interested at all in organic wine.” Better yet, “my customers are very against organic wine”. Frankly, if that is the case, as a retailer you are failing miserably. You are failing to do the work involved in finding the now thousands of organic wines available which are delicious. Deeply delicious. Whereas even a decade ago, many which were organic were pretty poor, there are now a very happy host of great examples to chose from.
You are also failing to even begin to properly educate your customers. What earthly reason would anyone have for being ‘against organic wine’? If they truly are then they are deeply ignorant and if you run the place that they go to buy their wine then that is your responsibility.
I don’t know if Green & Blue will stand the test of time and it is definitely too soon to say whether or not our dream of a small chain will ever be realised or indeed possible. We will stand or fall on the premise describe above though. The world is changing. How and what we eat and drink is changing and will continue to change profoundly in the future. Which is tomorrow. And the day after that and the day after that.
I don’t know if it is good for me or merely disgustingly depressing to put myself round a table to discuss such things. I feel generally that it is a total waste of my energy trying to persuade certain members of the trade of the value of my ideas. I am really not interested in their approval or their ridicule. As long as the people who matter, namely our customers, get it completely, then we are doing our job. And frankly, that is such a big, exhausting job I shoudn’t be wasting energy on anything else.
At the height of the frenzy producers were selling below cost just to get a listing with big supermarkets and all sorts of corners were cut in efforts to slash wine production costs. The intrinsic quality of the wine and the true cost of such wide-scale and irresponsible production – when measured in terms of impact on the environment and on wine drinkers - were never discussed. There is still not much discussion on the subject.
Then we do the very hard, never ending task of selling them. As all food or drink in the most ideal of worlds should be sold. By doing the sheer graft involved in educating people so that they understand why something costs more and they know how to taste the difference.
You are also failing to even begin to properly educate your customers. What earthly reason would anyone have for being ‘against organic wine’? If they truly are then they are deeply ignorant and if you run the place that they go to buy their wine then that is your responsibility.
