Malcolm Jolley: The comfort of familiar favourites—or the fun of finding new wines?

In 2017, Sainsbury’s, the big U.K. supermarket chain, replaced the bestselling Casillero del Diablo brand of red wines from Chile with a store brand called Camino del Angel with a label that suspiciously looked a lot like the brand from supplier Concha y Toro. Those suspicions were confirmed when, not long after, the supermarket stopped shelving the Concha y Toro wine altogether. And there was little doubt about what Sainsbury’s was up to when they launched a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc called Villetta that looked an awful lot like the market leader, Villa Maria.^{1It’s worth citing that I learned about Sainsbury’s wines and the connection with fast thinking from Episode 12 of Felicity Carter and Lulie Halstead’s podcast, A Question of Drinks.}

Apart from an insight into the ruthless world of supermarket marketing, Sainsbury’s derivative brands tell us a lot about how most consumers buy wine. First, they do it quickly, using what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman called “fast thinking,” based on instinct and emotion. They grab and go.

The Sainsbury’s ruse, assuming the intent was to fool consumers into believing they were buying the original brand instead of the similarly labelled store one, only works if the buyers aren’t spending much time scrutinizing the label. Alternatively, it’s entirely possible the derivative labelled didn’t need to fool consumers to be effective. Maybe it’s enough to simply signal, by use of colours and fonts, that the derivative brands are similar to the originals: if you like their brand X, then you’ll probably like our brand Y.

The Swedish-based wine marketer and Substack publisher Joe Fattorini explored a related idea recently in a post about the success of celebrity wines. He argues that consumers don’t like celebrity-endorsed wines because they think actors or rappers know anything about wine, but because they trust that the celebrities they like won’t put out a wine so terrible it might damage their reputation. They’re trying to avoid making a poor purchase rather than pursuing a good one.

This ties in and loops back to another of Kahneman’s concepts, developed earlier when he worked with long-time collaborator Amos Tversky: the familiarity heuristic. This is our cognitive bias towards the familiar and aversion to the strange. Big brands know it and use it to their advantage.

But what if you’re not a big brand? There are an estimated 100,000 wineries worldwide.

I thought about this last week when, through a series of random personal connections, Madame Constance Slaughter came to my kitchen table. As the chatelaine of Château de Mille in the south of France, she was in Toronto for an event put on by the Rhône Valley Wines and to investigate the market for exports.

Undaunted by the prospect of dealing with 13 different provincial and territorial alcohol commissions, Slaughter left my house with the intention of getting her family’s wines into some of Canada’s wine markets. I hope she does because the wine I tasted at the event was excellent.

If she does, then when I see the label of her wines, I will surely order them or take them from the shelf into my cart, as I do when I recognize a product made by someone or some people I have met. I will also likely write about her and her wines.

As a wine writer, I am as susceptible to bias as anyone.

As it turns out, before I met Constance Slaughter in Toronto, I could have tasted her wines a few weeks before when I was in Avignon. Château de Mille was present and pouring at the big Rhône Valley tasting at the Pope’s Palace. But, like a shopper glancing past unfamiliar wine labels, I never made it to their table.

I didn’t taste the Château de Mille wines, nor lots of other wines, when I was in France, because of a combination of general and specific reasons. First, it would have been in the Luberon appellation section, which is a sub-region of the Rhône that I am not that familiar with. If there was a producer there that I knew (as there is now), then maybe I would have been drawn to it, and after tried some of the wines at the neighbouring tables.

Second, most of the time I had on the floor was spent with either winemakers I knew personally, winemakers recommended to me by colleagues or the Canadian wine trade, or at the tables of brands I recognized as available in Canada. There were enough of these to more or less monopolize my time. Still, I worried that I was missing out on new discoveries.

The trouble was that when I did take a chance on an unfamiliar table, the wines could be disappointing. It was hard not to adopt an attitude like Joe Fattorini’s celebrity wine shopper and be motivated more by fear of wasting my time with an uninteresting flight of wines than by discovering something new and good. It was safer to stick to my list of known producers.

When I tasted unfamiliar wines, it was mostly in the context of structured tastings: seminars presented by an authority on the wines being poured. Of course, this was ultimately a case of outsourcing familiarity to the authority. As follows recommendation in a review.

The struggle of most of the estimated 100,000 wineries in the world is to find some way to make their wines familiar to as many consumers as they can. I am happy to be their proxy, though it turns out that getting my attention might be as difficult as anyone else’s. I will do my best to look beyond what’s safe and try to be familiar with as many new good wines and wine people as I can.

I have written that in the 21st century, one of wine’s great appeals is that it has to happen in real life. You can’t taste wine on a screen. It turns out that it’s better sold and bought in real life, too.