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Posts Tagged ‘Rosé wine’

At Classic Wine Direct we’re pretty upfront about what we do – we can’t compete with supermarkets on price so we offer wines from off the beaten track instead. We believe that these wines are more interesting and quite simply, tastier. However, it can be difficult for wine drinkers to understand the true value of a wine.

Back in 2006, Jean-Manuel Spriet, the then chief executive of Pernod Ricard UK, sent shockwaves through the wine trade by admitting that many of the “half price” wine deals in supermarkets were actually a rip-off.

The fact that a leading player in the wine business had admitted that consumers were being conned caused many a raised eyebrow.

half price deals are not in fact deals at all according to Spiret. Put simply, a bottle reduced from £7.99 to £3.wines are more likely to be worth £3.99.99 in the first place.

they mark up wines at selected regional outlets for a short period to cover them legally then mark it down. wine customers will believe they are getting a bargain price. Confused? the general idea is.

the wine industry is believe the main wine drinker is obsessed with the £3.99 price tag.the cheap price to customers affects the ways the suppliers are producing their wines.

Spiret thinks consumers know they are getting misled and they get use to it. this leads to the wine trade not havng any money.

Spiret’s gives us an inside view of the true tricks in which wine is sold by the big retailers. More worryingly it gives us an insight into what the big retailers really view their customers to be, namely lazy and ignorant.

the wine industry is not the only industry where these marketing practices happen.

two thirds of the wine sales are taken up by the supermarkets.

If the regular wine drinker believes that he is getting £7.99 of value from a £3.99 bottle then it follows that it will be much harder for the independent wine retailer to sell something whose real value is (and always was) £7.99.

There is, of course, no end in sight to this type of price fraud – the subjectivity of a wine’s value leaves this particular sector open to all sorts of underhand practices.

However, if the political mood continues to be against discount selling for alcohol, it will be interesting to see how the big retailers find a real price for wines they have knowingly mis-sold for the last 10 years.

When red and white wine sales are steadily dwindling around Europe, what could the answer be? The EU says we can mix them together to make rosé.

Rosé wine has been produced for decades all around the world and there are a number of different ways to produce it, all of which take great care and refined processes. The most common way is to follow the “nobler” tradition of crushing red grapes and bleeding the red colouring, or tannin, from the mixture before it can stain into the wine. This produces a lovely rose-coloured appearance and a light glow.

Brussels have had another idea for making the very popular rosé wine and it is a little more crude. They have put forward a proposition to make the wine by taking white wine (around 95%) and mixing in a little red wine until the mixture takes on a pinkish look. On April 27th a draft EU plan will be put to a final vote and would allow the new type of wine to be produced and sold anywhere in Europe

Wine makers in Provence, where the majority of France’s rosé wine is currently made are outraged. Many of them feel that the producers of red and white wine in Europe are selling out since white wine sales have been overtaken by rosé in France. It is easy to see why people would want to be in the business of selling rosé wine at the moment as its popularity is at an all time high. Rosé wine rack up a figure of 22% of total wine sales in France currently.

Experts however believe that the new blended wine will not catch on in the way producers hope. Most suggest that rosé wine has earned it’s subtle flavours and distinctive qualities through painstaking experimenting and developing of advanced methods. Fake rosé cannot match these standards they suggest