(Republic of) Georgia on my mind: Wine tourism’s future in the “Cradle of Wine”

August 30, 2016 By Mike Veseth in emerging wine regions, extreme wine, globalization, Russia wine market, wine, wine history, wine tourism 8 Comments

In a few days Sue and I will be jetting off to the Republic of Georgia for the first United Nations World Tourism Organization Global Conference on Wine Tourism.We have been trying to learn all we can about Georgia and its wine and wine tourism industries in preparation for the trip. I thought you might be interested in three of the resources we have found especially useful.

Taber’s Final Frontier

George Taber spent the best part of a year circling the globe collecting wine tourism experiences that he chronicled in an entertaining 2009 book called In Search of Bacchus. Most of the places Taber visited would be on any globetrotter’s wine tourism map — Burgundy, Bordeaux, Tuscany and so on — and his reporting and first person accounts are very interesting. Taber waited until the final chapter to veer off the conventional road map to visit Georgia, which he calls wine’s “final frontier.”

Taber had a great time in Georgia, the “Cradle of Wine,” 8000 vintages and counting. He loved the people and culture and was fascinated by the wine, reporting on the traditional wine-making process using big clay jars called Qvervi (which are buried in the earth as shown below) to ferment and store the wine until ready to drink.

Taber comments on consumption patterns as do most who write about Georgian wine. A rule of thumb, he notes, is to allow for two or three liters of wine per person at a supra banquet or celebration, where tradition requires that guests drain their glasses after each toast.

When celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain visited Georgia (see video above) he also cited high alcohol consumption and complained of frequent hangovers, although this might be Bourdain being Bourdain as much as Georgian tradition. I will let you know what I find out.

Wine Tourism as Economic Development

My wine economics colleague Kym Anderson visited Georgia a few years after Taber to analyze the wine industry’s potential as an engine of economic development. His 2012 report, Georgia, Cradle of Wine: the next “new” wine exporting country? (pdf), makes good reading.

Anderson found the wine market quite segmented. Most of the large domestic demand was satisfied by basic traditional wines, a surprisingly large proportion being home-produced. Industrial production of wine for export to former Soviet countries made up a second market segment. Rising quantities of wine are made for export to other markets (including US, Canada, UK, etc), where quality expectations are different than the Russian market and production adjustments necessary.

A recent report lists Georgia’s five largest export markets as Russia, Ukraine, China, Kazakhstan and Poland although there have been substantial sales increases (albeit from a low base) to Germany, the UK, and Canada.

Anderson clearly sees potential for Georgian wine exports if industrial and agricultural upgrading continues, but he is especially interested in wine tourism, which he sees having potentially greater impact on rural incomes and employment. Georgia’s decision to host the UNWTO program is consistent with this priority. International tourism is an important income source for Georgia and wine tourism has growth potential.

Anderson makes a number of specific recommendations for upgrading hospitality and winery facilities to make them more appealing to wine tourists. We will be interested to see what progress has been made in this regard in the short time since Anderson’s report.

Back to the Future of Wine

Natural wine proponent Alice Feiring seems to have found her “tribe” in Georgia. Her 2016 book For the Love of Wine is an entertaining, informative and deeply personal account of her encounters with Georgia wine and wine-makers.

Feiring is taken by the naturalness of the Qvervi wine-making process and the dedication of those who kept this tradition alive during the long Soviet wine winter. Whereas Anderson’s concern is economic development, Feiring worries more about the soul. She sees Georgia’s past as a path to a better, more soulful future.

But she worries these traditional wines are threatened by a new foe — those US, UK, and EU markets that seem to demand “me too” wines made in an international style with lots of additives and manipulation. For Feiring, Russian communism and international capitalism are “twins separated at birth” in the sense that each destroys the essence of wine in its own way.

Feiring’s mission is to support those who seek to make high quality traditional wines. But there are problems. The Georgian domestic market for such wines with their necessarily higher price compared with home production is not large enough to support the craft industry, which means that buyers must be found in other countries.

Feiring’s tribe needs to grow to support the wines she treasures. The natural wine movement is growing in part due to her determined efforts. Perhaps wine tourism will convert visitors to natural wine (and Georgian wine) ambassadors.

That is a sip of what I’m learning and a hint of the sorts of questions we hope to explore. Georgia is definitely on my mind!

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We appreciate everyone who helped us prepare for this trip including the officials and staff at the UNWTO and the Georgia National Tourist Administration plus Mariam Anderson, Prof. Kym Anderson, Nino Turashvili, Viktoria Koberidze, Irakli Cholobargia, George Akhalkatsi, and Hermes Navarro del Valle.

A Sneaky Preview of a Work in Progress: “Around the World in Eighty Wines”

August 23, 2016 By Mike Veseth in globalization, Shameless Self-Promotion 6 Comments

80days I am busy working on the third draft of my next book, which will be released at about this time next year (lots of work left to do!). It is called Around the World in Eighty Wines and I am sure you have already guessed that it is inspired by the famous Jules Verne adventure story.

It is too soon for details, but I thought I would tease you just a bit with a pair of maps. The first map (above) is my lame attempt to plot out the route of Jules Vernes’ hero Phileas Fogg. He started in London and worked his way from east to west around the world and back to London again.

My quest, which also starts in London, is to travel the world in eighty wines, not eighty days. Each individual wine needs to represent something important about wine and the places and people and cultures that produce wine. Since there are thousands of wines in the world, you might think this is an easy task. But you would be wrong (or at least that’s the premise of the book).

Telling the story of wine and its world with just eighty bottles — that’s insane. But I think it will be fun and I promise that the readers who come with me for the ride will find much to learn, love and laugh about along with (as in the Jules Verne story) some inevitable challenges and confounding frustrations.

80wines This map (above) is my obviously amateur attempt to plot out the route that my book seems to be taking us (books have minds of their own — sometimes it is the story not the author who calls the shots).

If you compare the two maps you will see that circumnavigating with eighty wines is obviously much more difficult than doing it in eighty days. Just look at how much more complicated our route is than Phileas Fogg’s!

My maps are terrible, but that’s OK with me because I don’t want to give away too much just yet. Maybe you can guess where the journey will take us and perhaps you can even channel some of the wines. But I guarantee some surprises even for the most clairvoyant readers!

Where would you go on this adventure? Which wines would you choose to fill the eighty spots in your wine case? What fun we will have together finding the answers and the wines to go with them!

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BBC presenter Michael Palin took on the 80 day version of this challenge in 1989. Here’s a snippet of the 7-part television series that recorded his adventures. Enjoy!

Judge & Jury Paradox: What Can Jury Duty Teach Us About Wine Markets?

August 9, 2016 By Mike Veseth in wine, wine awards, Wine Competitions 1 Comment

jury I am out of the office for a week or two on jury duty and the experience has unexpectedly reminded me of some important things about the world of wine.

A Jury Duty Paradox

I didn’t hesitate for a moment when the jury service summons arrived. I can find the time right now and besides it is a civic duty. I am not an expert on the law but that doesn’t seem to matter.

The idea of a jury trial is that the experts make their case and try to convince ordinary citizens like me that they are right. Some cases are decided by experts — the Supreme Court, for example, is both judge and jury for the cases that come before it — but most justice starts (and often ends) with the judgment of a jury of peers.

I think it is a bit of a paradox, however, that I accepted the jury duty quickly but, about the same time, I declined an invitation to be on a different kind of jury — a jury of judges for an important regional wine competition. Thanks, I replied, but I am a self-taught taster and inexperienced with these particular wines. This is a job for experts, not someone like me.

Each of these decisions makes sense on its own, but they are a bit puzzling when you put them together.Objectively, I might actually be better qualified to judge wine than a legal case. But for some reason I applied different standards in the two situations.

Why do I seem to believe that specialized knowledge is needed to serve on a large wine judging panel (where the stakes are actually very low), but expertise is not required for duty on a civil or criminal court jury where with potentially significant consequences? Seems like I’ve got my priorities backwards, doesn’t it?

The Jury of Public Opinion

But then I realized that I was missing something. Wine is actually a lot like the judicial system. While there are a few wine market cases that are decided mainly by the “Supreme Court” of experts (here I am thinking of the role of big-name critics in the en primeur market, for example), it is really the supply and demand “jury of peers” who render most verdicts.

At the end of the day for most wines, it is what the buying public thinks that matters more than the experts’ judgement. Is this a good thing? It is easy to point out that citizen juries have some disadvantages compared with expert panels, but there are advantages, too. It is important that arguments are persuasive enough to sway unbiased citizen peers. It sort of keeps us all honest, if you know what I mean.

In the same way, it is a good thing that critics don’t always reign supreme when it comes to wine markets and that most of us take their expert wine advice with a grain of salt. Wine’s most important job is to give us pleasure, as Jancis Robinson has said, and we amateurs are ourselves the best judge of that.

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(Did you notice the sneaky way I used Jancis Robinson as a kind of “expert witness” in the last paragraph?) The Wine Economist will take a brief recess until my court duties are complete. In the meantime, here’s a “judge and jury” scene from Eric Idle’s fun London Mikado production. Enjoy!

When Will Wines from Asia Hit U.S. Shelves? (Hint: They’re Already Here!)

August 2, 2016 By Mike Veseth in emerging wine regions, India, wine, wine magazines, wine markets 1 Comment

chinasale Most people are surprised when I talk about the growing wine industry in Asia. In working on my next book Around the World in Eighty Wines I have sampled interesting wines from China, India, Thailand, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and even Bali. And I know there are more out there waiting to be discovered.

Why are people so surprised? Stereotypes are part of the answer — wine isn’t part of the way that we usually think of these countries. But availability is also important. We understand that wine is made in far-away New Zealand because we see it on store shelves. When will Asia wine arrive in the U.S. market?

Flying Below the Radar?

Asian wines are a little more visible in Europe and the U.K. Reports from Paris suggest that Chinese wines can be found in many places (perhaps reflecting in some way the boom in Chinese investment in Bordeaux) and Berry Bros. & Rudd, the London wine seller, proudly advertises its commitment to Chinese wine offerings. Sue and I enjoyed some lovely Thai wines from Monsoon Valley on our last visit there to London, too.

Asia wines are pretty much flying below the radar in the U.S., but they are here if you know where to look. I found a nice Korean raspberry wine at one local Asian market, for example, and a Chinese wine — a Changyu Cabernet — at another. A brand of Chinese wines crafted specifically for the U.S. market appeared a few years ago and made a bit of a splash, but now Dragon’s Hollow wines seem to be hard to find.

Not Sherlock Holmes
sula-sauvignon-blanc-premium-white-wine

You won’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to find wines from India if Rajeev Samant has his way. Samant is founder and CEO of Sula Vineyards and his wines are not just here, but are getting a good deal of attention. They were featured in the May 2016 issue of Wine Enthusiast magazine, for example. The Sula Dindori Reserve Shiraz was named an Editors’ Choice and the Sula Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc and Shiraz all received ‘Best Buy’ recommendations.

Wine was probably not high on priorities when Samant was growing up in Mumbai, but things changed when he came to the United States to attend Stanford University and work for a while in Silicon Valley. Visits to Napa Valley and wineries like Robert Mondavi left their mark.

Coming home to India, Samant accepted the challenge of reviving a family farm near Nashik. He cast about for crops that would provide higher margins and wondered if wine grapes might thrive. With help from a California flying winemaker, he learned tropical viticulture and made the necessary winery investments.

The rest, as they say, is history, but that phrase doesn’t begin to capture the challenges that Samant has faced and overcome over the last 20 years. Sula is today India’s largest winery, with capacity to both service the growing India domestic market and also make targeted export sales.

The Mondavi of Mumbai

The Stanford University alumni magazine published an article about Samant a few years ago, calling him the “Mondavi of Mumbai,” a reference to Robert Mondavi, who was also a Stanford graduate. It was a bit of journalistic hyperbole then, but the title is not without merit today. tasting1

Samant seems to have followed the Mondavi blueprint in many ways, both in breaking new ground in wine production and promoting his products and the region through wine tourism. The Sula Vineyard winery includes attractive hospitality facilities and hosts concerts and festivals, too.

The operation is world class. Or at least that’s what the experts at The Drinks Business believe — they presented Sula with the prize for Best Contribution to Wine and Spirits Tourism at their London awards ceremony in May.

Once the Novelty Wears Off …

The thing about wines from unexpected places is this. People will try them once just for the fun of it, but the quality and value have to be there to earn a repeat sale. Sue and I have had an opportunity to taste the Sula lineup and we think the wines pass the test.

No one comes to this URL looking for tasting notes or point scores, so I won’t give any, but the Sauvignon Blanc was particularly noteworthy. It managed to walk a fine line. It was made in an international style — clean, crisp, balanced — but it had its own character, with a rather nice finish that wasn’t Marlborough or Napa or anywhere except Nashik. Not a me-too wine, if you know what I mean, and therefore a good addition to the wine shelf.

Sula isn’t the first wine from Asia to arrive on these shores and I expect we will see more and more of them now, especially if (as I worried in a previous column) the recent UK Brexit vote makes London a less desirable wine market and more of these wines are directed our way. If that’s what happens, I guess London’s loss is our gain.

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This brief video does a good job telling the Sula story. Watch it — I think you will be surprised!