Some personal anecdotes

People do sometimes ask me about the other part of wine writing, since I usually write about data, rather than about wines themselves. Do I drink the stuff, and what do I think about it? Well, just for a change, I will write one post about it.

My wife and I do consume a bottle or two in most weeks, and we do visit wineries when we are on holiday (see From the sublime to the ridiculous in winery architecture). However, my wife is much better at wine tasting than I am — embarrassingly so. I have the theoretical knowledge, and she has the practical ability. This works well as a team; but I let her write the wine notes, these days.

I first learned about wine back in 1982. My girlfriend and I found out that down the road (in the Sydney suburb of Summer Hill) from our rented house was a wine shop, run by a guy named Bill Ireland (a wine retailer in various parts of Sydney from 1979 to 1996). He held tastings of new releases each Thursday evening; and so we became regulars on Thursdays (in those days, Thursday was late-night shopping, when shops stayed open until 9 pm). Bill then started doing special (paid) tastings on Saturdays, which we also attended. I learned as much as I could; and we also started visiting wineries within a day's drive of Sydney (in those days, that meant the Hunter Valley, to the north, and Mudgee, to the west).

Of course, I encountered the usual sorts of problems. For example, I would read a description of a wine and it would bear no connection at all to my own description. Wine writing can be piffle, as I have mentioned before (Are CellarTracker wine scores meaningful?). However, it is all we have as a means of communication, and it is thus not all meaningless. I first learned this at one of Bill's tastings. I had never smelled "chocolate" in a wine, even though the pundits sometimes mentioned it. Then, one day I picked up the bottle from which we were tasting, and sniffed the opening. "Milk chocolate" was the perfect description; and I have never forgotten that experience, in the 40 years since then.

But I still couldn't really get it from the glass. This told me that glasses can also be important, even though some pundits dismiss this idea. I have since found the same thing with some "port" glasses that I have. The contents never seemed to smell of much, and I eventually decided to try some new ones, from a different manufacturer. The difference was impressive, with a whole new world of smells becoming then available in the new glasses.

Bill himself was pretty impressive when it came to wine tasting. My favorite anecdote involves a wine from Bowen Estate (Coonawarra, South Australia). Bill used to tell fishing stories about the owner, Doug Bowen, so there was some familiarity. One day, I bought along a special bottle to a Saturday tasting, in lieu of paying. To our great surprise, Bill immediately identified the masked wine — maker, grape, and year (Bowen Estate Claret 1975); and he had never tasted the wine before!

He achieved this apparently remarkable feat by using both experience and deduction. He said that the wine reminded him of the only wine he had tasted of the first vintage from Bowen Estate — there were two reds (Cabernet sauvignon; and Shiraz-Cabernet = Claret), and he had tried the one but not the other. After tasting the masked wine, Bill remembered that he had previously told me this, and he figured that the wine I had brought along would be the missing one. So, it is important to remember your customers, as people!

I have only one anecdote of my own in similar style. I had always read about the smell of "sweaty saddle" in some wines, but had never experienced it. Then, one day, at dinner with a friend (the same one who had told me about Bill's shop in the first place), she asked me whether the wine she was going to serve "smelled okay". Well, one sniff told me that "well-used leather" was the perfect description for this wine's smell. This sweaty-saddle smell had always been described (by Len Evans, the doyen of Australian wine writers) as a characteristic of Shiraz wines from the Hunter Valley. I then remembered my friend telling me that the Hunter was her favorite wine excursion; and, of course, I expected that she would be serving me a special wine. So, I seized my opportunity. I put the glass down without even bothering to taste it, and said: "If it's an old Hunter Valley Shiraz, then it's fine." I then walked away, while she picked her jaw up off the floor. The visitor had got on the wine scoreboard first!

Lewis Perdue (Misinterpretation: Words = Big trouble) notes: "Whether we are aware of them or not, smells do connect to memories that can influence moods". He tells an anecdote about his own unfortunate association with "Almond paste and flying roaches", with which many of us will have empathy.

My own personal version does not involve wine, but involves strawberry flavored milk, instead, which I loved as a child, back in Australia. It was available for purchase in small containers at the school canteen, which I acquired often. Until, that is, my school class went on an overnight train trip from Sydney to Brisbane (1,000 km away), when I was about 11 or 12 years old. This was a slow and bumpy trip, lying in a sleeping berth. I made the mistake of consuming some milk before going to bed. I was queasy during the night; and I have never been able to stomach strawberry flavored milk, ever since. I had to switch to chocolate flavoring, which I still drink, to this day. (Mind you, the chocolate flavoring used here in Sweden is far too sweet to be really nice.)

By the way, Bill Ireland was an aspiring wine-maker of sorts. Even as a retailer, he would buy a few batches of bulk wine, bottle half of it and sell it to us (often under the name Bacchus Selection), and then use the proceeds to put the other half in oak for a while. He would then sell that second half to us at a bigger profit. He and his wife (always known as Noel) eventually purchased a half stake in Finders Bay winery (in Western Australia); and in 1995 they bought what was then Old Station Vineyard (planted in 1926 at Watervale, in the Clare valley, of South Australia), but which they renamed Fire Block in 2003. (See here; or you can use Google Translate to read this Swedish description.)

The wines for the latter are made under contract at the nearby O'Leary Walker winery; and you have never heard of Fire Block, because they are mainly sold locally. Imagine my surprise when, back in late 2007, I came across a 6-pack of Fire Block Old Vine Shiraz in a local liquor store here in Sweden. They were being imported by another expatriate Australian (through Antipodes Premium Wines), who still runs a wine import company (now called Vinoteket). Indeed, to this day Fire Block wines are available only in Australia and Denmark/Sweden (and sometimes Malaysia); and I acquire a suitable selection of each new vintage.

It is not everyone whose connection with their wine mentor still links after 40 years, and literally across two hemispheres! (Update: Bill occasionally contributes items to Australian Rural and Regional News.)

---

I also had the Bowen Estate Shiraz 2011 with dinner last night. These days, the wines are made by Doug's daughter, Emma (Bowen Estate Shiraz – a Coonawarra benchmark). They are not available in Sweden — I have to order them from the UK.

Ad Tracking by online wine shops is variable

In my previous post, I looked at the extent of Ad Tracking by several dozen websites, covering various parts of the wine industry (Some wine industry websites track their visitors egregiously). I found that only about one-fifth of the sites did no detectable tracking of visitors. More importantly, some sites had outrageous numbers of ad trackers and/or third-party cookies.

I suggested at the time that it might be equally revealing to look at online wine retailers; and that is what I do in this blog post.

As in the previous post, i have used the Blacklight Privacy Inspector to assess each of the nominated websites. This recently released tool is intended to let you find out who is tracking you when you visit their website (see: It’s easier than ever to find out how your favorite websites are tracking you). Blacklight checks for the presence of each of seven possible types of Ad Tracking technology on each site, which are described in detail in an online article (How we built a real-time privacy inspector).

I ran Blacklight across the website of each of the selected online wine sellers last week. These stores are a somewhat arbitrary collection of six dozen possibilities based in the USA (27), the UK (23) , or the European Union (22). Most of the non-US stores are ones I have used myself, at some time over the past decade or two. Sadly, I cannot check any wine retailing that is part of general food stores (such as Amazon, Aldi, Lidl, Costco or Trader Joe’s), because Blacklight checks the main home page of the website, rather than just the subpage specific to wine.

The table at the bottom of this post presents the results of my tests. The columns of the table present each of the seven Blacklight criteria, for each of the named websites (one per row). The first two criteria list the number of trackers encountered, while the other five columns indicate (Y=yes) that the site was detected carrying out the named tracking activity. A summary of Ad Tracking: the 3 main types & how to do it effectively will put you in the picture.

Only 8 / 72 (11%) of the websites were not detected doing any ad tracking at all; and congratulations to those one-ninth of the website owners. Sadly, none of these sites were based in the USA, with five being in the UK and three in the EU.

Indeed, in general, the US sites are doing much more tracking than the other locations. This may have more than a little to do with the much more stringent internet-privacy regulations that have been implemented in the European Union (of which the UK is still a part for the next couple of weeks). The EU collective General Data Protection Regulation differs notably from the state-based approach in the USA (eg. the California Consumer Privacy Act). Actually, the EU is intending to make things even harder in the near future (EU targets big tech in new proposals).

This is not to say, of course, that all US sites are equally bad, because they are obviously not. Indeed, 15 of the 27 sites (55%) were not doing a great deal of tracking; and two sites actually had only one Ad Tracker, while one site had only one Third Party Cookie. However, the other half of the US sites were doing egregious amounts of tracking. The Blacklight check on 80,000 of the most popular websites indicates that the average number of Ad Trackers per site is 7, while the average number of Third Party Cookies is 3. So, those online stores with more than a dozen Trackers (maximum = 27) or Cookies (maximum = 59) are sailing pretty close to the wind.

Most of the UK and EU websites are behaving relatively responsibly, although there are clearly three UK sites that exceed the tracking behavior of the others by a wide margin. Interestingly, one of these is Naked Wines, which has both a US and a UK website — the UK site does notably less tracking that the US site, but still much more than most of the other UK sites.

As far as informing Facebook and Google about your site visits goes, almost all of the US sites did both, while less than a half of the UK and US sites inform Facebook, and less than half of the EU sites inform Google. So, I can expect to receive far fewer personalized ads following me around the web, directly as a result of living in Europe.

In contrast, the EU and UK websites are more likely to be be doing Session Recording than are the US sites; and Keystroke Capturing was detected in the EU but not in the UK. Neither of these practices should be necessary for the purpose of ordering wine online.

To me, the oddest experience occurred at the Drizly store. This was the only site with a CAPTCHA, to assess whether I am a bot or not; but it then proceeded to track me mercilessly, when it realized I am a human (highest number of Cookies, third-highest number of Trackers). I feel doubly insulted!

In my previous post, I specifically noted that many people who have set up their own website may not fully understand what sort of tracking they have allowed on their site (and, indeed, one site author expressed complete surprise, and immediately started doing something about it). However, professionally run wine stores have no such excuse. The offenders listed in the table below need to get their act together.

Note that assessing the US stores is complicated. After all, the infamous Three-tier alcohol-distribution system disrupts the idea of a national online liquor retailer (unlike in the EU, where there is free trade across all member countries). The list of Beer, Wine & Liquor Stores in the US suggests that there were 45,952 liquor businesses back in July, and none of them have a market share of greater than 5%. So, it would be hard to check them all.

As I noted last time, there are some people who apparently don't mind having advertisers looking over their shoulders as they browse the web. However, it goes beyond that. Ad Tracking is like having both mummy and daddy following you everywhere you go, and trying to train you to "do it right". If you do not want this to still be happening to you, then not telling them what you are up to is the obvious first step.

This has been a good year for online alcohol sales, because there is a pandemic, and people are not too keen on going into crowded shops. We are not sure how long this will last (see: Covid online wine boom fizzles out), but I assume that many of you are ordering your Christmas drinks online this year. Now it's time to find out what price you might really be paying — when the product is free, that means you are the product (Don't expose yourself: A guide to online privacy).

Some wine industry websites track their visitors egregiously

Much fuss is made these days about the potential invasion of privacy involved in the act of tracking visitors to websites. In many cases, the visitors are not told about the extent to which they are being tracked by any given website, least of all by the website providers themselves. Indeed, this is so bad that the European Union has legislated against it, which prevents quite a number of US websites from serving EU visitors.

Most of this tracking is allegedly done in the name of "providing a helpful customer experience", but in actual fact this requires very little tracking, if any at all. In practice, most of the tracking is done in the name of advertising — tracking the potential customers' online behavior so that they can be served carefully targeted ads. (Note: this is quite a different thing from other forms of web privacy invasion, such as data security, and leaking of personal information.)

Ad tracking borders on the unethical in many cases, and clearly passes that border in some cases. So, the obvious question is: where does the wine industry stand on this matter, in practice? (What people say, is another matter entirely!) It turns out that we can actually find this out for ourselves.

This is because the topic has been the subject of some practical research, in the sense that there are now tools for you to find out what any given website is doing when you visit it. One of the most ambitious of these is the Blacklight Privacy Inspector. The public release of this tool a few months ago did attract some media attention (eg. 87 percent of websites are tracking you. This new tool will let you run a creepiness check). The Markup company itself ran its own checks on 80,000 of the most popular sites, which provides us with some useful comparison data. One of the most unexpected outcomes was that the site owners themselves often did not know that the homepage set-up tool they had used had inserted trackers into their website (The high privacy cost of a “free” website).

The Blacklight tool checks any web address that you give it, and looks for a number of potential privacy invasions that could be occurring:
  Number of ad trackers
  Number of third-party cookies
  Tracking that evades cookie blockers
  Session recording
  Keystroke capturing
  Facebook pixel
  Google Analytics internet tracking
These are described in detail in an online article (How we built a real-time privacy inspector), and I briefly discuss them below.

So, let's name names. The table at the bottom of this post presents a somewhat arbitrary collection of five dozen wine-related websites. I have tried to include all of the usual suspects, supplemented by a few sites that I sometimes read myself. I apologize in advance to those of you who have been left out, or if anyone finds releasing this information embarrassing. My ultimate aim is to make wine-industry websites as clean as possible, by pointing out where the dirt has accumulated.

Note, also, that I have excluded online stores selling wine and accessories, which are far and away the most likely sites to be tracking you (for their own purposes). They may appear in a future post (now online as: Ad Tracking by online wine shops is variable).

The columns of the table present each of the seven Blacklight criteria, evaluated by me during this past week, for each of the named sites (one per row). The first two criteria list the number of trackers encountered, while the other five columns indicate (Y=yes) that the site was detected carrying out the named tracking activity.

I am pleased to report that 11 / 60 (18%) of the sites were not detected doing any ad tracking at all. Kudos to those one-fifth of the website owners. Note that the Wine Gourd does have one cookie, as do all Blogger sites (owned by Google), and also Facebook sites.

Potentially the most invasive activity is Keystroke Capturing, which records every single time you press a keyboard key (such as when entering your personal details in a form). There were 2 sites apparently doing this, which Blacklight reports as an average percentage across the web. It is possible that this use is (or once was) actually legitimate, as it is sometimes used for auto-completion of forms. This would need to be checked.

Session Recording keeps a record of your on-site activity, including mouse movements, clicks and page scrolling. This is sometimes ostensibly done to optimize the layout of web pages, but it can also be used for ad tracking (see Advertisers can now tell if we're paying attention). There were 4 sites doing this, which is half the Blacklight average; but why do it at all? These sites definitely do not need to be doing this.

Evading Cookie Blockers (aka Canvas Fingerprinting) is the next most egregious action. There are browser add-ons or extensions that we can use to stop cookie tracking by any website that we visit (the one I use is Privacy Badger); and when we use them we mean: Don't Track Me! There were 5 websites found to be using fingerprinting, which is a bit above average, according to Blacklight. It is possible, but unlikely, that this activity was actually an attempt to protect those sites from botnet attacks.

Next, Ad Trackers try to identify and collate information about users, and send that information back to the tracker's website, to be used for ad targeting. The average number per website, as reported by Blacklight, is 7, and the wine sites had an average of 6. So, the wine industry is no worse than elsewhere, in this regard. However, you can see in the table that several wine websites currently exceed this number massively. This occurred in all four categories of website, although the Wine Professionals were the least egregious. But why on earth does anyone need to put 20 or 30 ad trackers on their website? Sadly, we all know the answer.

The same thing applies to Third Party Cookies. These have nothing to do with the running of the website itself (which legitimately uses cookies to keep a track of things like visited pages and log-in details). Instead, these other cookies are installed on behalf of external sites, and store information on your own device, to identify you when you visit other sites with the same cookie. Blacklight says that the web average is 3 per site (often associated with the ads displayed on the pages), but the wine industry apparently thinks that a better number is 11 per site. More to the point, you can see for yourselves that quite a number of sites massively exceed even this large average — and there are not that many ads displayed on their pages, so the cookies are covert. These sites are usually the same ones that have a large number of ad trackers, as well; so, we are left in no doubt about the attitude towards site visitors by these website owners.

Next is Facebook, which is monetized by serving personalized ads (and is currently embroiled in anti-trust lawsuits — Federal government and 46 states file antitrust suit seeking to split up Facebook). To serve these ads, Facebook wants to know which websites you visit, and it finds this out by getting the website owners to tell it. Blacklight says that about 30% of sites agree to do this, and 23% of the wine industry sites also currently do so. Did you know that a quarter of the websites you visit are telling Facebook that you are there? This explains why Facebook ads seem so directly relevant to your past web activity.

Finally, we come to Google, which is also monetized by ads, and whose web behavior has resulted in fines of tens of millions of dollars, especially in the European Union (eg. Google, Amazon fined $163 million as France takes hard line on privacy). Google wants to track you across all of the web, which it does by cross-collating every bit of information it can find about you, and especially your activity. In order to succeed, it helps if the website owners tell them about your activity, which Blacklight says about 50% of sites agree to do. In the wine industry, it is about 45% of the websites. So, Google must know a lot about you all, by now.

As I noted earlier, it is possible that some the website owners fingered here do not know what their own website is doing. If they used a "free" package to set up their sites, then the tracking activity could have been installed without their knowledge. Blacklight reports that a number of site owners immediately removed the trackers when they were informed about them. It would be nice if that happened here, as well.

For the rest of you site owners, please clean up your act. A cookie or two is one thing, but the table below indicates some seriously invasive activity. If a site really does need to do this sort of thing, then it should tell us about it when we first visit the site, rather than making us find out for ourselves. Indeed, this is actually mandatory in the EU — although I doubt that too many people read all of those Cookie Consent pop-ups (they are usually quite uninformative).

In the meantime, the rest of you can all try out Blacklight, and test your favorite websites for yourselves. Some people apparently don't mind having advertisers looking over their shoulders as they browse the web. Indeed, anyone who logs into a website using their Facebook or Google credentials is actually demanding that they be tracked (in exchange for saving a few seconds, or having to remember only one set of login details). However, we should all be given the option to opt into tracking if we want to, rather than being forced to opt out.

Tasting great wines?

A few weeks ago, Eric Asimov noted that: "Benchmark bottles were always a splurge. But an increasing concentration of wealth has put them out of reach for all but the richest connoisseurs" (How income inequality has erased your chance to drink the great wines).

The basic argument here is that The Great Wines of the World used to be at least within the reach of the likes of you and I, even if we chose not to reach out, and actually pay the money. That is, we had a choice: "middle-class wine lovers could still afford to experience ... drinking a truly great wine, not simply to enjoy it, but to understand what qualities made it exceptional in the eyes of history." These days, this choice is no longer the case, so that Millennials will not be able to experience fine wines the way their Baby Boomer parents are alleged to have done. (See my post on: The outrageous prices of modern high-quality wines)

Well, I grew up in Australia. In Australia, even the Baby Boomers found it difficult — we could get good Australian wines, but the stuff from elsewhere was financially out of bounds, even back in the early 1980s. I got thoroughly sick of hearing about them, especially from a bunch of wine writers who usually got to taste them for free. Since I never got to experience these things, my daughter (a Millennial) and I (a Boomer) have more in common than you thought.

Far more importantly, though, I feel that this is all beside the point. Indeed, it smacks of wine snobbery. Wealth has always been the arbiter as to what are The Great Wines of the World. Are these wines expensive because they are great, or great because they are expensive? Neither I nor the Millennials will ever find out.

Obviously, I have had a long time to think about this, and work out what to do about my wine education. I could move down-market (Can’t afford the finest wines from Burgundy and Bordeaux? Try these instead), but that somewhat defeats the purpose. So, I decided that a far more useful yardstick of wine quality is likely to be modern comparative tastings. There are plenty of them; and they often seem to involve wines that we could all afford. Why not get the experience of drinking some of them, and find out why they did so well in head-to-head competition?

The answer to that question is, of course, that many of these tastings are not as objective as we might like. Indeed, some of them are downright suspicious — you pay your entry fee and you get your award. So, we need to tread carefully. In this regard, it has been said that: "The International Wine Challenge [is] the world’s most influential and rigorously judged wine competition". So, we could do worse than start by having a look at the IWC winners.

Conveniently, the IWC has recently announced its 2020 best wines from around the world. The full list of results is on their website, but the top 30 wines have been reported around the media (eg. here and here).

What I have done for these wines is use Wine-Searcher (and some other sources, when that failed) to collate the average $US price per standard bottle, excluding sales tax. The results for 29 out of the 30 wines are shown in this graph (the Chinese wine proved to be elusive). Each dot represents the price of one wine.

These prices are not as bad as they might be, although the increase in price across the wines is exponential (as expected). Clearly, some of them are not much better priced than The Great Wines, but others are very affordable. Indeed, a bit of a splurge (up to $100) would get you almost all of them.

So, my suggestion is that the Millennials can approach their wine education this way, rather than by adopting the ways of their forefathers. There is nothing either remarkable or new about this suggestion, but it seems to need to be pointed out again. The Old Way is not always the best way.

The ultimate objective of wine education, as I see it, is well expressed by Tom Maresca (Some good everyday wines): "I long ago decided that life is too short to ever drink mediocre wine, so even though I could never afford those legendary, crème de la crème bottles that headline so many ads, I’ve worked hard to ensure that the wines that accompany my daily bread are pleasurable".

Are CellarTracker wine scores meaningful?

I have written before about the quality points awarded to wine by many critics (Quality scores changed the wine industry, and created confusion). This sort of thing is not unusual in the modern world, where just about every human endeavor is rated by someone, somewhere; everything from restaurants and hotels to books, music and holidays. The only things that is not rated are the customers, which may explain a lot of the problems.

All of these scores are assigned by individuals, and thus represent a single opinion, whether by an expert or not. However, particularly in the modern world, there are now commercial groups that aggregate what might loosely be called user ratings, to provide some sort of consensus score. The important word there is "consensus", which is a fairly nebulous concept, but which needs to be made concrete if a combined score is going to be reported.

This is the topic of this post. CellarTracker, as but one example, aggregates scores provided by wine drinkers, and provides a consensus score. So, the blog post title translates as: Does the concept of a consensus rating make much sense for wines?

There are many types of ratings, and also many types of consensuses. Ratings can be quite detailed, such as scores out of 100 or 20, or relatively simple, such as 3 or 5 stars, or even binary, such as approve vs. disapprove. How to then get a quantitative consensus out of these ratings is the step being examined here.

For the third type of rating, the usual consensus is simply to report the percentage of raters who approve (or disapprove). For example, in the world of politics, elections are reported as the percentage of voters who chose each candidate, and a "winner" is then declared. Does this approach actually make sense? After all, in a three-candidate race, a winner can be elected even if more than a half of the people disapprove of them. Indeed, in situations where voting is not compulsory, it is commonly reported that only c. 40% of the people actually vote, which does suggest that 60% of people think that the consensus approach is nonsense. It is tempting to see this majority of the people as being the sensible group.

For more complex situations, the consensus is usually reported as some sort of mathematical "average" score. How do we go about combining ratings into a consensus? Does it even make sense to combine user opinions, or expert judgements, in this way? What on earth does such a mathematical consensus represent?

Would I really proceed to work out what color is the sky by trying to combine people's opinions on the matter? Would that really make the sky the same as the calculated consensus color? Or would the consensus be some sort of wishy-washy middle result that does not represent any sky ever observed?

Obviously, I could work out the light's wavelength on the standard color scale, and make lots of such measurements, and then calculate their average. That might make some sense. But that is not what we are doing when we average people's opinions about wines, or about almost anything else.

I think that a reasonable case can be made that individual opinions about wines do matter, but a consensus of those opinions does not mean much at all. These aggregation sites are likely to be wasting our time, as well as their own.

Leaving aside these philosophical questions, we could, of course, proceed by simply calculating an average rating of whatever product we are interested in. Mathematically, there are actually three quite different ways to calculate an average: the mean, the median, and the mode. You are all familiar with the mean, since it is far and away the most common calculation method when people refer to an average.

However, the median (which is the middle value when the scores are arranged in increasing order) makes much more sense as a consensus. This situation is explicitly acknowledged in economics, where an average salary, for example, is calculated as the median. This takes into account the obvious bias introduced by billionaires and the like. If Bill Gates walks into the room, then the mean salary in the room would make us all millionaires, but the median would not change much, if at all.

Is the median used by sites like Amazon and CellarTracker, who provide us with consensus ratings? Not usually, although CellarTracker actually does (as illustrated above). We usually get the mean, instead, which has many odd mathematical characteristics.

The mode can also make much more sense than the mean, as a consensus score. This is defined as the most commonly reported score among the ratings being collated. The problem here is that you need a lot of data to actually calculate the mode; and so we rarely see it, in practice.

For ratings using a small number of stars or the like, a better approach would be to simply report all of the individual ratings, and that is what many aggregators actually do. This focuses attention on the individual ratings, not on their consensus.

However, the individual ratings only make much sense if they are accompanied by written comments. Sadly, even then we may not get much information. After all, we all know what a 5-star review is going to say — the person loved the holiday, or whatever else they are rating. We also know what a 1-star review is going to say, although, rather bizarrely, this will combine the true 1-star ratings with the 0-star ratings — why do we live in a world that pools these two quite different things together?

So, the real information resides in the comments from the 3-star and 4-star reviews, where something was not quite right, and we need to work out whether this particular thing would affect us or not. Someone else's dislike might not be our own, after all.

I well remember once trying to find a place for my wife and I to stay in Sicily. One place I looked at had an average rating (3 stars), but when I looked at the comments I realized that this was a perfect example of why a consensus rating means nothing. Half the reviews said that the place was great and the other half said to avoid it completely. So, the average of "good" and "poor" is (mathematically) "okay". Not likely, I say.

After reading the user comments, I realized that the issue was that the good reviews all occurred when the manager was on site, and the poor reviews occurred when the manager was absent — when the cat is away ...

Anyway, we did not stay there, because I could hardly ring up and ask if the manager was going to be there, just for my holiday. So, we chose to stay somewhere else (shown above); and it turned out to be one of the most memorable experiences of our trip. We were the only people there that night; and, in Sicily, mamma's home cooking leaves every Michelin starred restaurant for dead. I can still remember it all.

So, what is the problem here? Well, the words in most short wine reviews are piffle. Indeed, winespeak is frequently laughable. User comments are more useful than points, except in the wine industry, which is rather a sad thing to say. The most useful information the reviews could provide is what food to drink the wine with, and when — and we do not get even that information, very often. Whether the wine is value for money would also be useful, but that information is even rarer (Calculating value for money wines).

So, what practical use, then, is CellarTracker's score?

France's changing vineyards

In a recent post, I discussed Germany's changing vineyards, as an example of an Old World wine-producing area that has changed considerably since 1960, in terms of both vineyard area and grape varietal composition. Previously, I had also discussed Australia's changing vineyards, as an example of a New World wine-producing area. In this third part of the series, I briefly look at France, as another example of an old-established vineyard area.

As before, the data come from the Global megafile, National 0920 spreadsheet file of:

Anderson, K. and S. Nelgen (2020) Which Winegrape Varieties are Grown Where? A Global Empirical Picture (revised edition). University of Adelaide Press: Adelaide.

These data consist of the estimated growing areas for each of 263 grape varieties, for each decade or so from 1960 to now — 1958, 1968, 1979, 1988, 2000, 2010, 2016. Sadly, the data for the first four years are severely limited. The data totals appear to be complete, but there are individual data for only the same 31 varieties for each of these years.

That is, most of the varieties are simply lumped together under "Other red varieties" and "Other white varieties", which account for 25–65% of the vineyard area (this varies between the four years). This clearly affects my ability to analyze at least 23 other varieties (all of these have high values in the final three years); and it also seems to affect at least another 25 varieties, but to a lesser extent.

So, I cannot perform all of the analyses that appear in my previous two posts. In particular, there can be no analysis (except for the three final years) of the Diversity Index, or of the Network of grape varieties. This is why I presented the analysis of Germany first — I could at least do it properly.

However, we can look at two aspects of the time-series data, as shown by the two graphs.

First, note (in the first graph) that there has been a continual decrease in total vineyard area in France over the past 60 years. This amounts to 635,000 hectares, which is 44% of the area covered in 1958. Most of this decrease occurred before 1990 (37 of the 44 %), but the decline has slowly continued since then. This slow recent decline matches the slow decline of the German vineyard area over the same period.

Overall, this is a massive decrease, especially compared to other countries in Europe, and I have not seen it commented upon much in the media. This decrease has, as far as I know, been mainly among the so-called "country wines", rather than occurring in the prestige vineyard areas. There is plenty of bulk wine in the world, but the French staunchly maintain that their premium areas are unmatched elsewhere.

Second, we can note (in the second graph) a change in the composition of the varieties through time. The national vineyard area is dominated by red varieties (the red line), as we might expect, although this can vary a lot locally. However, there was a slow increase in the reds until 1990 (and a corresponding decrease among the whites), followed by an on-going reversal since then. Indeed, the whites now occupy a greater percentage of the area than they have at any time time in the past 60 years (34%). Perhaps the French are slowly coming to value their white wines, as has the rest of the world?

It is sad that the data do not allow me to analyze this latter trend in any more detail.

How close are repeated wine-quality scores?

This year has been awkward for the purchase of wine, as many people have commented in the media. We can all trust a global pandemic to disrupt international, national and local events.

Here in Sweden, our national liquor chain (Systembolaget) has had to change the way it releases new wines, in order to maintain social distancing among their staff in the main warehouse. This has meant that the wine release schedule has been drastically changed from the previous steady state.

In turn, this change has affected the wine commentators, as well as the wine customers. In particular, the commentators have almost all had problems at some time during this year, tasting new wines and publishing their subsequent quality assessments. For example, both BKWine and Vinbanken did not publish their usual wine-quality scores for the new releases during May and June (I have used these score sources in previous posts; eg. Are wine scores from different reviewers correlated with each other?).

While compiling this year's new-release scores for an upcoming post, I noticed that for the BKWine reports a few of the wines appeared more than once (ie. in the reports for different months). Moreover, some of these repeated wines did not receive the same scores. This situation allows us to comment quantitatively on the repeatability of wine scores from the same person.

This is a topic that I have commented on before, notably in my post on: The sources of wine quality-score variation. In that post, I briefly discussed a dataset from Rusty Gaffney, who re-tasted 21 Pinot noir wines 16-26 months after their first tasting.

Well, in the current case, we have a much shorter period of time than that; and this gives us a much better insight into the process of scoring wines, which is, after all, rather subjective. The August and September BKWine commentaries were published much later than usual, in the middle of the month rather than at the beginning. This presumably reflects pandemic-induced problems, which lead to what is presumably an unintended mix-up. The same person was responsible for all of the actual wines scores (Jack Jakobsson).

This graph shows us the scores for those 16 wines that were repeated in both the August and September wine commentaries. Note that the scores have a maximum of 20 points (not 100).

Only 4 of the 16 wines have the same score on both occasions; but 12 of them are within half a point (the smallest possible difference). However, 3 of the wines have a difference of 1 point; and 1 wine differs by 1.5 points. Nine of the wines had an increased score on the second occasion, while only 3 decreased. Circa 39% of the variation in scores is shared between the two occasions.

The differences in scores are somewhat disappointing. Although the similarities are much better than would be expected from random chance (p<0.01), we are still faced with a situation where the differences are slightly bigger than the similarities.

However, this situation is vastly better than the previous one that I reported (see above), where only 6% of the variation in scores was shared between the two occasions (which were much further apart in time, of course). Tastings close together in time are expected to be more consistent; so we at least get that.

A problem for wine-makers in Sweden?

We have all heard that cellar-door tastings have been seriously affected by the current Covid-19 pandemic. This has caused especial consternation among wine-makers who rely on direct-to-customer sales. It has also, of course, annoyed those who wish to partake in wine tourism.

However, this has not been the slightest problem here in Sweden. This is because here is no such thing as cellar-door sales. As I have noted before (Why are there wine monopolies in Scandinavia?), all retail sales in Sweden must go through a single liquor chain, called Systembolaget. This means that, while a winery might be able to conduct tastings, they have to send potential customers down the road to the nearest shop.

Now, obviously, this annoys the pants off the wine-makers. As a personal perspective on the current situation, below is a translation of a recent article about this, from my local newspaper, Upsala Nya Tidning (published 2020-10-25, on p. 14). The original article is called Vinodlaren om förbudet: "Skadar landsbygden", about one of my two local grape-growers (in the province of Uppland). The grape-grower involved is pictured below next to his vineyard (but that is the neighbor's mansion in the background).

In fact, objections to this situation have been raised for a long time. For example, back on 11 September 2012 there was a national media report headed Wine growers rebel (Vinodlarna gör uppror), about the same topic:

The Swedish wine growers are on the warpath. If there is no decision on farm sales, they plan to defy the law and sell anyway ... It was at the annual meeting during the weekend that the Swedish wine growers decided to investigate the possibility of opening their farms for sale despite the ban ... The wine growers also intend to contact microbreweries and fruit wine sellers to try to get them involved in the protest.

The question of whether Swedish wine growers should have the opportunity to sell wine on the farm has been discussed since the 1990s. The Riksdag [national parliament] has at times had the matter up for consideration and in 2007 appointed a special inquiry which came to the conclusion that the sale should be allowed. But the objections have been many ...

... the purpose of the action is to bring about a judicial review that can go to the European Court of Justice. There, there may be an examination of the entire Swedish sales monopoly that exists through Systembolaget.

This situation has not been changed, until recently. The European Union is unlikely to have an official position on the matter, as this is solely a national affair. This EU attitude differs importantly from their 2007 decision against Systembolaget, which concerned transport of alcohol among EU member countries (not sales within a single country). In the 2007 case, a single Swede (Klas Rosengren) simply tried to import some Spanish wine from a Danish retailer, knowing full well that this action would result in a court prosecution, and thus get the situation reviewed. This action was ultimately successful in getting things changed (see the final EU Court of Justice report).

A current possibility of a change in the situation for farm sales in Sweden has actually made it into a recent article in The Economist (The state's grip on grape and grain: a proposal to water down Sweden’s state monopoly on booze). Sweden currently has a minority government (which is not unusual), based on a group of several political parties having a loose agreement among themselves (none of this two-party system for Swedes, like some other countries have!). In this case, the Economist article notes that the moderate Centerpartiet (Center Party) has negotiated a consultation about the introduction of farm sales, in exchange for their parliamentary support of the minority government.

We shall see what happens with this consultation, which will take at least a couple of years. Mind you, wine-making in Sweden is not yet ready to take on the wine-makers of the rest of the world. The 500 SEK bottle of Swedish wine referred to below would cost less than half of that if it came from anywhere else.

---

The winegrower about the ban: "Damages the countryside"

By Jennifer Berg Eidebo.

Two years ago, Björn Wollentz started a winery in Häggeby. In the future, he wants to sell sparkling quality wines, but he is afraid that the regulations regarding alcohol sales will put a dent in his wheel.

Lillhassla winery is located in Häggeby, next to Ekoln. There are 2,500 vines that will become sparkling wines for around 500 SEK [US$55] per bottle. There are still a few years left until the wine willbe ready for sale, but already now the wine grower has encountered problems with Swedish bureaucracy.

"Everything from writing the place on the label to being able to offer farm sales takes place naturally in other countries, but not in Swedish bureaucracy," says winemaker Björn Wollentz.

It is, above all, the rules regarding farm sales that create problems.

"As I understand it, you can offer tasting, but if someone wants to buy a bottle and take it home, it's no go."

Swedish producers of alcohol who want to sell their products may do so via Systembolaget or restaurants with an alcohol license. But Wollentz wants to be able to sell directly from the vineyard, preferably in collaboration with other local producers.

"Being able to offer wine tasting with bread from local bakeries and cheese or jam from local producers, would create a synergy. It should be in the public interest, so that the countryside does not become depopulated."

Wollentz plans not to live on his wine production, but works everyday at the Ministry of Defense. He has also not dared to take out a loan, but is responsible for all of the investments himself.

"I am very worried about what sticks the regulations will put in the wheel."

Wollentz thinks that farm sales should be allowed, without harming public health. Another one who is on the same track is Björn-Owe Björk (Christian Democrat political party), responsible for regional development in Uppsala County.

"I think farm sales should be allowed for wineries or breweries. It would be good for the countryside and small businesses."

The issue of farm sales has been raised several times over the years. In 2020, the issue will be investigated again.

"It is positive that the government will investigate it again, because it means that somewhere the ambition exists to bring about a change," says Björk.

Wollentz is confident that he will be able to find solutions for his wines, even if farm sales are not allowed in the future. But he believes it will harm the countryside.

"We will get sales for our wines, but there will be no synergy in the countryside. This is still Uppland's first winery, at least since the Viking Age [official end: 1100 CE]," says Björn Wollentz.

Germany's changing vineyards

In a recent post, I discussed Australia's changing vineyards, as an example of a New World wine-producing area that has changed considerably since 1960, in terms of both vineyard area and grape varietal composition. [Note: one late part of that post has since been modified, due to an error in calculations.] In this second part of the series, I look at Germany, as an example of an old-established vineyard area.

As before, the data come from the Global megafile, National 0920 spreadsheet file of:

Anderson, K. and S. Nelgen (2020) Which Winegrape Varieties are Grown Where? A Global Empirical Picture (revised edition). University of Adelaide Press: Adelaide.

These data consist of the estimated growing areas for each of 107 grape varieties, for each decade or so from 1960 to now — 1964, 1972, 1979, 1991, 2000, 2010, 2016. Sadly, some of the data are reported to be missing for the first four years. However, even more obvious is that there are no data for the Gewürztraminer variety in either 2000 or 2010, even though there are hundreds of hectares reported for the other years  — I had to mathematically interpolate the missing data, in order to do my calculations.

We can start to look at the time-series data by noting that there was a continual increase in total vineyard area in Germany until 1990, as shown in the first graph (click to enlarge). This coincided with the rise in global popularity of German wines, the whites in particular — if there are customers, then the producers will provide the required product. Since 1990 there has been no further increase, and even a slight (<10%) decrease in recent years.

As expected there has been a steady increase in the number of varieties reported, as well, although this may at least partly reflect better data collection in more recent years. In 2016, four times as many varieties were reported compared to 1964 (103 versus 24).

Of more interest, though is the varietal make-up of these grapes. As in my previous post on grape varieties, I have used a network as a convenient pictorial summary of the complex varietal data. As before, I first calculated the percent of each grape variety as a component of the viticultural area, and then calculated the similarity among pairs of years using the Bray-Curtis measure (important, because it ignores varieties that do not occur in either of the two years being compared). I then used these similarities to calculate a NeighborNet network, as shown next. Years that are closely connected in the network (along the edges) are more similar to each other, in terms of their grape varietal composition, than they are to years further apart.

The basic picture is pretty clear. There was a continual change in the varietal make-up of Germany's vineyards from 1964 (at the top-right of the graph) until recently (2010 and 2016, at the bottom). The years are not especially different from each other in the network, except 1964, and their similarities to the general pattern are most prominent. The biggest change in varietal composition occurred between 2000 and 2010, although this was not due to much of an increase in the actual number of varieties (67 and 75, respectively). Between 2010 and 2016 there was the addition of c. 20 new varieties, mostly at 1-2 ha, although Cabernet Carol and Cabernet Cortis had 34 and 59 ha, respectively. Obvious candidates like Grüner Veltliner (so abundant in neighboring Austria) also arrived (14 ha in 2016).

Since Germany is famous for its white wines, we might expect white-grape varieties to dominate; and this is indeed so, as shown in the second graph above. However, even more obvious is the rise of red-grape varieties since 1980. These particularly include Dornfelder (now 8,000 ha versus nothing in the 1960s) and Pinot Noir (11,500 ha versus 1,800), but also Blaufränkisch (1,700 ha versus 400) and Regent (2,000 vs 0).

Dornfelder is a complex hybrid developed in Germany in the 1950s, with both Pinot Noir and Blauer Portugieser in its ancestry (the latter of which has actually decreased in area by 40% since the 1960s). Pinot Noir is, of course, the world's most popular cool-climate red grape variety. Actually, other members of the Pinot family have also increased in area in Germany during the past half-century, including Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris, Pinot Meunier, and Pinot Noir Précoce.

Note that the increasing prominence of red-grape varieties does not really coincide with the increase in total vineyard area, indicating that the red-grape vineyards were mostly not added, but instead white-grape vineyards were replaced. The most notable decrease occurred in Silvaner (now 5,000 ha versus 18,000 in the 1960s). Interestingly, several other white-grape varieties increased from the 1960s to 1990 and then decreased again, notably Müller-Thurgau (from 14,000 ha in the 1960s to 25,000 in the 1980s, and then back to 12,000 in the 2010s), but also Bacchus, Huxelrebe, Kerner, Morio-Muskat, Ortega, and Scheurebe. Note, also, that the recent decrease in vineyard area (graph 1) coincides with a plateau in the varietal composition (graph 2). This is presumably not actually a coincidence.

All of these changes have lead to an increase in varietal diversity in the German vineyard area, as shown in the third graph above. To illustrate this, I calculated Simpson's Diversity Index for each year, which is a formal measure of such things. Low index values indicate dominance by very few varieties, while higher values indicate much more equal abundances among the varieties. In this case, there has been a continual increase in diversity for 50 years. Notably, the varietal predominance of the triumvirate of Müller-Thurgau + Riesling + Silvaner decreased from 75% of the German vineyard area to 40%. This is still an awful lot of area for only three varieties, of course (but they do make very nice wine).

Presumably, things will continue to change in Germany, given the government's stated intention to be proactive about response to climate change (No wine left behind: how Germany wants to adapt to climate change).

Next time, I will look at France, as the most prominent of the Old World viticultural areas.

Should we worry about Artificial Intelligence in wine writing?

Recently, Richard Hemming published a short article called Are wine writers redundant? Most of the actual text was produced by the HAIMKE Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, under the guidance of Yoav Shoham. Yoav said: "Cute, I think", while Richard said: "Terrifying, I'd say." These are two extreme viewpoints, of course, and reality is presumably somewhere in between. But where?

To me, the important point to note is that two human beings were actually involved in producing the article — and none of us would bother reading it if there had been no people involved at all. Being human is a rather human activity, which means that it is based on social interactions. Humans interact with other humans by choice. If things are done by machine, then they have no especial human interest.

After all, isn't that the fundamental cause of the current second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which infections are increasing to levels not seen for several months? People are thoroughly sick of all those months of "social distancing", and having to look like masked bank robbers making a getaway. They want some social human contact, such as they previously had in their lives (and which they one day will have again). So, the restaurants and bars are full, and the young people are partying again. The virus loves it. (For an interesting discussion of the psychology of our current pandemic responses, see: Acedia: the lost name for the emotion we’re all feeling right now.)

So, should we worry about AI in wine writing? Only if the readers want no social contact with another human being. A blog post concerns human communication, for example, as do YouTube videos, FaceBook messages and Twitter tweets. The world is full of noise, of course, but in amongst it there are some real attempts at communication.

You see, the thing about AI is that it is and it isn't. It is artificial, and it isn't intelligent. Even though we call it "machine learning", the computer doesn't actually learn anything. All that most AI systems can do is take a massive amount of input data, and create an organized database that synthesizes the observed patterns of relationships among the different parts of the data. Then, when the system is later given one of the components as a new input, it produces a closely matching output. Impressive, sure, especially when the output looks natural; but human beings are not quite that mechanical — indeed, humans often need only one previous example of something, in order to correctly identify new examples.

We will, of course, be seeing many more uses of AI in the future; and I have written about some of them before (Artificial intelligence in the wine industry? Not yet, please!). Car driving is an obvious candidate, given just how bad most humans are at it. I have always thought that the most remarkable thing about people is their ability to fall asleep at the wheel. Cars can kill, as hundreds of people find out every day; and yet our minds grasp this fact so poorly that they think it is a good time to take a nap while driving. AI has the potential to alleviate the danger of this situation. Even bad AI will probably be better than many human drivers.

So, AI can be used for many things, including unexpected ones. As one interesting example, while there are specialist computer programs for playing the game of chess (eg. Deep Blue, Stockfish, AlphaZero), even a general text AI system can also do it (such as HAIMKE, referenced above) — this is called "natural language processing" (NLP). Chess moves can be written in the form of words (see Chess notation), and so a text-based AI system can be given a large collection of chess games that have previously been played. Even without any further instructions about how chess is played, after it has generated its database, it will have discovered all of The most common chess openings. Then, in response to any given chess move, it will respond with one of those opening gambits, just like a person would. The system knows nothing about chess, not even the concept of a chess board, let alone the rules of play — it simply produces what are apparently appropriate (text-based) responses to any new (text-based) input. Under these circumstances, is this system really "playing" chess?

Anyway, it seems that our children's children will be living in a different world, and this will be an AI one for sure. But I doubt that they will be reading wine writing if they know it was "written" by a computer rather than a person — there is an important difference between creative "writing" and mere "text generation". The latest NLP systems can produce some pretty remarkable performances, such as creating poetry that seems just like the real thing (see GPT-3 creative fiction); but is there much of a market for it? * AI has its obvious uses, but human communication is not one of them.

Mind you, the products of actual Wine Writers often seem far too much like repetition of the same old stuff, year after year; so I guess that the AI people will see reproducing this as pretty easy for a computer to do. Interestingly, this response might very well stimulate more creative forms of human wine writing, which would not be a bad thing. After all, this is what actually happened with chess (AI ruined chess: now, it’s making the game beautiful again).

At least this year the wine writers had some new things to write about, which is something that AI systems cannot (yet) do. However, I hope that we do not have to write about fires and pandemics too often!

---

* See also: Experimental evidence that people cannot differentiate AI-generated from human-written poetry.

Australia's changing vineyards

[Note: this post was modified on October 28 2020, to correct a mis-calculation in the final graph.]

In a recent post, I discussed where various wine-grape varieties are currently grown. I noted that there is more difference between countries than similarity. This is a Good Thing in the face of global climate change, as it means that grape varietal diversity is not under immediate threat.

However, it has been noted that the vineyards of the world are changing, with some varieties becoming dominant in many regions around the world. These include the obvious international candidates, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. This is probably a Bad Thing, both biologically (less diversity) and economically (more competition for the same markets).

So, it is worth having a look at some relevant data. Recently, Kym Anderson & Signe Nelgen published a report on Australia’s Declining Winegrape Varietal Distinctiveness; so, Australia seems like a good place to start, as an example of varietal changes in a New World viticultural region.

The information for this post comes from the Global megafile, National 0920 spreadsheet file of:

Anderson, K. and S. Nelgen (2020) Which Winegrape Varieties are Grown Where? A Global Empirical Picture (revised edition). University of Adelaide Press: Adelaide.

The data consist of the estimated growing areas for each of 139 grape varieties, for each decade from 1960 to 2016. Sadly, the data for 1980 are seriously incomplete, as this includes only 20 varieties (compared with 41 in 1970 and 40 in 1990, for example). Since the missing varieties include obvious things like Cabernet Franc, Côt (aka Malbec), and Pinot Noir, I have left this year out of most of my analysis.

First, it is important to note that there was a rapid increase in Australia’s wine-grape bearing area between 1990 and 2000, associated with a boom in premium (bottled) wines, as shown in the next graph. It is interesting to see whether there was also a change in varietal mix during this time, or whether the same dominant varieties simply increased in area.

As in my previous post on grape varieties, I have used a network as a convenient pictorial summary of the complex varietal data. As before, I first calculated the percent of each grape variety as a component of the viticultural area, and then calculated the similarity among pairs of years using the Bray-Curtis measure (important, because it ignores varieties that do not occur in either of the two years being compared). I then used these similarities to calculate a NeighborNet network, as shown next. Years that are closely connected in the network (along the edges) are more similar to each other, in terms of their grape varietal composition, than they are to years further apart.

Well, the basic picture is pretty clear. There has been a continual change in the varietal make-up of Australia's vineyards from 1960 (at the top of the graph) until recently (2016, at the bottom). The years are, indeed, somewhat different from each other, especially 1960, but their similarities to the general pattern outweigh their differences. The 1960 sample is different because, at that time, Australia’s vineyards were often planted to high-yielding multi-purpose varieties, and wine-making was concentrated on what were then known as "sherry" styles.

The network shows that there were large changes in composition between 1970 and 1990, and also between 1990 and 2000, and apparently in the same direction. There were no differences in the number of reported varieties (1970: 42 varieties; 1990: 40 varieties; 2000: 43 varieties), but clearly the relative abundance of these varieties changed considerably. Anderson and Nelgen (cited above) note that these changes were associated with increasing dominance of the most popular grape varieties. They illustrate this using the following graph of the most abundant varieties, which shows that the area of the main international varieties increased disproportionately.

This pattern was a general one, as there was an overall decrease in varietal diversity after 1990. I calculated Simpson's Diversity Index for each year, which is a formal measure of such things. Since there was little change in the number of reported varieties through time, in this case the index will be measuring how equal were the relative grape areas — low index values indicate very uneven abundances (alternatively, index = 1 would mean that all varieties had the same growing area). The next graph shows that the index consistently decreased between 1990 and 2010, suggesting it wasn't just the main varieties involved in the change during the boom.

Notably, there was very little change in the area of the major varieties between those years, but many more grape varieties are now being recorded. For example, only 40 varieties have data for 2010 but there were 118 recorded for 2016. There is the possibility that much of this difference is simply due to more thorough data collection. However, there has also been a deliberate response to climate change, as many vignerons start to trial new varieties from (especially) dry climates around the world. These varieties are often in low abundance at the moment (eg. there are 35 varieties listed as 1–2 hectares), and it is often smaller wineries that are most interested in them, but the area will presumably expand if the trials are successful.

Next time, I will look at France and Germany, as examples of Old World viticultural changes.

Why have we left it so late to deal with climate change in the wine industry?

Okay, I know what you are going to say, and you are right: the wine industry is ahead of most other industries in accepting the existence of climate change, and starting to address its consequences (compare it with the salmon industry, for example). But it seems to me that we have still left it horribly late, given the constraints on viticulture. After all, The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has noted that new climate modeling suggests that change is coming much sooner than previously thought.

The basic issue for us is that wine-making relies on grapes, and grape-growing is part of agriculture, which is a practical application of biology; and there are huge parts of biology that do not happen fast — some bits do happen fast, but most bits do not. Many plants and animals grow and breed at quite a leisurely pace, in the big scheme of things. And climate change is happening faster than they can cope (eg. Fire, smoke, heat, drought — how climate change could spoil your next glass of California Cabernet).

In the modern world, we are used to trying to make things happen faster and faster. We often succeed, but that is not necessarily a Good Thing. For example, after the SARS (coronavirus) epidemic in 2002 and the following MERS (coronavirus) epidemic in 2012, a report was published with an explicit forecast of how fast the next epidemic would spread (Predictability and epidemic pathways in global outbreaks of infectious diseases: the SARS case study). Boy, did they get it right, noting in particular the importance of plane travel in making the spread happen really fast. Pandemics used to take years, now they happen in weeks; and we need to adjust to that fact.

So, modern travel accelerates that particular part of biology; and it also helps us with more useful things, like getting food from much further away than we ever could before. But what about other parts of biology? Well, many parts cannot be fast; or, at least, not that fast.

Plants usually take hundreds or thousands of years to adjust to changes in their environment. This is a very specific type of what people mean when they use the word "evolution". In biology, individual organisms themselves do not change. What happens is that there is much genetic variation among any given group of organisms, and some of these variants will be better suited than others to any new situation. These are the ones that will grow and breed, while the others die out. Slowly, bit by bit, that group of organisms will change as a whole, even though no individual within the group changes during its own lifetime.

This natural process all takes time, and lots of it. The world has been through all sorts of environmental changes, including Ice Ages and all the rest of it. These changes have been just as severe as the results of the currently observed climate change, but because they happened slowly the organism groups could adjust. Whole groups of organisms have disappeared through time, of course, not just the well-known example of dinosaurs; but the rest of us have made it, so far.

The issue, then, for the current climate change, is speed. If we are going to continue to live a life-style somewhat similar to our current one, then agriculture needs to be based on organisms that can tolerate the new regime. Many types of agricultural organisms may not be greatly affected by the new conditions, but plenty of them will be; and grapes are among them.

It is for this reason that the wine industry is ahead of much of the game. Regional conditions have always been a vital part of viticulture, in terms of the resulting wine. So, any change in those conditions becomes obvious pretty darned quickly. People cannot help but notice when their wine changes.

Therefore, much of the wine industry has at least taken notice of climate change, and parts of it are actively working on ways of dealing with it (eg. Horticulture researchers find ways to combat climate change in vineyards). What, then, is my point here? It is simply this: the viticulture part of the wine industry cannot change fast, solely because of the time needed for the grape vines. We can be speedy, but they cannot.

New cultivars

Suppose, for instance, we need new cultivars for making wine, ones that can handle the new climate conditions at any given location, and still produce grapes that ripen evenly, with good sugar and acid levels, and excellent flavor components.

Well, we first have to breed them, then we have to trial them in a few vineyards, then we have try making wine from the grapes, and work out the best wine-making style for those wines, and then get the public to decide whether they like them or not. If they do like them, then we have to propagate the vines, and disperse them among the rest of the vineyards, whether for grafting or for new plantings.

There's quite a few years right there — after all, it can take 5 years between planting vines and harvesting a decent crop of grapes. In other words, the wine industry needed to be where we are now about 20 years ago, if not more, if we are going to use new cultivars effectively.

Our current cultivars have been developed over hundreds of years. This is quite speedy compared to the natural process I described above; but half the point of agriculture has been to speed things up by doing them ourselves, rather than waiting for nature to do it for us. We select organisms from among the variants that we can see in nature around us; and we encourage particular organisms to breed, if we think they will have offspring that are of use to us (eg. Champagne growers help cultivate the grape varieties of the future).

This is fast, but it is still slow compared to a human lifespan. The wines I am drinking now are made from cultivars that were mostly derived in previous centuries, rather than during the current one. We have had quite a few human lifetimes to sort out how to make the best wines from them.

The issue, then, is that the speed of climate change is not giving us those lifetimes. We need to make changes right now, not next century. So, we need to speed-up the process of getting new cultivars; and there are biological limits to how fast we can do this.

Mind you, not everyone is pleased with this prospect, anyway. It can take scores of new cultivars to get even one that the wine-drinking public will take to. For example, Robert Joseph (The grape of things to come) has looked at a few recently derived cultivars, and he reports that neither he nor the vignerons nor the wine drinkers are too impressed with some of them. It seems that we may have a ways to go.

However, it is also possible that this response is cultural. The people referenced by Robert Joseph, including himself, obviously assumed the concept of straight varietal wines. Not all wine-making regions favor this approach, notably in Portugal and Spain, but also in Italy. For example, I recently had a wine from Bairrada DOC in Portugal (Quintas de Bágeiras Reserva 1999), which mentions no grape cultivars at all — because the wine is a blend of anything up to six cultivars, none of which you have ever heard of. The way into the future may well be this sort of blending of new cultivars, rather than reverence for a few special ones, as we currently so often do it.

Alternatives

Without moving too far from the idea of new cultivars, another practical alternative is direct genetic modification. We physically move some genetic material from one organism to another, so that the second organism now has a different genotype. That way, we don't have to wait for the organisms to breed, and make new genetic variants, as we simply create the ones we want (or think we do). This is very fast, indeed.

This form of Genetic Engineering is called transgenic genetic modification; and it is opposed by many people, and for good reason. It certainly makes my own skin crawl. The basic issue is that there is no apparent boundary to the ethics of who can do what. If I want fluorescent pigs, then I can have them (Scientists create the world's first glow-in-the-dark PIGS after injecting them with jellyfish DNA); and a lot worse, as well.

A different form of Genetic Engineering is what we call gene editing. We don't actually add new genetic material into the organism, but simply modify what is already there. Some gene-controlled features are actually based on very small changes in the genome, often just the addition or deletion of a single base-pair (the smallest unit of genetic material). If we make these small changes ourselves, then we can add or subtract quite a bit of genetically controlled behavior.

However, this is like anything — all of this can be used for good or evil; and you will get no say whatsoever in which one you get, because it will be someone else doing it (and probably funded by your own government). Genetic Engineering is best banned, in its entirety. The issues are far too complex, and there is far too little understanding about these issues, even among biologists, let alone the public (Key SA wine region leads push to remain GM-free).

An alternative that is available in many geographical regions is to use current cultivars from one region and transfer them to other regions. If Champagne and Burgundy are now too warm for Pinot noir and Chardonnay, then replace them with Cabernet sauvignon and Sémillon. Stick the Pinot noir and Chardonnay in Denmark, where they can now grow quite well. You get the idea — we still get roughly the same wines, and vignerons get to keep growing grapes. What changes is geographical location, not so much the types of wines.

This is still a pretty big change for the wine industry, of course. Our grandchildren will revere Danish wine, even if we don't (yet). I'm probably too old to see it fully, but most of you may not be.

Conclusion

I don't really have an answer to the question posed in the title, other than standard human inertia. We usually don't change anything until we are forced to — if it isn't broken, then don't fix it. However, it has become increasingly clear worldwide that something is pretty seriously broken; and we are now pretty sure that we know what it is. We also have several options for what specifically can be done in viticulture to mitigate the effects of the breakage, along with the obvious global option of trying to slow down (and even reverse) the process of climate change. The future of the wine industry does actually depend on it, whether we turn a blind eye or not.