A solution to bottle shop angst

Many’s the time I’ve wished for a wine bottle with a label like those on cheap perfumes at the chemist. You know the ones: “If you like Chanel No. 5, you’ll love [insert slightly suggestive name here].” Except in the instance of wine, the label might say, “If you like Dom Perignon, you’ll love this $20 bottle of plonk.” It would save time and plenty of bottle shop angst.

Well, the good folk from the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) have come up with an even better solution. The PinotG Style Spectrum gives pinot gris and pinot grigio wines a spectrum rating from “crisp” to “luscious” that gives consumers a handle on what’s inside the bottle.

Grigio/gris: a rose by any other name

Pinot gris and pinot grigio wines come from the same grape; the difference in nomenclature refers only to the different styles of wine produced. Pinot gris is traditionally produced in Alsace, where the style is luscious and rich. Italian-produced pinot grigio, by contrast, tends to be crisp and zesty.

To confuse matters further, the line between the two styles has become blurred in recent years, with many pinot grigio wines becoming richer and some pinot gris wines being made in a slightly more restrained style. Even Italian wine producers have changed what they’re making in recent years, says Peter Godden, Industry Applications Group Manager at the AWRI, with some grigios moving from crisp towards luscious in style. Godden suggests we call the whole lot “PinotG” to cover all expressions of the grape.

This is where the Spectrum comes in handy. “To explain the whole concept of the PinotG Spectrum in one go is too much for most consumers,” Godden explained. “There’s a problem; there’s at least two names for the same variety, and lots of different wine styles. It’s confusing, isn’t it?” The PinotG Spectrum cuts through all the confusion with a scale that gives consumers a clear visual indication of what’s inside the bottle.

While the PinotG moniker is yet to be taken up in the Australian wine industry, Godden thinks it’s just a matter of time. “If someone does it and it’s successful, there’ll be a lot of people wanting to be a close second in the market. But until someone does it for real, no one else seems game.”

From fine Burgundy to cask chardy

The PinotG Style Spectrum isn’t new; it was launched in 2010. What is new, however, is that the AWRI has been developing an equivalent Spectrum for chardonnay. While the PinotG Spectrum uses “crisp” and “luscious” as its ‘anchor words’, during the development of the Chardonnay Spectrum, the wines have been classified on a spectrum from “fine” to “full”. “The terms used on the labelling device will be decided after extensive industry consultation,” Godden said.

The AWRI is currently seeking industry support to fully develop and refine the Chardonnay Spectrum for use on labels, as well as a precommitment to use the Spectrum once it is fully developed.

While the PinotG Spectrum works for wines from the crispest pinot grigio through to the most luscious pinot gris, the Chardonnay Spectrum will rate wines from cheap quaffing chardonnay through to 300-bucks-a-pop white Burgundy, Godden says. Importantly, however, it works well for bottle shop wine: the $15 to $25 chardonnays that make up most retail sales.

How it works

The PinotG Spectrum relies on ‘fingerprinting’: using a spectrophotometer to analyse the wine, which is then cross-referenced with data from the AWRI’s sensory panel. “We’ve built a calibration of a spectral scan against experienced tasters rating the PinotG style from crisp to luscious.

“The technology behind it is a world first - there’s no question,” Godden said. “We are measuring wine style. It’s an amazing concept. It has a huge applicability throughout winemaking and grape growing, not just for labelling wine.”

While wine buffs might turn their collective noses up at the notion of a machine describing something as complex and difficult to define as wine style, Godden says there’s more to it than just chemistry.

“When we taste as experienced tasters, or professionally, we taste analytically, and we start to talk about individual components,” Godden said. “But when we drink wine, we don’t talk and think about those things. We take in the whole experience.”

To analyse the wine for individual chemical measures would not give data that is necessarily useful in describing a wine stylistically, Godden says. “Fingerprinting is looking at everything in the wine in one go. And the clever statistics that are used in the background of this give weightings to various parts of the Spectrum that relate to alcohol, or sugar, or phenolics, or to many other components.

“The Spectrum tells us the things that distinguish between the wines, and match best to sensory tasters’ ratings of those wines; things at particular parts of the Spectrum at particular wavelengths. But to do that, you don’t need to know what these things are. It’s analogous to drinking the wine and not just tasting it analytically.

“So fingerprinting’s looking at everything in one go. It gives us insights into what is important in determining the differences, but in terms of rating the wines on the Spectrum, [the chemistry is] irrelevant.”

Slow uptake

The Spectrum sounds like just the thing to assuage my bottle shop angst. So why am I yet to see it on the shelves? “The major issue is that no one’s got a cent to spend,” Godden said. “Most companies have had - at least for the last two years - a blanket stop on any new spends on anything. I think if we launched it five years earlier, it would’ve had huge uptake.”

There are logistical reasons, too, Godden says. While the AWRI anticipated that winemakers would add the PinotG Spectrum as a separate label on their wine bottles, it’s not quite as simple as that. Godden says the feedback he’s received is that a separate label is too expensive, but that most companies aren’t in a position to spend money on major revamps of their labels.

There are other costs involved in using the PinotG Spectrum. “There’s a one-off cost of testing the wine, and then there’s a 2 cents per bottle licensing fee,” said Godden. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, and we think it adds more than 2 cents per bottle value. And one of the major users says this quite categorically: it adds much more value than 2 cents per bottle.”

Despite the wine industry’s sluggishness, the PinotG Spectrum following is definitely growing, Godden says. Wineries are slowly coming on board and a number have indicated they will use the Spectrum when they revamp their labels.

Surprising discoveries

Many important discoveries have been made while researchers were looking for something else entirely. That’s been the case in the development of the PinotG Spectrum. “What we found is that glycerol is not important at all in defining the difference between crisp grigio and luscious gris,” Godden said. “You can double the amount of glycerol in wine and experienced tasters can’t tell the difference.”

Rather than glycerol, the AWRI found that phenolics are what most affect mouthfeel. “As you know, you’ve got tannins in red wine,” Godden said. “You’ve also got tannins in white wine - different tannins, maybe, or different quantities. But it’s the phenolics at different points on the Spectrum that really affect mouthfeel.”

This discovery has fed into other AWRI research projects; namely, the white wine phenolics project.

“We know relatively little about what changes or affects the mouthfeel and texture of wine,” Godden said. “When you think about the difference between a truly great wine that might sell for thousands of dollars a bottle and a $10 bottle, in terms of percentage of what’s actually in the bottle, 97 or 98% of it’s going to be exactly the same.

“A very small percentage of things that are different make a difference in price and quality perception, which is what makes wine such a fascinating product. I don’t think there’s any other product that can claim that.”

Indeed. I’ll drink to that.