{"id":16189,"date":"2016-11-04T22:01:29","date_gmt":"2016-11-04T22:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=16189"},"modified":"2016-11-04T22:07:58","modified_gmt":"2016-11-04T22:07:58","slug":"brand-familiarity-quality-and-the-mac-and-cheese-metaphor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/uncategorized\/brand-familiarity-quality-and-the-mac-and-cheese-metaphor","title":{"rendered":"Brand familiarity, quality and the mac and cheese metaphor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday\u2019s Kayra tasting<\/a> raised an interesting question.<\/p>\n

In 2006, winemaker Daniel O\u2019Donnell finds himself in charge of one of Turkey\u2019s most popular wine brands, Buzbag<\/a>. As a winemaker, surely it\u2019s his job to make this wine \u2018better\u2019. He says that hygiene standards weren\u2019t the highest, and the wine comes from Eastern Turkey, where for religious reasons, pretty much all the people working in the winery don\u2019t drink wine. The grapes come in, and there is no selection for quality. They are made into wine. Then the wine is bottled, with the oldest wine in tanks bottled first.<\/p>\n

And people buy and love this wine. I never tried the old Buzbag (I\u2019ve not tried the new either, just the Reserve version), but I imagine that it wasn\u2019t great. But people who buy this wine, and hold the brand dear, have learned to like a pretty old school, probably faulty wine. As a new winemaker, put in charge of production, what do you do?<\/p>\n

O\u2019Donnell used the ‘macaroni cheese’ metaphor. It\u2019s a little lost on me because we never had macaroni cheese at home, but I can see what he\u2019s getting at. You love your mother\u2019s macaroni cheese. For you, this becomes the benchmark. If others try it, they might not like it so much: it might not be the best, but it is the one you grew up with, and you love it.<\/p>\n

So, with wine, is there a similar liking of familiar tastes? Do we grow to love flavours that are familiar when it comes to wine brands, just as we do with other foods?<\/p>\n

Wisely, O\u2019Donnell realised he couldn\u2019t change Buzbag beyond all recognition. Yet he couldn\u2019t leave it how it was. So he had to work to improve hygiene and clean it up. But to clean it up too much, and produce a fruity commercial wine, would lose the essence of the brand that people are familiar with.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take another example: Musar. It is a wine I love, but if you were to strip it of its brettanomyces and volatile acidity (I\u2019ve seen lab analyses on this wine), you\u2019d probably have a boring, sweet, ripe warm-climate wine. It would take great skill to produce something that\u2019s still recognizably Musar and interesting, while cleaning the wine of its brett and oxidative character. Indeed, don\u2019t know whether this is actually achievable or not.<\/p>\n

If wine is an acquired taste, then it\u2019s possible to acquire a taste for wine that, by conventional standards, isn\u2019t very good. This doesn\u2019t mean that anything goes when it comes to wine quality, just that wine isn\u2019t simple, and we need to be humble in the face of wine.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a whole group of consumers out there who aren\u2019t looking for novelty. They are looking for a familiar flavour in their favourite brand of wine or beer or soft drink. Change the recipe, and this group of consumers will notice. It\u2019s another reminder that in discussions about wine, we really need to segment consumers. There\u2019s no such person as \u2018the consumer\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday\u2019s Kayra tasting raised an interesting question. In 2006, winemaker Daniel O\u2019Donnell finds himself in charge of one of Turkey\u2019s most popular wine brands, Buzbag. As a winemaker, surely it\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16189"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16192,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16189\/revisions\/16192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}