Unconscious bias?

There has been much made in the press recently on unconscious bias and the merits of training to make us aware of this, here I am going to take a different slant on this and how it can apply to our wine perceptions.

We often discuss labels in the shop and how they can help or otherwise, we have one Spanish wine which I have always avoided purely because of the label: while I am a dog lover I do not really take to French Bulldogs and the Can do Sil has one on the label! That was all that put me off it, so much so I hadn’t read the back label or looked it up.

When Seb chose it to go on our Bin End list it prompted me to have a closer look and I saw it was a blend of Mencia and Garnacha, two of my favourite varieties. Having read about it I then bought one to try this week at home and it was really good. Mencia can be a little more challenging than others and can make it taste like it was matured in oak when all of both wines were aged in very modern stainless steel. Once you get into the bottle it develops a real freshness and lots of fruit, typical of the wines of Galicia. Lesson learned and I will be more open to looking at wines in more depth before making my mind up in future.

Today was another morning for putting deliveries away and bringing out of stock bottles back into the shop. The NZ Long White is back and looks very different, the label is, on first glance overly simple and Ormy and I were quite shocked by how plain it looks. On further inspection you can see where the designer earned her or his money: there is some very fine detailing and texture to the label that supports the plainness of the initial look. Definitely a case of less is more!

American labelling can divide opinion too, one of our new Kentucky Bourbons has a very retro label, a look that goes back to the days of the 19th Century when they might have been hand drawn. Again there is some texture to the text on the label and it feels better than it initially looks. We have a delicious Syrah from Washington State, the Cascadia, where the label is a watercolour of the rivers, trees and mountains associated with the region and definitely gives a “sense of place” as much as a Chateau does on a Bordeaux. I have heard comments that this style of label doesn’t help because it doesn’t show the winery.

The lesson for us all is that the winemakers are all doing what they can to make their bottles stand out on crowded shelves and ever-growing web lists. If a picture catches your eye for whatever reason then do look further. Trust the person you are buying from to have good wine and you can look with that extra bit of reassurance!

I think we will leave discussing corks, screw tops and other closures for another time!

Andrew