Thoughts on Portfolio Tastings
Good evening all,
This wasn’t written while I was on a train, so fingers crossed we aren’t littered with typos this week. Someone said “I have come to expect it from you, it's endearing!”*
This isn’t sponsored editorial
This week I went to the SWIG Trade Portfolio tasting, I really like their range.
I’m hoping to use some of their wines for a number of the events and wine tastings I’m hosting over the next year.
It’s a nice snapshot to have a proper look at a few hundred wines in a few hours. It gives you a real sense of perspective on a wholesaler/importer by looking at all their wines together. Rather that than just looking a specific producers or ranges in isolation, as samples in the office.
My Approach To Trade Tastings.
Firstly, I’m a grumpy fucker, and I like to go on my own, and if I’m honest, as I’m usually there for work, and I’d rather not talk to anyone at all. Not even the producers**.
Yes, it’s great for some people to chat to the winemaker and get the back story, maybe somms, or retail buyers who need a hook to cling onto, beyond “this wine is great, trust me!”.
For me, and the way I’m looking at wines right now, I need things with a nice label, that fit within my budget for tasting events and then they need to be from somewhere fun to talk about.
A lot of my tastings centre around wine styles, regions and compare/contrast, they’re for guests who are interested, but not particularly knowledgeable.
I’m also not there to flog wine, which is particularly refreshing. So I take wines that give the opportunity to talk more broadly, and I don’t have to know the name of the winemakers dog, or daughter.
How To Taste 250 Wines in 2hrs.
Don’t.
I spend the first 10 minutes skimming through the booklet or tasting sheet, I go through and mark off all the producers or wines that look like they make some sort of sense to taste.
If they’re too expensive I won’t bother tasting them. If they’re from the wrong country I won’t bother tasting them. If they’re generally classics and don’t fit the tasting events I’m looking at, again, I probably won’t bother tasting them.
Then I grab two glasses, one for white & one for red, and plough through the wines in whatever order they are on the sheet. All they have to do is be tasty. I wasn’t really there for MW study, so I didn’t spend too much time overthinking the wines.
All in all, I probably tasted everything I was there to look at in about 90 minutes, probably around 50 wines, then for the last hours I just followed my eyes & nose tasting whatever looked interesting.
For context, I went to SITT*** in Feb and spent 2 hours tasting every Sauvignon Blanc in the room from a study point of view. After that I just poked about tasting things with people l knew or with wines that had pretty labels.
They Are a Bit Overwhelming
More often than not, I find the whole experience a bit overwhelming, there’s never anywhere to put your pen, pad, glasses down, there’s too many people jostling for selfies and taking photos, there’s too many wines to give each one any real concentration.
In a past life I’d go to these things, then pull in samples of all the wines that I liked that made sense to look at properly once I’d got back to the office to re-taste.
Suppliers often put on tastings like this to tick off as many customers in one go, so they don’t have to send out bottles and bottles as freebie samples. It’s a tried and tested process, but I do wonder if the hassle and expense and exposure of them really is worth it.
Is There a Better Way?
If wholesale suppliers could find a better way of the right people tasting the right wines, in their own time more effectively, I wouldn’t have to carefully consider the expensive train trip to London, a day out of my diary. I wouldn’t have to taste 200+ wines to find 10 to buy.
Finding a range of wines from lots of small, cool, agile importers sounds like a great idea, but in practice, you need to balance them out with one or two of the large suppliers for reasons other than good wines.
One of the things that’s cropped up over the last few years are groups of like minded suppliers hosting combined tastings, such as Dirty Dozen or The ‘WTAF’ Alternative Formats Tastings. They make a lot of sense from a supplier point of view, shared costs, shared customers****.
I’m not wholly convinced that they make such sense for buyers, because it’s easy to taste another 250+ wines, whittle that down to 10 or 15 that make sense, then realise that there’s 2 wines from each of the 7 or 8 suppliers.
All of a sudden you have a bunch of new accounts to open, a bunch of different suppliers, invoices, purchase orders, payment terms and that to figure out, and you end up wishing that all the wines in the room were available from the same place.
Perhaps more suppliers will end up consolidating like Red Squirrel and Knotted Vines did to create Graft Wines.
Or, perhaps more suppliers could find a way to consolidate deliveries? I ask this as a question because I don’t know anyone doing it, but think it’s a good idea.
I wonder if the onus should be on indies to come together in smaller buying groups. Funnily enough, indies generally value their independence, so that largely hasn’t happened either.
So, That’s Why I Like Swig.
Their range ticks a lot of boxes and all the wines come on the same invoice/delivery.
I can rock up at a tasting fairly anonymously, taste what I need to taste and slip off without too much faffing about.
Their focus is the on-trade too, meaning there’s not a huge amount of exposure for the wines in a retail setting, which I quite like.
dk
* Thanks, Paul.
** If I really like their wines, I’ll go and watch them on WineTimeLondon’s IGTV channel as they’re bound to have been on at some point.
*** “The Specialist Importers Trade Tasting is the event where independents from the on and off-trade have been doing business with companies like yours since 2005”
**** I’m not talking about Marketing tastings like ‘Wines of Portugal’ or whatever, they certainly have a place to raise awareness, and are great for study purposes, and the ‘Influencer’ crowd do their bit here as well.
While I’ve got you. At some point I’m going to switch the Paywall on properly. So if you’re still a free subscriber, consider chipping in £20 for the year, or £5 per month to support and follow along the MW journey. Thanks.
Further Reading
Swig Wines on the internet
“A bunch of misfits looking for delicious undiscovered wines that punch above their weight.”
A review of the recent Dirty Dozen Trade Tasting, by David Kermode in The Buyer
“The Dirty Dozen are twelve small, specialist importers who see themselves as complementary to one another and not competition in what they offer the trade…”