Guy Woodward: how to avoid putting off consumers

By Guy Woodward

Published: 15 May, 2025

I’m going to come right out and admit it. I’ve worked in the wine world for 22 years now, and I still don’t really understand malolactic fermentation. I know what it is, in principle. I even know roughly what it does. But how it works or how you stop it? Not a scooby…

The thing is, never once have I felt like I needed to know. Better still, my blissful ignorance precludes me from ever talking or writing about it and, in the process, boring consumers senseless – or, worse still, alienating them completely. Because trust me, most consumers don’t know either, and neither do they care – about this or most winemaking minutiae.

I interviewed the Alsace winemaking great Olivier Humbrecht MW the other day, and spent 10 minutes of an otherwise engaging hour trying to follow his ever-more detailed insights into the concept of inverted soils. I could tell it was important – especially to fellow MWs, winemakers and Jamie Goode. But none of it made it into the final article. What did was the part where he talked about meeting his wife on London’s No.19 bus.

The writer Henry Jeffreys recently posed the question of whether wine writers need wine qualifications. It’s a hard no from me. The likes of Jancis Robinson MW and Tim Atkin MW notwithstanding, I’d even argue it can be detrimental. I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read that are more like an MW thesis than something that consumers can relate to and benefit from. And we wonder why wine is viewed as elitist…

I was reading a few of the prodigiously long Bordeaux 2024 vintage reports on fine-wine merchants’ sites recently. All impressive in their detail, but do would-be buyers really want to know the dates of budbreak, flowering and veraison; the impact of hydric stress; or the diurnal temperature range in St-Estèphe? All anyone really needs to know is it rained. A lot. Maybe with a quote from a winemaker saying how his/her wellies leaked for the first time in 30 years.

Doing consumer tastings, I gen up on techy stats in case someone asks me. No-one ever does – unless we make them feel like they should do. With that in mind, here are my top five topics to avoid when speaking to consumers.

1) Clones. In trade tastings, you can bet some bore will ask what clone of Pinot is planted. There are only two possible reasons for this: a) They’re studying for their MW; or b) They’re desperately trying to impress a room of wine geeks. Neither of which applies to normal people.

2) PH levels. I admit I’m not the most scientifically minded, but any talk of PH levels immediately returns me to the school chemistry lab. It’s all so confusing – high PH means low acidity, right? Or is it the other way around? And how high is high? How low is low? It always seems to be roughly about 3, in any case.

3) Ditto levels of Brix, TA, dosage or potential alcohol. You can just about get away with the date of disgorgement and, on a good day, residual sugar. Even I know what disgorgement is – Lanson laid on a library tasting the other day, going back to 1921, and the difference between the original and recent disgorgements was profound. But the fact remains that most consumers will be more interested – and more likely to remember – that the 1952 was served by Charles de Gaulle to JFK at the latter’s state dinner.

4) Soil types. Urgh. Clay soils retain moisture, right? Whereas you can get better drainage on gravel. Or is it granite? And what about limestone? Is that the same as chalk? And where does calcareous fit in?

5) Trellising and training systems. Single Guyot, Double Guyot, Single Cordon, Double Cordon, Gobelet, VSP, Scott Henry, Geneva Double Curtain… What is this, a WSET Level 2 class? Kill me now.

Yes, yes, I get it, all these things are integral aspects of winemaking and I am a philistine. But they only become relevant to consumers if their effect and context are fully explained. So marl soil = calcareous = calcium carbonate = limestone = alkaline = high PH = low acidity = slower ripening = high acidity grapes. That’s eight steps before we get to what’s in the glass – about seven too many, in my book.

Most people will retain one, at most two, pieces of information about a wine: the blend, maybe; perhaps the oak regime; and – if you tell them – how the winemaker met their spouse. And that last one will always be the most memorable.

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