Women Wine Critics Board

Make Benefit Glorious Zinfandel

"Consumer Learnings for Make Benefit Glorious Zinfandel Future"

Christian Miller, owner of Full Glass Research—a wine industry research firm—chose this title for a presentation he gave in Paso Robles as a joking reference to the movie Borat.  (See the movie's wine episode here.) And it’s pretty appropriate, because depending on who you talk to, zinfandel means different things to different people. There’s an almost Babel-like confusion involved in the language of zinfandel.

Some people expect jammy wines. Some people expect spice and pepper. Some people don’t like it because they don’t know what to expect. Only 17% of hard core wine geeks would drink zinfandel with a "gourmet dinner at home," but 51% of the same group agree that zinfandel "complements a wide variety of food."

Zin winemakers reported that direct-to-consumer sales were the most important part of their marketing. But according to the study, consumers want to see more zinfandel in restaurants. One of the significant findings of the study was a difference in trade perception vs. consumer perception. In other words, wine drinkers are not seeing what they want on restaurant lists—versatile, food-friendly zinfandels.

Make Up or Break Up

Do “Chick Wines” Really Exist?

This week we are joined by Christian Miller, proprietor of Full Glass Research and director of research for Wine Opinions.

"Chick lit" seems to have been a recent trend in literature, or at least in publishing house PR. I guess it’s another trend that I missed or didn’t really get. (Are the Brontes chick lit? Eudora Welty? Toni Morrison? They all bring a feminine perspective, but somehow I have a hard time thinking of them as chick lit). And the concept of "chick films" seems to get plenty of mention in popular culture from radio to critics to water cooler talk. So are there "chick wines" or is this another urban myth?

This concept has a fairly long cultural history in the U.S. wine business, from the notion that red wines are drunk by men and white wines by women to the idea that wine in general was a women’s drink and men preferred beer. These cruder and more basic notions have been generally discarded, but our preference for easy generalities still pops up in ideas about differences between what men and women want in wine. The fact that there are genuine biological differences in sensory perception between genders helps fuel these ideas.

We’re getting some answers and insights into this issue at Wine Opinions. Wine Opinions is a research company that has created a panel of over 2000 core involved wine consumers, geographically and demographically representative of the wine buyers who really drive the market for fine wines. We do market research for a variety of wineries, and grower/winery organizations. During the course of this research, we often look for patterns or trends by gender in consumer opinion.