We don’t need no education

What the success of Guinness can teach us about getting the kids into wine.

First a bit of news, after six years editing the Master of Malt whisky blog, I’ve decided to go back to working freelance. I have a potentially big project and a book proposal on the go but this also means I will have more time to devote to Substack. There will be more things for paid subscribers including in-depth looks at certain specific brands and producers. Right, let’s get on with it…

A story about the soaring popularity of Guinness among women and younger people caught my eye recently. A bit of good news in the ocean of despond that makes up most reporting on drinks these days. In a beer landscape dominated by bland lagers, the success of a distinctive and distinctly coloured beer is remarkable. Beer is an acquired taste but Guinness with its roasty, bitter flavour is especially so. People aren’t suddenly drinking Guinness because they have tasted it and fallen in love with the taste. It’s the image which could have been custom designed for Instagram. That slow-poured pint, the head slowly settling on the top, the bubbles slowly rising, aren’t you salivating already?

Admit it, you’re tempted

I have to confess, I don’t love draught Guinness. I much prefer the Foreign Extra Stout, but as soon as I picture a pint of the black stuff poured in a pub, I want one. That the genius of Guinness marketing. As the the old slogan used to go Guinness: Pure Genius. This is the work of decades of brilliant advertising. In the end it doesn’t really matter how Guinness tastes, as long as it looks as it does and there’s the ritual of the pour.

While I was ruminating on the success of Guinness, I went back to some discussion on Linkedin where I seem to be spending an increasing amount of time. There’s something quite mesmerising about seemingly normal people saying things like “what are the take aways from lack of Q4 growth?” or oversharing about their mental health. And why is it that all the biggest ravers from university are now marketing gurus? Anyway, I digress. The point is there was a discussion about trying to get customers to spend more on wine and trade up from their pinot grigio and someone responded along the lines of “this is why we need the WSET more than ever”

For those who don’t know the WSET, which for years I thought was the same as the WSTA, is the Wine and Spirit Education Trust which does exactly as its name suggests. It runs teaching programmes for the industry and customers with exams from level one going up to a diploma which is very hard indeed. For the record I hold a level 1 in wine and level 2 in spirits and have no interest at all in going any further. While these exams might be very useful for those in the trade and a great way to learn about these subjects, they are not, I would argue, very useful in reaching the general public.

Cast your mind back to the 1980s and it was still normal to make jokes about wine drinkers like in Red Dwarf: ‘It's never beer, is it? It's always wine. "What do you want on your Cornflakes, darling?" "Oh, I'll have some wine, please."

That joke doesn’t quite work now because wine drinking is so normal. And what changed it? Well, it wasn’t the WSTA, and it wasn’t ‘wine educators’. I’d say it was a combination of Jilly Goolden and Oz Clarke, neither of whom had any wine qualifications, Oddbins, supermarkets, easily understood wines coming out of Chile and Australia combined with a growing number of people taking holidays in France and Tuscany, the Beaujolais run, Peter Mayle, Summer’s Lease. Wine was Australian or French, wine was warmth, wine was sexy. Nobody was learning about malolactic fermentation or memorising the crus of Beaujolais from north to south. 

So how can we recreate some of that ‘80s magic? Well, if I knew, I’d be a top marketing guru rather than a freelance hack desperately trying to make a living in a hostile media environment. But there are some lessons we can take from Guinness. What’s the nearest wine equivalent to Guinness? Champagne, of course! Think about it: the condensation on the side of the bottle, the fiddling about with the cage with the very slim chance you might lose an eye and then the foaming bottle and bubbles rising up from the top of the glass? I know you’re all connoisseurs who know the correct way to pronounce Moët but for most of us, it’s the image that matters. 

Take Greek wine, with its grape varieties like malagousia and agiorgitiko, it had everyone scratching their heads when we used to try and sell it at Oddbins in the ‘90s. Now people love a glass of Aldi assyrtiko. The difference isn’t educators carefully explaining the pronunciation of xinomavro, it’s because Greece is glamorous whereas before it was a Brits on the piss destination. People see the beautiful people on Santorini and it sells the wine of the same name.

It’s a similar story with yacht rosé - because of that image people are happy to spend £20 on a bottle that doesn’t really taste of very much and like Guinness is, let’s be honest, never as good as we think it’s going to be. It’s about anticipation not education. And all it takes is some brilliant marketing, quite a bit of luck and a massive pile of cash. There, fixed wine.