Wine styles

Factors and options to consider

There are a number of factors and options to consider in determining whether your business is positioned to offer something different or modify current offerings and do so profitably. The key to navigating these successfully is:

• knowledge and awareness
• planning and preparedness
• vineyard drivers
• winemaking techniques and processes

Having some flexibility in your portfolio can help navigate shifts and industry challenges across multiple aspects of the supply chain and help set up a more resilient, profitable and successful wine business.  

The big trends with respect to wine style in the current market are crystal clear: the shift to lighter styles, which is the main focus here.

What you need to know and where to find it

When considering if a style change is appropriate for a particular wine, there are several ways to bring rigour to the planning around it and take out the guesswork. Understanding the opportunities and the trade-offs are crucial to making informed winemaking and business decisions, so information is key. 

Some useful sources of information and desktop exercises:

Wine Australia insights and tools provide invaluable data and information on domestic and export markets, consumer trends and style preferences:

• Market Insights and Market bulletins 
• Ask an Analyst support service 
• Planning your wine explores the ‘whole-of-business’ perspective.

Industry reports, such as State of the Grapes and Endeavour Group’s Distilled publication, are derived from large data sets across the country. They also provide some interesting comparisons of wine with different drinks categories.

Paid resources and data are also available from sources like IWSR and scan data from NielsenIQ and Circana.

Wine show results can offer great insights into industry trends and wine style and quality benchmarks. The results are usually publicly available and quite objective. Attending exhibitors’ tastings can also be a simple and useful exercise. 

Commercial success and consumer preferences however are not necessarily aligned with wine show success, with some popular styles and market segments scoring more modestly. This 2012 report by Charles Sturt University, Measuring Consumer taste Preference through Wine Shows, explores the potential for beneficial cross over of wine shows results and consumer insights.  

Insights from existing contacts and colleagues, including cellar door staff, distributors and their sales teams, are among your best resources. It also highlights the importance of investing in and training your cellar door and sales teams so they can be better attuned to customers and gauging feedback. 

External consultants can be a good investment in some cases for more direct input and tailored advice specific to your business. 

Media publications and awards systems can provide detailed commentary and prove useful for industry and product benchmarking.

What are the main vineyard drivers of wine style?

If there is one aspect in common across the various vineyard drivers of wine style, it is that they all should really be planned in advance for the best result. 

The main vineyard drivers tend to be:

Grape varieties

If a choice is available, this is one of the most fundamental drivers of style – from sparkling wine (whether a blend is Pinot or Chardonnay dominant for example) to rosé and, of course, the full range of red and white wines. Observing the relative shifts in grape prices across regions and varieties can be instructive as they respond to market signals. 

Location

There are several ways to consider this in terms of a business’s approach to wine style. In some cases, it could be a shift from one site to another within a region (or even a vineyard), while in others it could even involve acquiring or merging with a business in a totally different part of the country. 

Ripeness

For all wines, there are few things as important as picking time to drive style and it is one of the most important decisions of the winemaking team. Two of the largest volume varieties – Chardonnay and Shiraz – illustrate that better than most, but finesse is important and extremes in either direction (very green or very ripe) can create their own challenges. 

Canopy management

This aspect of viticulture involves an extensive range of techniques to achieve various objectives, but a good example of how this can affect wine style is shoot thinning. In the case of making lighter-bodied red wines, the tendency will be to harvest a little earlier, but this can exacerbate any greener characters. If margins or costs allow, then shoot thinning can be a great way of reducing green characters and improving texture in red wines at lower ripeness.

Although the main focus here is on relatively conventional white and red still wines, many of these are still quite relevant to sparkling and even fortified styles. 

What are the top winemaking techniques and processes for steering wine style direction?

Once fruit arrives in the cellar, there is a whole new set of options that can be useful for steering wines in the style direction that best suits a business and its customers. For clarity, hand picking versus machine harvesting is left aside for now, as it is often a financial decision. 

Some of the top processes to keep in mind include:

Grape receival and processing

• For whites, this might be the difference between the extraction from crushing and/or skin contact time versus top-loading or whole-bunch pressing.
• For reds, the handling considerations can be very similar when considering the texture differences between must pumping versus direct tipping to open fermenters.
• The latest generation of destemmers can also have an impact on the texture of final wines.

Fermentation

This has almost endless ways to steer style direction and, again, comes back to planning beforehand and having a sense of where the final wine is headed:

• yeast selection 
• temperature
• oak inclusions or other products
• turbidity
• skin contact (whites)  
• extraction
• pressing time (reds). 

Whole bunches in reds

• Can be a great way to bring focus and fragrance to reds when done sensitively and with balance.
• Requires skill, care and balance – many of the top reds in wine shows and favoured by the critics use this method to great effect.
• The cost of hand picking may rule this out in many cases and it won’t be to everyone’s liking.

Maturation

• Storage temperature and duration are sometimes overlooked or underestimated in terms of their impact on fruit freshness and texture. 
• Making reds that are brighter and more fruit-driven can be a very simple way to shift the style in that direction.
• The same goes for the use of oak, regardless of the format. 

Blending and bottling

The skill involved in fine-tuning wines for bottle is one of the final stages to make an impact on style. A good example is the deft hand needed in blending light dry red (LDR) styles (again, not suited to all brands). Others include:

• managing dissolved gasses
• sweet-spotting final alcohols using reverse osmosis 
• careful use of the various new products available to finesse texture.

What’s the best market position for this wine style and your business?

If there is to be a shift in style, one of the most important business considerations is how this should be presented and explained to the market. The last thing any modern wine business needs is to alienate or confuse existing loyal customers. 

In some cases, it may be best to simply introduce or trial a new product within an existing range, perhaps even releasing it first to your wine club. With a more radical change, such as new spritz products, it might be wise to develop a whole new brand that is tailored for the target market segment and channels. 

Either way, having a plan is key to success.