Young set pace on wine trends

The wines you'll be savoring five years from now are being picked today by enological trendsetters barely old enough to drink.

But what they're looking for – wines that are quirky, regional, with rich background stories – isn't what the mainstream domestic industry seems to be selling today.

"It flies in the face of the way wines are made in California," said Joshua Greene, editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits magazine.

Greene was part of a panel discussing the state of the industry Wednesday morning at the annual Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in Sacramento, the largest conference of the year for the U.S. wine business.

In just the last few years, said Greene, whose magazine annually surveys the wine buyers at 2,300 restaurants across the country, there's been an explosion in the number of sommeliers, or wine stewards, in their 20s.

While sommeliers purchase only a small fraction of the wine bought in the nation each year, their choices play an important role in establishing industry trends for years to come.

Change may be in store for the industry, but the 10,000 wine business players gathered at the Sacramento Convention Center this week are celebrating an excellent year.

• Retail sales topped $30 billion, up 4 percent on the year.

• Grape prices were up, following the end of a nearly decadelong glut driven by a wave of overplanting in the 1990s.

• And the industry's most expensive products continued to be its best–sellers: For bottles $12 and up, sales rose by 20 percent or better.

Still, the cheery sales data came with several shots of caution, particularly concerning the growing strength of import brands in the U.S. market. Import brands accounted for nearly two-thirds of the growth of wine sales last year.

"Now is the time to not be complacent," said Glenn Proctor, a global wine broker with Ciatti Co. in San Rafael.

Import brands, especially Spanish and Italian labels, have been especially successful at catering to the whims of a few particularly influential wine buyers: the new generation of young sommeliers at the nation's high-end restaurants.

Imports represent about 31 percent of the total wine market by volume. But they account for a significantly larger share – about 43 percent – of the wine sold at the restaurants.

More than their predecessors, the new generation of sommeliers is looking both to have fun and to make a statement through wine, Greene said and that often means looking for something handcrafted and unique.

"Their challenge is to find a wine that they're as excited about as the chef is … about the flavor of his vegetables from the farmers market," Greene said.

Some California wines, those made from grapes grown on the same piece of land year after year and fermented using traditional techniques, fit that mold, Greene said.

But many winemakers, in the interest of consistency or hoping to produce wines with broad appeal, have moved to more modern methods, such as processing the wine using reverse osmosis to reach a target alcohol level. That, Greene said, tends to detract from a difficult-to-quantify but potentially valuable trait of a wine – its "authenticity."

To be "authentic," Greene said, a winery doesn't necessarily have to be small and old-fashioned. But it probably does need to know something about the land on which its grapes were grown as opposed to buying bulk grapes on the open market. And newfangled winemaking techniques are probably off-limits, too. A history of the winery and its people adds to the picture.

Still, said industry analyst Jon Fredrikson, the U.S. market for wine is so vast and diverse that there's probably room for wines-with-a-story as well as the low-priced, bulk-manufactured brands that are consistently the best supermarket sellers.

"We way overestimate the knowledge of the American consumer," Fredrikson said.

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• Call The Bee's Jim Downing, (916) 321-1065.