Quality label for wine seeks to shine

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Terravin, Vaud wine quality label organization, says it will be making changes in 2015 to help consumers understand that it isn’t a competition, but a quality label. It will keep the colour gold but probably move away from a sticker to a collar for the bottle neck, a kind of bowtie for fine wine.

They’ve pinpointed a problem that is bigger than the Terravin label.

How many people buy a bottle of wine because there’s a sticker or collar on it showing that some group of professionals decided it was drink-worthy? I suspect all of us have, even knowledgeable professionals in the wine business who, faced with unknown labels while vacationing on an obscure island, grabbed one with a gold medal.

The problem is that we often don’t know what the medals, collars, stickers and other “award-winning wine” paraphernalia mean. A nice way of describing these in French: “des joutes viniques“. (source: Terravin)

The annual general meeting of Terravin 1 May, held on the Vaud-Fribourg border at the Caveau de Vully, confronted the problem of growing consumer confusion about quality labels versus competition awards.

The group in 2013 celebrated its 50th anniversary, but it began awarding its Lauriers d’Or for the best Vaud wines only in 1993 and it created its Lauriers de Platine, which rewards the best Chasselas wines, only in 2007.

Last year it took a survey to find out what people thought, and the answer was clear: Terravin should be saying clearly it provides a quality label.

The group confesses that it contributed to the confusion, which has grown as the number of wine competitions has increased: its Lauriers d’Or wines are given a gold sticker that visually resembles gold medal stickers given by a number of competitions. And its Lauriers de Platine wines are in fact winners of a competition, but what the group refers to as one that is clearly “hedonist”. The “college” of oenologists and other experts who taste and rate (not rank) Vaud’s Chasselas wines throughout the year select 16 of the best and then let a jury of mostly sommeliers and journalists pick their favourites during three rounds of selections in a morning. Personal taste is the order of the day.

I’m just a bottle buyer: what’s the difference?

Let’s back up and look at what quality labels are; they exist used for wine but also in other businesses, for example, the olive oil industries in several regions in Europe.

Monday night I attended a presentation of wines and olive oils from the Livorno Province on the coast in Tuscany. An oil producers consortium talked about why there is a need to select and promote the best. They have a large number of producers and oil is made from 80 varieties of olives. Consumers want to understand what it means to be the best, want help learning to appreciate these. A group of experts from the region regularly reviews oils to rate them for origin, quality and typicity: the top oils act as standard setters, for they are what the producers themselves seek in an excellent product.

Sound familiar?

Competitions help define market levels

Wine competitions have groups of judges from the area and further afield to check wines for faults and give them points for good qualities, visually, in nose and in mouth. Winning wines receive the highest number of points. Competitions provide a sense of whether or not the wine is well made, but they primarily offer a comparative view of a wine in its market, at a given moment. Judges from a large area and a list of features that are noted give some objectivity, but one criticism is that wines often compete when they are too young, or in some cases wines with short lives do well, then falter just as consumers are buying them.

Nevertheless, the best competitions give consumers some guidance and wine producers use them for marketing.

Setting standards

A quality label doesn’t worry about ranking wines: it ensures that a product lives up to standards set by those who make it and know it best. Most labels are created by producers themselves, who then ensure the label’s quality by overseeing the independence and qualifications of the tasters.

Terravin started in Yvorne, soon spread to cover the canton

Terravin has a group of 20 judges, its independent college of oenologists and other experts who meet in groups of five several times a year to blind taste the wines. They have training sessions and use a complex set of 25 criteria to determine if each wine meets the quality criteria: these are not simply correctly made wines, says Terravin, they must go further and give good expressions of their grape variety, terroir and AOC (appellation d’origine controlée). A wine that misses even one criterion will fail to pass.

The wines can be presented either before or after bottling, but if it’s before, the wines that are accepted must be tasted again within three months of bottling.

The success rate for wines presented is 50 percent, but the wines that carry the label are just 5 percent in terms of volume, of the canton’s total wine production.

The group recently began to work with Terre Vaudoise, a regional products specialist with shops in Lausanne and Pully that now carries the wines, to help raise the visibility of the label.

The wines are also available in a number of shops; the group’s web site has a list.