Tastium®

Over 20 years ago I noticed a new trend in the wine business that promoted neutral blend of varietal wines in production area that were renowned before that for their wines with lots of character. At the time I was told by many producers all over the world that they were producing wine for entry-level drinker that were getting more and more important in the biggest emerging markets like in the United States. If I remember well I had some long arguments with a lot of people at the time, and my point that it is nice to make some wines more approachable by the masses, but if you do it and lose the soul that makes your region and your wines, in the long run you will destroy your market as you will have a bunch of boring cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay from your area, battling against another bunch of boring cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay from another area or country. Not that there is nothing wrong with either cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay, but for a while they were the only thing available in many markets.

Of course this is the way that the market went, to the detriment of regional or varietal diversity. Luckily, over the last decade, a wider diversity of varietals and appellations have started to become popular and the market is slowly changing, with people looking for more interesting tasting wines than the bland stuff available on most retailer’s shelves. The main problem that I have found is that some producer, to make their wine more accessible, toned down their traditional wines to bring them in line more with the blandness of the global market. This problem reminds me a lot of what I discussed some weeks back about food lacking taste, in that it seems that the experts in the food and wine industry have suddenly decided all over the world that people did not want food or wines that have taste in them. I think that the taste molecules (Tastium®) that were used to make food and wine are getting so expensive in the future markets that they are now forced to use less Tastium® and more imitation Tastium® to make their products profitable.

I am sure that with the billions spent in genetic engineering or nanotechnology that the world’s experts will soon create some new version of Tastium® that will be better tasting and cheaper to produce and that one day soon we will have taste back in our food and wine.

Lucito