What Job Does Your Wine Do?

There's a lot of chatter about soil, climate and winemaking, but too little about the 'why' of each and every wine. What is its raison d'etre? If it ceased to exist, who would really care?

What job does this do?

It was a question I found myself asking recently while doing a deep tidy of my kitchen and finding various gadgets and tools that hadn’t been used in a long while, if ever. What if I gave or threw them away? Would I be any the poorer? Would anyone else be richer?

To look at wines in the same way might seem perverse, but it’s undeniable that there are hundreds of thousands of different bottles out there (115,000 apply for label approval every year in the US) whose reason for existence is not exactly clear.

If asked what job their wine does, after raising an eyebrow at the question, a fair few producers, I imagine, might well reply “reflect its terroir”.

But is that really a job? How many people, outside the winemaker’s family and maybe

a small group of enthusiasts, would actually care if their particular patch of soil went un-reflected? It might be a shame, of course, but far less so than the daily extinctions of species and languages that pass unnoticed.

Fill a need

What I call a job for a wine is one in which it answers some kind of need - real or imagined - on the part of a sufficient number of potential customers to justify its place on the shelf, list or table. Because, ultimately, that’s what matters.

Champagne’s main job - along with its fizzy competitors’ - is to mark a celebration, and/or possibly add a certain something to pre-dinner drinks. Rosé is for summer afternoons, ideally close to a pool or the sea. Of course, these styles may be able to do other jobs very well, as Champagne companies prove by emphasising the sophistication they confer on the people ordering them, and by hosting meals at which every course is matched with bubbles; and as makers of super-premium pink wines are doing with their ‘gastronomic’ efforts.

Like the part-time employee who, without anyone noticing quite how or why, finds themself on the permanent staff, rosé is now hard at work as a ‘simple, enjoyable drink’ from January 1 to December 31.

Sauternes looks like a saddlemaker in a village with no horses.

Sauternes, by contrast, is desperately retraining to be a dry wine after demand for its old role as an accompaniment to foie gras or dessert dropped off a cliff, and it was left looking like a saddlemaker in a village with no horses.

No dole queue for Pinot Grigio

Among the contemporary successes, Pinot Grigio - like Merlot for those who prefer red - is the perfect vinous counterpart to what beer drinkers call a ‘session ale’. It’s an alcoholic beverage that goes down easily and doesn’t require thinking about. For wine drinkers who prefer a bit more acidity, there’s Muscadet (moonlighting from its long-standing but limiting job as accompaniment-to-oysters) and Picpoul de Pinet; while for those with a sweeter tooth, there’s Prosecco.

Prosecco comes in for a lot of flak from wine professionals who hate the very idea of it, having failed to understand that it’s a brilliant crowd-pleasing product. If people in the North East of Italy hadn’t invented Prosecco or something like it, sooner or later, a Californian, Chilean or Australian wine giant would almost certainly have done so.

Which, now I come to think of it, is what a few clever New Zealanders did in the 1970s when they made the first Marlborough Sauvignon Blancs - another style ‘normal’ people enjoy, and far too many wine people treat with contempt.

New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc’s job was to be the fruit-salady alternative to the vanilla-and-buttery Chardonnay that, back in the day, was the freshly minted, richer, drier option for 1980s wine drinkers who didn’t want relatively flavourless Soave (the Pinot Grigio of its day) or semi-sweet Liebfraumilch (Prosecco’s shamelessly sugary, bubble-free forebear).

Georgian job definition

All of which leads to me standing behind a table this week with 10 Georgian wines at Hallgarten Novum, my UK distributor’s annual trade tasting. For many of the attendees, this was a first encounter with the Mtsvane, Rkatsiteli, Saperavi and Otskhanouri Sapere grape varieties, let alone my own K’AVSHIRI wines, which are blends of many, often even less familiar, Georgian varieties.

To simplify matters, I described the job each bottle on the table was supposed to do.

The stainless-steel-fermented Mtsvane, I explained, was the stuff to offer a customer who asked for a Pinot Grigio if that was a wine you didn’t sell. Mtsvane doesn’t actually taste like the Italian grape, but it’s sufficiently rooted in that ballpark to ‘do the job’. On the other hand, it would also satisfy someone wanting a dry while that “isn’t Sauvignon or Chardonnay.”

The qvevri/amphora Rkatsitelli’s job was slightly harder to define, but orange/amber wine fans reasonably say the same about that style as I’ve said about Prosecco: that it fills a gap in the market for a style that isn’t white, pink or red. Inconveniently, however, as anyone who, like me, has judged at competitions for amber/orange wines will have discovered, the category is very, very diverse.

The one I was pouring in London’s job struck me as a ‘don’t frighten the horses’*, gateway to orange wine. It was far less aggressively tannic than many and, having been made with cultured yeast, free of the ‘funk’ that some natural wine fans relish. In other words, if a customer doesn’t like this, they’re almost sure to hate the more phenolic, more animal stuff. If they nod approvingly, you may be able to give them something more natural.

The Saperavi that came next was the partner to the Mtsvane - a red to pour for someone who asked for Cabernet or Malbec - while the Otskhanouri Sapere was an option for a customer who likes the combination of depth and Grenache/Garnacha brightness to be found in many Rhônes and Riojas.

Our K’AVSHIRI red and white are unashamedly nichey: for adventurous folk who’d like the complexity and textures of French or Italian wines that would almost certainly cost more than we are asking, and are prepared to explore unknown territory. When I said that the dark-hued, complex K’AVSHIRI Clairet’s job is to be ‘not Provence rosé’, everyone seemed to understand - just as most did when I described our tiny experimental batch of Georgian methode ancestrale fizz as ‘Pet Not’. Like the Qvevri Rkatsiteli, it’s produced using cultured yeast and emphatically non-funky.

But, with its - 2.5% - touch of Muscat coupled with a basic absence of sweetness (1.8g/l of RS), It also fills a gap in the market: for a fruity-but-dry fizz that isn’t trying to be Champagne and isn’t Prosecco. I’d much rather drink something of that style than the acidic English fizz I was served later in the day.

The non-alc job

Mind you, the same is true of the best zero-alcohol fizz I’ve had, but few people are usually choosing between alcoholic and non-alcoholic versions of the same beverage. For whatever reason, they have already decided to opt for the AF and simply have to select one of the options on offer. In that sense, a 0.0 beer or ‘wine’, like a decaffeinated coffee or fat-free milk, has the most clearly defined job of all: deliver an acceptable experience without a specific unwanted component.

Obviously, defining the job your particular Chardonnay or Chablis, for example, is doing differently to, or better than, the many other examples on the market, may not be straightforward; it might indeed involve characteristics and qualities beyond the liquid’s flavour and quality. But I still think the intellectual exercise is rewarding. And if you fail to come up with an answer, and if the wine isn’t contributing significantly to your business’s bottom line, maybe it deserves to suffer the same fate as some of those curious items I found at the back of the drawer in my kitchen.

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*The words ”Does it really matter what these affectionate people do, so long as they don’t do it on the street and frighten the horses?” were famously attributed to the 19^th century British actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in response to a comment that a male actor was too affectionate towards the leading man in a play.

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Addendum to “What Job Does Your Wine Do” (Thanks to Courtney O’Brien)

Linkedin regular, and drinks business consultant, Courtney O’Brien also considered what job any beverage has to do - and, in a Linkedin post, usefully went further than I did in my Substack. So I decided to include an extract here.

The following text and the image above were created by US beverage consultant, Courtney O’Brien. Many non-US readers will not recognise the brands she references, or even the categories, but the point she is making is crucial: if you think your wine is only competing against other wines, you may well be missing an essential point

➤ Consumers are not choosing drinks by category anymore. They’re choosing by moment.
➤ That sounds subtle until you realize what it does to your competitive set.

Your nightly Sauvignon Blanc doesn’t just compete with other wine anymore. It competes with Recess, High Noon, Michelob Ultra, a non-alc spritz, and poppi.

Not because those are the same product. Because they’re competing for the same job in the eyes of that consumer.

Same shopper. Same night. Different outcome desired.

Buyers are already operating this way too. Shelf space is tightening, slow SKUs are getting cut, assortments are shrinking.

Nobody wants to take a bet on something that requires a long explanation.

What buyers want now is pretty simple:
➤ Can I understand what this is in one second?
➤ Is the moment obvious?
➤ Do I believe it will sell without me babysitting it?

If you’re building your 2026 plan right now, here’s the question I’d start with:

What moment do you want to own, and what proof do you have that you already win it?

If you can’t answer that cleanly, you are asking the buyer to take the risk, and building a growth curve based on hope.