Market research, say many, tells you less about what is likely to happen in the future than it tells about the past. A fine example of this was covered recently on Decanter.com, which featured an article about some research that is supposed to breathe relief into the lungs of Old World Europe. The research concerns drinking habits of UK inhabitants with respect to their age. It was commissioned by Vinexpo and conducted by Wine Intelligence, a London-based research firm that specialises in wine. According to Decanter.com, the research claims that ‘as the UK population increases and ages, Old World wine producers will regain ground lost to the New World’. This conclusion is based on the ‘facts’ that people turn to red wine as they age and also to Old World Wine. Nobody would argue with the notion that people with entrenched (Old World) wine drinking habits would be hardest to swing over to New World wines. Almost to prove this point, the research confirms that as people age they become less ‘impressionable’ to wine commentators and ‘less adventurous in their choices’ (Decanter.com’s words). So why should the UK’s existing hundreds of thousands of consumers of New World wines suddenly change their minds? In other words, the research is informing Vinexpo precisely what it already knew: that the French and other Old World producers are in deep trouble, since the demographic where they are most dominant is an ageing one. Uncannily, however, it would appear that the trends have been interpreted the other way around. One hopes for the French that they didn’t pay too much for this research and they don’t get too carried away about its conclusions.
