Morrisons mixes it up

Getting shoppers to create a new wine blend in a single afternoon was always going to be a risky strategy. But according to the Morrisons Cellar wine team, crowdsourcing wine blends enables it to offer a unique proposition to its consumers.

The retailer held a wine-blending masterclass with Australian wine brand Rosemount Estates in Bicester over the weekend, aiming to create a wine that will go on shelf next May.  I went along to see how they got on, and try my hand at being a wine-blender for the afternoon.

Five Morrisons customers were selected to take part in the creation of a new 'shopper's blend' in an online competition which got consumers to describe a great bottle of wine. The aim was not so much to find a new blend - after all wine companies and retailers employ heavyweight oenologists to do this - but to engage consumers and gather valuable insight about wine marketing from shoppers themself.

“What surprised us in the competition was the way in which people described the wine,” Morrisons wine buyer Gemma Cockshott said. “It wasn’t just words describing the taste but all the emotion attached to the experience. And because of the speed of social media, people didn’t tend to deliberate too much or over-think, so you tended to get a more immediate, gut response.”

This, she maintained, gives a far more accurate picture of the language that ultimately appeals to consumers than some of the high-falutin' terms often seen on wine labels.

The couples came from all over the UK and from different walks of life; some had in-depth wine knowledge, one had spend a career in the brewing industry, while others only had only a "I know what I like when I taste it" level of knowledge. But they were refreshingly unpretentious - although we were making a red blend, quite a few admitted to only ever drinking white wine.  
 
“That really did make me work hard,” Rosemount’s chief winemaker Matt Koch admitted later, but he argued it could make for a more accessible, consumer-friendly blend. “We wanted to hear from consumers, to learn what they drank and liked – but we really had no idea what the wine would come out like.”

Following a morrning tasting the core components that would go into our blend - six bottles of red wine identified solely with a number and our own description notes, we had a crash course in blending. We then got to experiment for ourselves, adding different proportions and combinations of our six pure varietals, an excellent way of doing away with any preconceived ideas of ‘accepted’ combinations and making it all about the taste.

It really was a fascainating exercise to see how the wine developed with the different proportions, taking on different characteristics from the various grapes, to become more than the sum of all its arts. I have to admit it was a little frustrating not to know for sure what the varietals were for sure. Finally, when each team had bottled their favourite out of the five or six blends, we submitted it for judgment by Koch and the Morrisons’ team.

And as it turned out, the wines were pretty good - the majority hovering somewhere between a Rioja and a Cote du Rhone in style, noted Morrisons wine sourcing manager Clive Donaldson. There was also an unusual level of similarity between four out of the five blends, which he said was surprising, but made the team more confidence of the style consumers liked.

If the idea was to create an interesting blend co-created and validated by consumer input, it will be fascinating to see how well the finished product goes down with consumers next Spring. 

But although only the competition winners were included in the official 'wine-off,' the judges also sniffed, and swilled the efforts of the remaining, highly competitive hangers-on - the two Rosemount brand managers, four Morrisons buyers, and me. And I have to admit that it was the highlight of my day to beat both Morrisons' wine teams.

An abridged version of this article was first published as a Daily Bread newletter by The Grocer

Cider with MPs

Cider makers and MPs were out in force last night as the All-Party Parliamentary Cider Group held its annual bash on the terrace of the House of Commons.

The mood of the night was largely one of celebration – the summer’s good weather has meant a good harvest and an increase in cider consumption – but there was a definite call to arms. Tory MP Ian Liddell-Grainger, who chairs the group, warned of “dark clouds on the horizon”, in the form of the duty escalator, which he said would put cider beyond the reach of ordinary folk.

“We have to get rid of it or it cider will hit the buffers in the future,” he declared.

Paul Bartlett, C&C Group's marketing director and the chairman of the National Association of Cider Makers (NACM), said it was important to keep up the pressure as the industry was investing heavily in planting orchards to boost production, as well as looking to make progress on the sustainability of the industry.

“There is a great deal of investment on the back of confidence in the industry,” he said. “It’s not through good luck that cider has been the best-performing drinks category – it is a result of an unstinting focus on product quality and the willingness of producers to invest in their businesses.”

Exports, he added, were the next big push – and there was a clear sign from both cider makers and trade representatives that they were gearing up for Anuga. “There are exciting opportunities on the horizon,” Bartlett said, pointing to markets in North America, Scandinavia and Australia. However, this could only happen if the tax regime in the UK remained stable – a critical point for the industry, he said.

However some argue that cider has been given an easy ride compared to other types of booze – and little mention was made of cider’s apparent ‘identify crisis’. The questions often bandied about within the industry as to what constitutes ‘real’ cider – whether fruit ciders count, what defines a British cider – went largely without discussion. Even the representatives from CAMRA seemed silent on this point, despite the real-ale organisation having a long ‘name and shame list’ of products on their website that they do not recognise as ‘real’ cider – many of them made by people in the assembled crowd.

Real or not, cider was also the principle theme on the drinks menu on the night – for those gasping for something other than apples, tap water the only available alternative.

This article was first published in the Daily Bread newsletter by The Grocer

Don't whine about low-alcohol wine

Headlines this morning have been screaming that the government is planning to “water down wine” to put a stop to “middle class drinking”.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Earl Howe, an undersecretary in the Department of Health, wants the EU to change the technical definition of wine from containing a minimum of 8.5% ABV to 4.5% - and is going to continue to lobby the EU to bring lower-alcohol wines back to the discussion table (metaphorically speaking).

As well as prompting the usual ranting about politicians meddling in people’s lives, there has been a fair amount of derision online for the “underwhelming” offering of lower alcohol wine. One commentator to the Daily Mail’s website described 8.5% ABV wine as tasting of “an immature bears [sic] armpit”, while Sunday Telegraph wine columnist Victoria Moore dismissed “artificially created” low alcohol wines as tasting “rubbish”.

As it happened, this morning I was sitting across a table from Thomas Jung, chief winemaker to Australian Vintage, as he discussed his new baby – the 5.5% ABV Miranda Summer Light range, which was unveiled two weeks ago and rolls into Tesco and Morrisons next month.

And there wasn’t a bear in sight.

Low and de-alcoholised wines are not new – Australian Vintage has been making them for more than 20 years, primarily for the Nordic countries – and in recent years, an increasing number of brands have come to market.

However, according to Jung, it is thanks to new techniques and technology that low-alcohol wine can start to hit the taste profile sought by demanding consumers, and deliver a quality proposition.

According to a recent report from Wine Intelligence, the sub-10.5% ABV wine category is growing “in stature” around the world, and Brand Phoenix – which co-owns First Cape Light – says it has the potential to become a 5 million-case category.

This demand is being “significantly” driven by consumers – the category is now worth £42m a year -– but Jung is convinced that we’re only at the beginning of the road towards better quality lower alcohol wine.

“It’s up to us an industry to ensure we put products on shelf that appeal to consumers, that are drinkable, approachable and deliver on quality expectation,” Jung said.

It seems the government agrees.

This article was first published in Daily Bread newsletter by The Grocer

Will Tesco let Toys be toys?

Now, you may not have noticed, but there’s been a backlash against all things pink – not the colour per se, but the fact it is getting to be nigh-on impossible to buy toys, clothing, or just about anything for children without being steered towards the kind of gender-colour stereotyping that would make Barbie proud.

Where once you had Lego bricks and the freedom of your imagination, now even construction toys are gender specific. Earlier this week, for example, LiteBrix brought out a range of construction toys with flashing lights – for boys, a space trooper robot; for girls, a fashion runway.

Now, I'm sure that many kids, girls and boys, would be very happy playing with the choices presented to them. What I object to is that it has got to the stage where virtually everything – from teethers and toddler bath toys upwards – are sign-posted pink for girls or baby blue for boys – and never the twain shall meet.

So it will come as a relief to some that Tesco has announced it is going to be removing all reference to gender on its online toys pages.

A Tesco spokesperson told The Grocer: “To help customers easily search through the range of toys that we offer, we categorise our toys in a number of ways including by price, age range and gender.

“We’ve recently carried out a review to understand what customers find useful, and as a result we’ll no longer be categorising toys by gender as we’ve found customers are not using this as a way to search.”

Parent lobby group Let Toys Be Toys, which successfully complained to Tesco in May that a chemistry set was being marketed as a boy’s toy – effectively stifling potential Baroness Greenfields or Marie Curies from the very start – said it was “really pleased to see that Tesco are moving in the right direction on an issue that is becoming increasingly important to customers”.

“However, we're just as concerned with in-store signs – if not more so, as they're more visible to children,” it added.

Tesco admitted the change was likely to take some time to complete and made no mention of its policy in-store. However, given that there is a (pink) kitchen aimed at small children advertised with the words “after she has finished cooking, she can wash up the pots in the sink”, any move seems to me to be decades late. (Although to be fair, this seems to be the manufacturer’s description, not just the retailer’s.)

This does bring me to a chicken/egg conundrum – do manufacturers and retailers go pink because kids demand it, or do kids like it because it is what is marketed at them?

As a child growing up in the 1980s, who alternated between spending time hanging upside down on a rope strung across the garden, climbing trees, and playing with cars with my sister, to spending hours badly sewing clothes for my favourite doll and covering myself and everything around me in glitter, I have to admit, I find it a shame that kids have to be channelled down a well-worn path rather than being allowed to forge their own.

But at least when it comes to exploring, Dora’s already out there.


This article was first published in The Grocer's Daily Bread newsletter

Keeping their cool

Tomorrow retailers will be bracing themselves for the latest supermarket share figures, with many worried for all sorts of reasons, not least of all the impact of the horsemeat scandal - and the numbers are not likely to be pretty, according to KantarWorldpanel’s Ed Garner.

Speaking at the British Frozen Food Federation’s (BFFF) conference on Thursday, Garner said that although frozen food had become the strongest growth area of grocery over the recession, there was “a very large elephant in the room in the shape of a horse”, which he said was more than likely to “p*ss on all the sandwiches”.

“The numbers won’t be pretty when you drill down to processed burgers and ready meals” warned Garner - but he pointed out that this was more than pure consumer reaction, as hundreds of products had been removed from shelves.

He said that the media coverage of people claiming that in future they will shop in farmers markets and butchers’ shops was “all fluff, as that is just what people say they are going to do.” Surveys which are not based on actual sales should be taken with a pinch of salt, he argued, and in the long term, the market would recover.

Nigel Broadhurst, buying director of Iceland also took a bullish attitude. “There are lying, cheating, rotten b**tards who put horsemeat in our previously very good quality products, who are doing it consciously and making a lot of money for themselves,” he said, adding that as the problem spanned across the entire supply chain, it needed to be tackled by all parts of the industry.

He decried the perception that has been promulgated in the media about frozen food in particular and called on a concerted and combined effort for the industry to work together to communicate the quality of frozen food to consumers and to keep innovating. “As an industry, [the frozen food industry] is struggling to persuade the market that great value doesn’t mean cheap rubbish,” he said. “It is time for a correction.”

Tough talk certainly – but nowhere near as tough as the task that lies ahead in terms of actually getting that message across to increasing sceptical shoppers.

 

This article was first published in the Daily Bread newsletter by The Grocer

Averting a recipe for Disaster

 

Yesterday saw the launch of an ambitious project to create a food manifesto for the under-fives, to tackle the problems of poor diets among young children.

The plan - to galvanise cross-party political support and enlist practical support from food industry stakeholders - is the idea of Ella’s Kitchen Paul Lindley, who wants to open up the debate on food policy and children’s nutrition in the UK.

It is, he says, a multi-faceted problem that requires a multi-faceted, long-term solution. He is also adamant that it is our collective responsibility – from retailers, manufacturers, healthy experts, the media and government - to ensure the next generation doesn’t suffer because of poor decisions that are made now.

Although obesity has captured the majority of the headlines in recent months, it was the statistics on malnutrition that were the most shocking. According to Defra, the number of children who included no fruit and vegetables in their diets had increased 33% between 2009 and 2010, while YouGov research on behalf of Ella’s Kitchen in December 2012 found that 26% of parents said the price of buying fresh ingredients was the main barrier to children healthily eating in the home.

Carmel McConnell, the founder of children’s charity Magic Breakfast, highlighted a Dickensian problem that simply should not happen in 2013 - the increasing numbers of small children in this country who do not have access to breakfast in the morning because of poverty and who have to turn up to school hungry.

Over the last 18 months, Lindley has enlisted the advice of key contributors involved in the food industry as well as health professionals, charities and food journalists to generate an overarching plan to tackle these multiple problems.

The seven-fold plan is certainly ambitious, not least in its primary aim of persuading all parties to agree to a 25-year cross-party manifesto to improve nutrition for infants in the UK. Other aims include an extension of the Healthy Start programme to improve support for new mothers and the provision of a free breakfast for every primary school child. As well as making cooking compulsory in all schools to ensure that essential skills can be passed on (which let’s face, it, is an obvious one), the project wants cooking and nutrition to be used as a central ‘prop’ across the broader curriculum to raise its profile.

However, the plan is not solely targeted at government – retailers and brands can get on board and it also calls on grocery brands to donate 1% of their annual TV spend to public service ads promoting healthy eating. Major retailers can provide practical help by offering cooking workshops at in-store cafes to close the link between food purchase and home-cooking. Similarly, the plan wants professional kitchens to throw open their doors twice a year.

There seemed genuine enthusiasm for it by everyone I spoke to at the launch, although one suspects that there might have been an element of preaching to the converted (bearing in mind that the launch was held in the conference room of Coutts private bank at the Gherkin). And although there was no representation from the retailers, food manufacturers and someone from the Department of Health  was there - which was heartening, given the project's aims -  in addition to charities, childcare experts and  nutritionalists,.

The challenge now will be to harness all that goodwill and publicity into firm action.


This was first published by The Grocers's Daily Bread newsletter

The Five Mile High Club

Fresh from 8000m ski descent of Manaslu in Nepal, legendary Everest climber Kenton Cool is still buzzing from the trip. Arabella Mileham caught up with him at the Ski Show at Olympia to find out how it went.

When you've summited the world's highest mountain as many times as Kenton Cool has, there's the slight chance of getting Everest fatigue, at least for a short while. With some of the toughest technical terrain firmly under his belt, alpine climber and adventurer Kenton Cool set himself a different challenge this year. Only four months after sitting on the top of the world for a jaw-dropping eighth time, he strapped a pair of touring skis to his rucksack, slung on his crampons and skied from the 8,163 metre peak of Manaslu in central Nepal, the eighth highest mountain on earth.

Kenton is now the only Brit with two 8,000m peak ski descents to his name, having shushed down Cho Oyo on a solo ski four years ago. So what prompted him to join this incredibly niche club?

"I love mountain adventure and the ski descent added that extra element", he explains over a coffee, although sheepishly admitting to healthy competition with business partner, Guy Willets, with whom he runs Dream Guides in Chamonix. During the winter the pair can be found creating private ski tours in the Mont Blanc Massif, while the summer sees them head off for the Alpine and Himalayan climbing season.

For someone who spends the majority of his career helping others push themselves to realise their dream, he confesses that it is good to have the chance to pursue his own every now and then.


Manaslu - one of the less well-known Himalayan mountain that sits in the Mansiri Himal, in the west of Nepal's central region - is only really on the radar for climbers keen to get some practice before attempting Everest. The unusually high level of snowfall for the region and pyramid shape of the mountain lends itself to a ski descent, however with blasts of 80mph winds regularly scouring the mountain, any pockets of powder are quickly demolished, making for a less than comfortable few runs.

Although Nepal was moving out of monsoon season when Kenton and the team arrived, the weather was still pretty abominable, both during the trek into basecamp and while waiting for the all important weather window.

"We were hit by a particularly bad year – the team was really challenged, we lost tents and had to dig the ropes out. If it has been Europe, it would have been fantastic powder, but the snow was blasted. Even on summit day there was howling wind and it was all in the balance all day long."

After a gruelling night at camp 4, the wind dropped and, heavily laden with rucksacks, touring skis and pole, they were able to make the six hour climb to the summit.  Then it was time to click into their bindings and rip down the mountain. “The initial gully from the top was quite good snow and we both made some good turns down it. As the mountain expanded out the wind crust appeared and linking turns became almost impossible. We slowly and steadily picked out way down to camp 4.”

He makes it sound so easy - but what is skiing at 8,000 metres really  like?

"Sodding hard work" according to Kenton. "Your legs and muscles are burning and your muscles screaming for oxygen. The fatigue, the heavy rucksack – it's a lot harder than walking down. You are very aware all the time and trying to scope the best lines and see where the dangers might be. We skied as much as we could – all that was ski-able, really and occasionally we managed some linked turns – but it's adventure skiing, not powder heaven."

Oxygen but no powder

"Climbing Everest is probably 85% mental strength and only 15% physical – and I think Manaslu was the same. Mentally I really had to build up to it – a lot of people didn't want me to do it, " he explained. "Obviously I’m a ski guide - but I’m a climber who became a skier, not a skier who became a climber."

Although proud of his earlier ski descent of Cho Oyo, this was the more enjoyable trip. "It was stressful skiing on my own - really tough. When I got down I was mentally exhausted. But on Manaslu, I came down re-energised. It was great to have a partner to share the ski adventure with – and I’m still buzzing. It was a brilliant trip".

He explains that every now and then, something happens in life that makes you think, 'that's how it ought to be'. "This was one of those rare times".

"Skiing for many people is a week in Val, a few piste runs, a nice lunch and a few more pistes then après in the bar," he says thoughtfully, adding that while there's nothing wrong with that, skiing is a far bigger sport and ought to be embraced. "There's freestyle, touring, cross–country - why not branch out and see what's there?"

With so much infectious enthusiasm for the mountains and pushing himself further, Kenton is already planning to complete his trilogy with another epic 8,000m ski next year – this time from the top of Shishapangma, over the border in Tibet.

Somehow, when he says he's not a strong skier, it’s very hard to believe him.

photos copyright Kenton Cool. This article was published on welove2ski, October 2010.