Will Biodiversity Make You Buy Wine?

Cape Wine 2006, an event that seeks to attracts buyers and media from across the globe to experience the wines of South Africa, started today, with a conference on Biodiversity.

Wines of South Africa, the generic marketing body for South African wines, have embarked on a new marketing campaign that seeks to promote South African wines, based on our biodiversity. While this is exciting and encouraging for a number of reasons:

•  we are acknowledging the importance of our unique environment in the production of goods such as wine
• we are creating a story behind our wines to give them an identity
• we are righting the wrongs of an industry who have in the past replaced massive tracts of Fynbos with alien vegetation (vines). The work of the Biodiversity and Wine Initiative, who are getting farmers to pledge to keep a certain hectarage of their farms under Fynbos, shows that the words of the industry are supported by their actions

All good and well, BUT … I can’t help to look at the other, less romantic, side of the story: apparently the decision making process, when buying a wine goes as follows:

1. red vs white
2. price
3. varietal
4. brand

Using this model, the biodiversity campaign is at most, only likely to have any relevance at the 4th phase of the decision making process. Should we not rather be focussing our efforts on something more tangible … possibly associating certain South African regions with certain varietals and therefore move brand South Africa up the decision making tree?