Imagine you are one of the vast majority of wine consumers who don't know much about wine--young or old, man or woman, you are among the at least 80 percent uninvolved with the wine category. Unlike the readers of wine magazines who are definitely involved with wine and can discuss terroir, malolactic fermentation, bud break and food pairings for hours, you just want to buy a bottle of wine you will enjoy. There you are standing in a chain retail store staring at a "Wall of Confusion," otherwise known as the typical wine shelf set, merchandised by size, price point, varietal, brand and country of origin.

Given that two different brands of Cabernet sitting next to each other on the shelf have less than a 50/50 chance of tasting the same--and God only knows what Malbec or Cab Franc taste like, let alone Rioja or Semillon--you are by definition faced with a potentially painful and expensive dilemma.

Petite Syrah is as much of an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp. Don't even go there with the country of origin thing, as if the country of origin has much if anything to do with what a wine will taste like to the uninvolved 80 percent. One Cabernet can be far more tannic than its next-door neighbor, and there are no commonly understood, accurate flavor descriptions on the labels or POP signage employed by the wine industry. Try reading the back label and you enter the world of "wine geek speak": fruit-forward, minerally, citric, cherries, plums, cedar, vanilla, tropical fruit. The uninvolved wine consumer has trouble deciding if the label is describing a frappaccino, the new flavor at Jamba Juice or the local produce stand.

Many of the easier to understand words, such as bold, sweet and smooth, aren't defined the same way by the wine industry, nor do they actually relate to how the wine will taste to any given consumer. "A little eager but finishes well," I thought this was a description of the winner of the Olympic 100 meter dash. "Well structured, complex and subtle" sounds like a gymnastics routine. "Elegant but approachable," I think I dated her in high school.

Pick the wrong bottle and get burned, or get lucky and then you may or may not remember what you bought. Given there is a direct structural linguistic connection between ease of phonetic pronunciation and memorability, by definition varietal wine names and the majority of wine brand names are easily forgettable. So what is the typical uninvolved wine consumer to do?

Historically, the wine industry wants the uninvolved consumer to invest time, attention and energy into becoming "educated" about wine in order to be able to decipher and navigate the Wall of Confusion. The traditional wine education approach has been and continues to be "a bridge too far" for the uninvolved. The vast majority of wine consumers just want to be able to buy a bottle of wine they will like every time, without having to take classes in Ito calculus or theoretical physics in French.

In a recent interview, E&J Gallo was quoted as saying, "Make wine that reminds Americans of the favorable images, and then deliver a simpler, more familiar flavor profile in a package that is easy to understand. If we can make wine more appealing by removing the things that some people find objectionable--acids and tannins--then that's what needs to be done."

Consumers also find it objectionable that a wine labeled "Cabernet" doesn't taste like the one next to it with exactly the same flavor descriptions on the label. Gallo has created a computerized "flavor profile" of their wines. They compile Gallo's consumer research and marry flavor descriptions of each wine of that varietal compiled by a Gallo panel. So after all this work, the wine section of the grocery store is no less confusing or hard to navigate. I applaud Gallo's efforts but what about the continuing Wall of Confusion?

Having spent hundreds of hours observing wine consumers in a number of retail environments as they go through the process of selecting a bottle or cask of wine, they commonly appear to be either confused or in pain. Retail chains have become the largest venue for wine sales; they are now the "front lines." Given the ongoing evident failure of "traditional" wine education to make much of a dent in the 80 percent of wine consumers who are uninvolved or the huge number of consumers who drink beverage alcohol products but don't drink wine, what is a retailer to do?

Flavor Merchandising to the Rescue

There is another and far less confusing way to arrange the wine category that has only recently begun to be employed by retailers: merchandising wine based on flavor. A number of smart on-premise operators, including The Olive Garden, Outback Steak Houses and Ritz Carlton Hotels, employ progressive wine lists that are based on the tenets of flavor merchandising (www.winequest.com).

Best Cellars was the first retail chain (albeit a small one) to employ flavor merchandising. Their system is based on limited SKUs, few brand names, and a merchandising format that divides the store into a number of sections with colors and descriptive words. The consumer determines what his flavor preferences are by taking a quiz (a little long for my taste). The consumer then visits their own pre-determined sub section of the wine department to find wines they are virtually guaranteed to enjoy. The 330-unit UK chain Phillips Newman/ Unwins has recently launched a program that is similar to Best Cellars.

Both the Winequest and Best Cellars programs are based on the scientific research conducted by Dr. Linda Bartoshuk at Yale on genetic variation in taste perception. Linda's research is focused on PROP (6-n-propylthiouracil), which tastes extremely bitter to 25 percent (super tasters), moderately bitter to 50 percent (medium tasters), and is nearly tasteless to 25 percent (non tasters) of the population. It's all about tannins because tannins in wine taste bitter.

Super tasters have the most taste buds, experience the most intense taste and perceive the most intense oral burn from irritants like the capsaicin in chili peppers (tastebuds are innervated by both taste and pain neurons). Your capacity to taste doesn't change from about the age of six months until very old age, so much for maturing tastes. Nontasters tend to prefer dark roasted black coffee; super tasters prefer cream and lots of sugar in their coffee and love salty snacks. Medium tasters' coffee preferences fall in between.

Go online and visit www.BestCellars.com or www.yumyuk.com to take their flavor quizzes. If you live in New York, Boston, DC or Dallas, visit a Best Cellars store and experience their system firsthand. Visit a Target store (or better yet a Super Target) to see how Andrea Immer mixed traditional wine speak and the way consumers really talk about wine with assistance on how to determine flavor attributes. Not quite flavor merchandizing but an improvement over the Wall of Confusion.

While working with a regional close-out chain retailer in 2003, I was able to develop a flavor merchandising system that enabled the consumer to self-diagnose their own flavor preferences by reading signage displaying declarative statements about flavor preferences that sent them to one of eight numbered and colored sections, with one-word descriptions. The consumer chose the statement that best described their own flavor preferences.

Because the retail environment was in continual reset based on the nature of the business (closeouts), the system was designed to eliminate the need to speak with any wine-educated salespeople (none were there) as well as for maximum structural flexibility. The program was in the initial beta phase when the retailer was forced to regroup due to increasing category competition (Big Lots, 99 Only, Dollar General).

I was able to pretest the system on a few hundred wine consumers, and it worked like a charm. In fact, just by determining a consumer's preferences for their style of coffee or tea (black, dark roast, cream, sugar), salty snacks and soft drinks, I was able to accurately predict (wine varietal/style and quite often brand) their wine preferences 90 percent of the time. With a batting average that high, I could play for the Oakland As.

At some point a large retail chain will recognize the advantage of empowering their wine consumers to easily and consistently identify the wines they will enjoy, without in-store personal assistance, wine education or theoretical physics. Imagine a user-friendly, visually empowering, linguistically simplified, easy to understand merchandising system for wine.

The likely result, however, will be a further dilution of brand strength in a category with very little to begin with because you only need a few marquee brands as flavor markers for consumers and fewer total SKUs. An increase in retailer brands built to satisfy the specific flavor preferences of wine consumers and the requirement that the industry develop a common language of flavor for labels that relate to the real world are likely as well. Not to mention a decline in the sale of antacids and headache remedies.

As usual the ball is in the chain retailer's court. Even though the flavor merchandising of wine would likely lead to increasing per-capita consumption by removing many of the key barriers to category entry, the wine industry has far too much emotional, human and dollar capital invested in the way things are to embrace the "disruptive innovation" flavor merchandising would entail.

On the other hand, chain retailers operate in an incredibly competitive marketplace, have far too much capital invested in wine (floor space, inventory, personnel) and understand the positive impact of attracting the increased market basket profitability that accompanies any wine consumer (uninvolved or involved, Franzia, or Silver Oak).

At some point in the future (hopefully not too distant), the power of clarity over confusion, physics over fantasy and dollars over donuts will have its day in the sun. New millennium clarity or same old Wall of Confusion--time will tell.

Imagine how much more wine the average tasting room would sell if the winery went about systematically determining what wine the consumer would actually enjoy. Think of Wine Flavor Merchandising as "Hooked on Phonics" for the 80 percent of wine consumers who are uninvolved. wbm