Redesigning the Wine Experience — Part 1

The Current State of Wine’s Information Architecture

Elizabeth Nicholas
Jul 25, 2017 · 6 min read

This is the first piece in a series of articles that will examine the current state of the wine experience and explore how to possibly improve it.

By now, the design community has amassed a considerable wealth of knowledge around Information Architecture principles, informed largely by the work of contiguous disciplines like library sciences or ecological and evolutionary biology.

Even with these foundational principles, each design challenge must build upon them, making informed assumptions to be tweaked, tested, and validated by the user — often with tools like card sorts, sitemaps, and site flows.

But what about information architecture that’s already been codified and set in stone? How do you iterate and improve a body of information when its architecture is defined? Or perhaps more broadly:

How might you re-design and re-image an entire industry whose very existence is defined, not only by customs, cultures, and traditions, but by law? And if you can, should you?

Wine is a large proponent of how I landed in UX in the first place. So much of the culture of wine and the industry of hospitality that surrounds it offers up the earliest examples of delightful, user-focused experiences.

HALP!

So it’s somewhat ironic that the very product we welcome into our homes during times of celebration, intimacy, and reflection, a product that we share and gift, can be so enigmatic and downright intimidating.

And the source of that intimidation? A fear of the unknown perhaps.

What lies beyond most people’s level of understanding is a world of nuanced, complicated, confusing, and — in the case of at least some french wines — completely outdated methods of categorization. Or put more simply, its unruly information architecture.

The dizzying array of geographies, varietals, and techniques that define a wine form the framework of a globally accepted wine “information architecture” (i.e. its labeling, categorization, and organization).

Overtime, the individual elements within these major wine categories have evolved and formalized themselves to the point where we as wine professionals can form expectations about them, and interpret them. The existence of an entire industry is centered on the interpretation and review of wines: from apps, to publications, sommeliers, and posters like the one shown here.

The problem is, most people have not had years of training and tasting to learn this classification system, making it accessible to only a few, and making the interpretation of wines only partially meaningful to the beginner-level masses.

Source: Wine Folly

The chasm between a novice wino and one who is intermediate is significant, and I would argue it’s because the current IA of wine does not make it very learnable or memorable. This is of course not surprising, given the fact that no one sat down over 7000 years ago with the ancient Persians, Greeks, and Egyptians, to do a card sort with them.

Like any crop, grapes were grown and harvested in several areas of the globe concurrently throughout history. With little to no communication with one another, wine regions developed their own laws, customs, and techniques that overtime were codified both formally and informally into the classification systems we have today (Bordeaux’s Grand Crus, for instance). As a result, the globalized wine economy is a patchwork of individual classifications which wine professionals have attempted to understand through a formalized labelling system of subjective characteristics that is perpetuated by the wine interpretation industry (discussed above).

The average wine drinker needs to subscribe to someone else’s model of categorization and labelling, not the other way around, and as I’ll demonstrate below, this top-down approach doesn’t bode well for engagement.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the complexities within the wine space, but that’s because I have an entirely different set of goals, life goals that center on achieving a deeper understanding of wine, and the historical and cultural context that surrounds it. Most people in the wine industry and amateur enophiles have a similar goal.

But what about those who drink wine for a different reason?

Apps like Vivino work to democratize the system of wine interpretation, putting the review power in the hands of the people.

But these 25 million friends still subscribe to these same categorizations and the same terms set forth by sommeliers, winemakers, and critics. The only thing that has changed are the people giving the opinions. Also, if my network is a quick indication of anything, a large majority of those 25 million aren’t actually contributing.

Just take a look at how active some of my network is:

Yes this isn’t a very scientific experiment, but at a glance it does tell us one of two things about the apps users’ behavior:

  1. They use the app only passively (reading recommendations without contributing any themselves)
  2. They don’t use the app

Most importantly, it demonstrates that there are unmet needs for this type of user, possibly in the way we’re choosing to describe wines in the first place.

We as an industry need to spend more time figuring out the goals and motivations of this user. We need to uncover what excites and delights them, and what will keep them engaged in the conversation, because the way we currently talk about it, might not be working as well as it could.

A wine’s objective attributes (such as where it was grown or other indisputable facts) often beget the subjective ones (such as the “minerality” of the wine). Riesling grapes are expected to have floral aromas, the chardonnay of chablis is expected to have tart apple/citrus notes, and so on.

As an industry, we’ve given our users a very top down approach for navigating wine. One that keeps us in a position of power by requiring years of training, tasting, and rote memorization to rightfully gain access to its information. We’ve done this by effectively creating our own wine language and system of classification and interpretation, one that doesn’t consider nor appreciate the full context of the user’s wine experience. More specifically, we’ve created a system that positions the physical attributes of the product (“jammy,” “mouth-watering”, “supple”) as a main selling point, without paying any mind to the emotional, anecdotal, and contextual attributes of the experience.

In this series, I want to explore my love of wine through the lens of a designer and discover who is drinking wine, what they want, and how we can improve their overall experience.

Follow me on this journey, and let me know what you think!

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