Berry Bros. & Rudd, one of the top wine merchants in the country, have produced a report looking at the future of wine.
A GLIMPSE INTO THE WORLD OF WINE IN 2058 is produced by 4 Masters of Wine and a raft of other experts. This is intended as a serious piece of futurology but contains some very radical, or possibly barmy, ideas.

Volume Wine
In the world of volume wine, Berrys believes there are two specific areas set for significant change by 2058:
new producers and climate change.

a). New Horizons
Already the world’s sixth largest wine producer, China is predicted to be the world’s leading producer of volume wine by 2058.
Berrys believes Cabernets and Chardonnays of real promise will be made. With the right soil, low labour costs and soaring domestic demand, China is apparently the future.

b)The changing climate
If global warming persists, many non-traditional wine producing countries given the chance to become real contenders.
Countries which are currently small-scale producers may become more significant. Much of Eastern Europe sits on the same latitude as some of France’s top wine producing regions, so countries like Ukraine, Moldova, Croatia, Slovenia and Poland could become major players, if they can attract investment.
Berrys believes Canada could also grow in importance. Southern Ontario and Southern British Columbia are already home to several large areas of vines, and Berrys predicts it could start to rival its American neighbour by 2058.

In the past year or two, Australia has suffered from very severe droughts, leading to vineyard irrigation being temporarily banned. If this trend continues, supplies of inexpensive Australian wine may soon be a thing of the past. By 2058, Berrys predicts Australia will be too hot and dry to support large areas of vines. It will no longer be known for volume wine and will become a niche producer, concentrating on hand-crafted, terroir-driven, fine wine.

2. BIG BRAND BOOZE
In 2006 Foster’s started sourcing wine for their popular Lindemans brand from South Africa and Chile.
The Berrys’ experts commented: “By 2058, big brand wine could be grape or blend specific, rather than from a particular country. Grapes will be gathered from all over the world and blended to suit consumers’ tastes.”
Consumers may recognise wine brands (and the flavours associated with them) in the same way they do spirit brands such as Smirnoff. Rather than ordering a glass of Australian Shiraz or Californian Merlot, it could be commonplace to ask for a ‘Lindemans Light’, ‘Waitrose White’ or ‘Rosemount Red’. Grapes will be genetically modified to change a wine’s taste and producers will add artificial flavourings to create a style wanted by consumers.”

Floating Vines
Satisfying this growing consumer demand will need wholesale changes in production methods.
By 2058, Berrys predicts vast industrial vineyards could house genetically-modified grape varieties resistant to disease, and genetically altered yeast will improve fermentation and help produce wines with lower alcohol levels.
An increased focus on low calorie lifestyles could entice producers to reduce calorific and alcohol content by modifying the grapes’ genetic structure.
Since vineyards typically take up huge areas of land, Berrys believes genetically modified vines could be grown hydroponically in vast off-shore floating vineyards.

Lightening the load
In 50 years’ time, Berrys believes wine is unlikely to be sold in glass bottles. Using glass will be unrealistic due to costs, waste, and environmental impact of wine. Even with lightweight bottles, Berrys believes the cost and environmental impact of shipping pre-bottled wine around the world will be too high. So we’re likely to see ‘wine tankers’ crossing our oceans. Bulk shipments of wine could arrive, before being put into plastic or reinforced cardboard containers in a bid to reduce environmental emissions and create a domestic bottling industry. This would make things a bit tricky for personalised labels!

Fine Wine
Berrys believes China has all the essential ingredients to make fine wine to rival the best of Bordeaux.
While most Chinese current wines seem alien to Western palates (ie horrid), a new breed of Chinese winemaker, backed by foreign investment and technical advice, is already trying to change that reputation.

The Indian wine industry is likely to challenge the supremacy of traditional winemaking countries as well.
High local demand and aggressive promotion from the government means more and more ambitious Indians are turning to fine wine as a mark of social standing. Berrys believes India will soon be taken seriously as a fine wine-growing nation.

Rising global demand for fine wines - both for investment and for drinking - and limited availability of First Growth wines from top châteaux means prices will continue to rise inexorably over the next 50 years until fine wine becomes the preserve of the very rich.
Simon Staples, Fine Wine Sales Director at Berry Bros. & Rudd believes: “If values increase by 15% per annum, as they have been doing recently, a case of 2005 Ch. Lafite-Rothschild, currently available for £9,200, could be worth just shy of £10 million by 2058.” Seems a better investment than a house at the moment!

British Bubbly
I blogged about this in April, but you may not have believed me. Thanks in part to warmer temperatures (2007 was the second warmest year in the UK in 356 years) more and more English land is becoming suitable for wine production. There are currently 1,000 vineyards in England across Kent, Hampshire, Essex and Sussex and production in 2006 was just over 3.3 million bottles. Berrys believes, the amount of English farmland devoted to wine production may rival that of France by 2058 .
French Champagne producers such as Louis Roederer have been looking at the chalky soil of the South Downs with interest, believing it offers them a great opportunity to produce sparkling wines similar to Champagne itself.
Recent international blind-tasting competitions even saw some English sparkling wines triumphing over the best Champagnes.
Berrys’ experts commented, “If British growers get support from British drinkers and are able to compete on price they may be able to compete with Champagne.”

Quality control
Berrys believes, if you order a bottle of 2005 Ch. Margaux in 2058 that is corked, it’s unlikely you’ll get the chance to taste it as top restaurants introduce innovative measures to ensure customers receive nothing but the best.
Recent developments in biotechnology have shown honeybees have a finely developed sense of smell. Honeybees trained to recognise particular odours, such as corked wine, and associate that smell with food. When they detect a corked bottle, a trained honeybee’s reaction will be easily picked up by a small detector.
By 2058, every sommelier could have their own personal bee!!

We have just added a whole batch of new labels on www.personalisedwinelabels.co.uk. The congratulations wine labels section has had 8 new additions, 4 for personalised wine/ personalised port and 4 for personalised champagne / personalised sparkling wine.

In the next few weeks we will be adding some brand new categories to the site, as well as more labels to the existing categories.

If there are any categories that you would like us to add, please add a comment to this blog

It seems that putting your brand on a bottle of wine is not a new idea. Naturally it wasn’t full colour labelling back then, because paper hadn’t been invented yet.

Clay bottle stoppers used over five thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia (broadly today’s Iraq), the birthplace of cities and writing, carried symbols that marked them out as the earliest evidence of branded goods. Designs have been found on Mesopotamian commodities dating from 3200 BC!

Dr. David Wengrow ,an archaeologist at University College London, believes that they were promotional logos, along the lines of those used by BP and Gucci.

Some, possibly from wines, show warriors involved in violent acts, perhaps appealing to the more macho or laddish individuals, in a way the Portman Group would frown on. “You get some designs that show people in the act of drinking or eating,” says Dr Wengrow. “They show people, gods, animals, even monsters doing all kinds of things together, including drinking beer through a straw, making textiles, but also killing each other too.” Quite a few ideas for new sections in our wine label gallery.

The first origins of branding date back to around 8000 years ago, when Mesopotamian villagers began making personalised stone seals, which they pressed into the clay caps and stoppers they used to seal food and drink. These marked commodities would have been traded directly with neighbours and travellers.

But they turned into brands when urbanisation began in Mesopotamia - a little over 5000 years ago - when traders encountered more strangers and city residents increasingly had to deal with products of uncertain origin. This was the time when beer, wine, textiles and dairy products began to be mass produced.

Wengrow says the symbols in caps and stoppers came to play an important role in telling people about the quality and origins of products such as oils and wine. He has described how the seals might have been used to ensure quality control, to give provenance for goods or to show that they conformed to a standardised system. By looking at the symbol on a wine stopper, says Wengrow, consumers came to know whether or not to trust that bottle (Current Anthropology, vol 49, p 7).

When a traveller saw a familiar logo, that provided him with reassurance about the provenance and the quality of what he was buying.

Many stoppers have been found in the ancient city of Uruk, now in southern Iraq, where some 20,000 people lived 5000 years ago. The symbols stamped on their surfaces are the first images in human history to be mechanically produced, says Dr Wengrow, referring to how the logo was carved on a piece of stone and pressed into wet clay in “urban temple-factories.”

Nowadays getting branded champagne and branded wine is quite simple. For corporate wines just visit www.euromarquewines.co.uk and personalised messages on the wine label go to www.personalised wine labels.co.uk

The biggest change in wine packaging in the last few years has been the widespread introduction of the screwcap (Stelvin) as a bottle closure in place of cork. Here at Euromarque Personalised Wines, we initially resisted because of the image of screwcaps as being down market. but have now used them for the last few years our easy drinking white wines. When we launched our new retail site, Personalised Wine Labels, we had all the same arguments again!

The only thing that never crosssed our minds was the impact on our corporate carbon footprint. Carbon footprint is the measure of the amount of CO2 - a greenhouse gas - released into the atmosphere through the combustion of fossil fuels and other sources.

It now appears that screwcaps for wine bottles produce the largest carbon footprint compared to synthetic closures and corks, according to research conducted for a major French closure company, Oeneo Bouchage.

According to tests conducted by Cairn Environment for Oeneo Bouchage, the production of screwcaps gives off over 10.6kg of CO2 per tonne compared with only 2.5kg of CO2 per tonne for corks.

The composite DIAM closure fell between the two, with a carbon footprint of 4.3kg of CO2 per tonne.

These figures include the PVC capsule on the cork and the DIAM closure. They also take account of 30% recycled aluminium content in the screwcap.

All the closures are produced by Oeneo as part of their standard range.
Oeneo Bouchage said all the tests had been ratified by the French Environmental Agency.

By way of comparison, one recent environmental study found that an individual cheeseburger has a carbon footprint of 3.06kg of CO2, including transportation of the raw materials and carbon emitted during the cooking process.

So drink more wine (preferrably personalised) and eat fewer burgers

OK, so we all now know that the official UK Guidelines are a pack of lies. But if the recommended weekly drinking limits of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women are totally bogus, then the question must be what is the truth?

Well, a whole host of epidemiological studies have filled the intervening years with real evidence, all totally ignored by the government and the anti-drinking cliques.

Most significant, perhaps, was a study carried out by the World Health Organisation in 2000.

The WHO’s International Guide for Monitoring Alcohol Consumption and Related Harm set out drinking ranges that qualified people as being at low, medium or high-risk of chronic alcohol-related harm.

For men, less than 35 weekly units was low-risk, 36-52.5 was medium-risk and above 53 was high-risk. For women were low-risk below 17.5 units, medium between 18 and 35 and high above 36.

Seven years earlier, in 1993, there was the British doctors study. This study of 12,000 middle-aged, male doctors led by Sir Richard Doll and a team at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, found that the lowest mortality rates – lower even than teetotallers – were among those drinking between 20 and 30 units of alcohol each week.The level of drinking that produced the same risk of death as that faced by a teetotaller was 63 units a week, or roughly a bottle of wine a day!

By 1994, five studies had been published which showed that moderate amounts of alcohol gave some degree of protection against heart disease. A year later, scientists at the Institute for Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen, who studied 13,000 men and women over 12 years, found that drinking more than half a bottle of wine a day – 50 units a week – cut the risk of premature death by half.

So what is the truth? Clarity is not aided by the fact that different countries use different quantities of alcohol to define a unit.

In Britain one unit of alcohol is 8 grams of pure ethanol. In Australia and Spain it is 10 grams, in Italy 12, in America 14, and in Japan 19.75. Translate the respective countries’ levels into British units and you find that, for men, Britain’s supposed safe weekly limit of 21 is more than Poland (12.5), but less than Canada (23.75), America (24.5), South Africa and Denmark (31.5) and Australia (35).

Some countries say that women should drink less than men, but others, including Canada, the Netherlands and Spain, make no distinction.

Christopher Record, a liver-disease specialist at Newcastle University, suggested that “it doesn’t really matter what the limits are”. “What we do know is, the more you drink, the greater the risk. The trouble is that we all have different genes.Some people can drink considerably more than [the limits] and they won’t get into any trouble.”

I’ll drink to that!

Yes its true. the guidlines that are constantly thrown at you the the nanny state and its supporters have no scientific basis at all!

The safe limits guidelines were introduced in 1987 after the Royal College of Physicians produced its first health report on alcohol misuse. In A Great and Growing Evil: The Medical Consequences of Alcohol Abuse, the college warned that a host of medical problems – including liver disease, strokes, heart disease, brain disease and infertility – were associated with excessive drinking. The report was supposedly the most significant study into alcohol-related disorders to date.

But Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the college’s working party on alcohol, told The Times in October 2007 that the figures were not based on any clear evidence. He remembers “rather vividly” what happened when the discussion came round to whether the group should recommend safe limits for men and women.

“David Barker was the epidemiologist on the committee and his line was that ‘We don’t really have any decent data whatsoever. It’s impossible to say what’s safe and what isn’t’.

“And other people said, ‘Well, that’s not much use. If somebody comes to see you and says ‘What can I safely drink?’, you can’t say ‘Well, we’ve no evidence. Come back in 20 years and we’ll let you know’. So the feeling was that we ought to come up with something. So those limits were really plucked out of the air. They weren’t really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee.”

Subsequent full scientific studies have found evidence which suggested that the safety limits should actually be raised, but they were ignored by a succession of health ministers because they were off-message.

Mark Goldrich, director of Euromarque Personalised Wines Ltd said “As ever, if Politicians are involved, you can’t believe anything that is said. Its enough to drive you to drink!”

Traditionally the Champagne producers have dismissed the idea that any worthy competitor could ever be made over here in England. But in the past few years, at least two of the major Champagne houses have looked at vineyards and potential vineyards on our side of the English Channel, where similar chalky soils and warming temperatures have prompted interest in english wine-growing.

Executives from both Duval-Leroy and Champagne Louis Roederer have toured vineyards in Kent and Sussex. Neither has bought any land nor gone into business with English growers, but Stephen Skelton, a wine consultant, said he expected that a large Champagne house could do so in the future.

“Warmer temperatures are making life a lot easier for winegrowers in England, especially if you are growing Champagne varieties,” said Skelton, who led Roederer executives on a tour of English vineyards in September.

Last year, Egon Ronay expressed frustration that a range of English sparkling wines made by RidgeView that he had honored with an award, could not be called Champagne. “The fact that they cannot call it Champagne is an absurdity and I take great issue with this silly rule,” Ronay told Decanter.com, an online news service for the industry.

Supporters of English sparkling wines say that they regularly hold their own against the top Champagnes in blind taste tests. Mike Roberts, the founder and director of RidgeView, said that his vineyard’s sparkling wines had been served at the British Embassy in Paris and at Queen Elizabeth II’s 80th birthday in 2006.

The term Champagne is protected by EU law to distinguish products from specific geographical areas. Under those rules, only about 32,000 hectares, (79,000 acres), of vineyards in Champagne may use the name.

Some producers have increasingly been using their expertise to produce sparkling wines from new world areas, particularly California and New Zealand. But Stephen Charters, who does research on the Champagne business at the Reims Management School, said that Champagne producers were cautious about buying land in England, even though land prices there were far lower than in Champagne.

The problem is that producers remain wary of marketing wine from a country like Britain, where the modern wine industry is comparatively new and small.

“Our interest was to see what’s happening in a place that’s not very far away from Champagne,” said Michel Brismontier, who is in charge of exports and sales at Duval-Leroy. He did not rule out future investments in England, but he said that the company had other priorities for now.

Yves Dumont, the chairman of the Champagne house Laurent-Perrier, is among the executives who say that they would never invest in sparkling wines outside of the Champagne region. Conditions in England now “could allow the creation of some very interesting sparkling wines but without the same taste as champagne,” Dumont said. “But the semi-continental climate of Champagne and the blustery island weather of England produce very different products”.

At the same time, Dumont acknowledged evidence that a changing climate created “worrying points” for the French industry. More frequent frosts have become a greater threat to harvests, he said. And while drought would not be a problem in Champagne because the chalk under the soil retains so much moisture, heat waves can roast grapes on the vine, badly eroding the quality of harvests, as happened five years ago.

“We’re seeing an aggravation in contrasts between periods that are very hot and periods that are very cold,” Dumont said. Yet another concern is that the level of acidity - a main characteristic of Champagne grapes - has dropped over the past six years because of steadily rising average temperatures.

Dumont said that increasingly sophisticated growing and blending techniques had made such challenges manageable. He also said that changes in the weather that might turn out to be cataclysmic for Champagne producers still could be as long as five decades away.

But some experts say changes could come sooner than the Champagnois expect.

“Some regions in Europe have had great vintages, thanks to climate change,” said Pancho Campo, a Spanish wine-maker who organised the conference on the implications of climate change for the wine industry in Barcelona in February. “But they have to understand that if these changes continue to increase, on a business-as-usual scenario they may have only 15 or 20 years to adapt.”

“The increasing quality of sparkling wines from the newer regions, such as like England, will create more competition for the Champagnois in some markets”, said Mark Goldrich, director of Euromarque Personalised Wines, but the romance and image of champagne will always give it an edge for celebrations and special occasions.

Extreme Expense?

A personalised, limited edition 12-bottle boxed set of Perrier-Jouet Champagne went on sale last Thursday after a glitzy launch party at Paris’ Opera Garnier,
with a price tag of 50,000 euros, ( $79,000, £38,000).if that seems a bit pricey, consider a single bottle at 4,166 euros, or $6,600, £3150).

Sales are limited to a “community of super-rich” consumers in the United States, Britain, Japan, China, Russia, Switzerland and France.

Says Olivier Cavil, head of communications at Perrier-Jouet:

“We are going to sell these box-sets to 100 people around the world who will have a chance to customise their own champagne, the ultimate luxury. Each buyer will come to Epernay” in eastern France “for a one-on-one meeting with our cellar master Herve Deschamps, and will personally add a ‘liqueur’ to personalize the bottles.”

A combination of sugar and wines from different years, the liqueur will put the finishing touch on bottles of Perrier-Jouet’s 2000 Belle Epoque champagne.

Buyers are offered a storage nest in Perrier-Jouet’s cellars, to hold the bottles for another eight months, to give them time to fully prepare their own cellars!

Buyers will also be offered a haut cuisine dinner and an overnight stay at Perrier-Jouet’s Belle-Epoque mansion in Epernay, home to 200 pieces of original modern art.

Will it sell?

Many of the 100 box sets available have already been snapped up by celebrities including former Bond girl Sophie Marceau, singer Marianne Faithfull and actress Victoria Abril

Is it worth it?

Good question. You would have to be quite an expert to taste the difference between the regular 2000 vintage and the “personalised” version. Most of the contents will be the same, and even the liqueur will made from wines with the same house style.

More importantly, the bottle will look pretty much like a normal bottle of vintage Perrier-Jouet. So how will it impress your guests?

It would be a lot cheaper and more visually impressive to buy a top quality personalised champagne with your own specially designed label on it. Euromarque offers Hachette rated premier cru champagne with your own personalised label for less than 40 euros, which is a lot better value than the 4166 euros for the Perrier-Jouet.

So it was Budget day this week. The Chancellor is short of money so decides to hit the innocent drinker.

After several years of steady increase, 4p a bottle for the last few years, this time it went up 14p. On sparkling wine and champagne the increase was 18p.

This hits the ordinary wine drinker the most, after all 14p on a Mouton Rothschild isn’t like to be noticed, but on a £4 Vin de Pays it is. Of course its not the wine drinkers that go on for town centre binge drinking. And wine is not the tipple of choice for underage drinkers. But their cider and alco-pops only go up 3p.

So come when you give your dad a bottle of wine with personalised fathers day label, or a personalised whisky you are likely to have chipped in a bit more to the national coffers.

For our corporate personalised wine we will be reviewing our prices in April. For the retail personalised wine labels we will review in May. We filled the warehouse before the budget to avoid any early hits, but when we run low on existing wine stock the price must rise. Sorry

One of the key elements in personalised wine is the quality of the label material. You may think it’s just a piece of paper but unfortunately its more complicated than that.

Depending on the requirement we use a range of different label stock. Some include various substrates for special roles, such as extra adhesion or heavy duty.

Your ordinary 80gm office paper is not in the same league!

We have been looking to reduce our environmental footprint throughout the business. When it comes to label stock it’s a bit tricky.

Recycled paper has improved greatly in the last few years. It’s gone from being only suitable for newsprint and scrap paper to being good for most all office purposes. Unfortunately its not easy to make it into top quality art paper and labelling stock from recycled paper pulp, and we haven’t yet managed to find anything suitable.

The next best thing is to source from the most sustainable sources.

Our principle label stock is a premium heavyweight product.

We source The virgin pulp is well managed from Nordic forests. The pulp is elementary chlorine free. The mill itself has ISO 14001 certification and is EMAS registered, the EU’s Eco Management and Audit Scheme.

The paper carries the Nordic Environmental Label or the “Swan label” is a multinational environmental labelling scheme which also has close co-operation with the EU ECO-label system, being a “Competent body” in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Norway). The Nordic environmental label is a neutral, independent label which guarantees a certain environmental standard. Only products which satisfy strict environmental requirements on the basis of objective assessments are allowed to display this product label.