Drink Cava! All the cool kids are doing it.
It won’t surprise you to discover you’re being watched. But, before you reach for the foil hat, you might be interested to learn which aspects of your exciting life these watchmen are monitoring.
Curiously, it’s not your bedroom antics, or the petty pilfering from the office stationery cupboard. But they are watching. After all, to bring Oscar Wilde’s wise words into our Age of Surveillance, possibly the only thing worse than being watched day and night is not being watched at all.
I know it sounds perverse, but what if, after all the videotape has rolled, all these voyeuristic tendencies lead to improvements in your life?
Imagine if each time you saunter into your local wine store and nonchalantly yank a bottle off the shelf to have with your dinner, a soft but persistent alarm goes off in a bunker somewhere.
In diligent response, some accounting type with beady eyes dutifully watches the CCTV footage of you (yes, everything is recorded on video) and makes a series of notes in his ledger with a stubby little pencil.
What’s he writing down? Well…to be perfectly candid…everything.
The type of wine you choose, the price, the time of day, the colour of your shirt, if your shoes are scuffed, the way you’re wearing your hair that day and, most importantly, how long it has been since you last bought a bottle; a month? A week? A day? An hour? You see, they’re interested in you. Very interested.
How do we know this? Simple. They publish the results.
Recently I received a report on how Australian wine drinkers feel about sparkling wine. It makes for fascinating reading. Did you know over the last five years, your interest in Aussie sparkling wine hasn’t grown at all? Not a smidge. At the same time, you seem to be drinking more imported fizz. I wonder why that is? Value? Flavour? Prestige? And to make it more interesting, you’re buying less of the cheap stuff than you were half a decade ago and more of the expensive gear. It’s heartening to see your tastes have improved.
Australian bubbles still represent 80% of all the sparkling wine you consume but you’re also drinking twice as much Prosecco as you used to. But then you probably already knew that. And you’re happy to pay more for better Italian bubbles. Again, you’re showing a real wine maturity.
Pretty much all the sparkling wine consumed in this country is either domestic or from France and Italy. Makes sense, right? The homegrown stuff plus Champagne plus Prosecco. What else is there? The answer is: a lot, like Cava from Spain or German sparkling wine, even the English are getting in on the act, but that’s a tale best kept for another time. Interestingly, the younger you are the more likely it is you’re drinking Spanish sparkling wine. I can see those future marketing campaign now. Drink Cava! All the cool kids are doing it!
Anyway, these surveillance artists have got the good oil on your drinking habits (and your bedroom antics as well, I lied about that bit). This is all to the good because, now we know what you like, we can work hard to bring you more of it. See, all we’re doing today is exactly what my old man used to say to me. Watch and learn, son. Watch and learn.