Italian wines should make themselves easier for customers

At one of our tastings, a guest, who was born and grew up in Rome and now lives in Brussels, told me that she prefers French wines to Italian wines. To be specific, she prefers haut medoc. 

I was very surprised, and asked her why. Basically, it’s because if you are not an expert on italian wines, italian wines are too confusing.It is very difficult to choose a wine to your taste just by looking at the label. even if you are a native italian and drinks a lot, as the guest i am talking about, it doesn’t help. 

French wines, on the contrary, are so clear and easy.   There are about 6 major wine producing regions and each region has 2 major grapes/blends, and they are already “international grapes’ ‘. and Every sub-region has a very clear, significant style.

Then french wine producers only need to specify the regions on the label, (for some wines maybe they need to specify what grapes are in this wine), then customers will know what to expect for the wine inside, so they can easily find a french wine they like. 

While Italy has 20 big regions, numerous sub-regions, more than 500 grape varieties, and numerous blends, most  customers don’t know  most of them, maybe even I don’t know most of them.

This is particularly bad for marketing. Because if a customer doesn’t know what to expect, and there are so many italian wines to choose from but he doesn’t know anything about them, he probably will choose none of them, and go straight for the familiar reliable french wines. 

To make it worse, Italian producers like to name their wines, while french producers seldom do this, they only print the name of the winery in the biggest font and clearly specify the producing regions,and if necessary, the grapes. And  Italian wines are already 1000 times more complicated than French wines!

Those are very good, very poetic names, I agree.  but, 

For 99% of international customers or maybe for 90% of customers outside of the region where the wine comes from, it is already a success for you if you can make them remember the grape variety -wine producing region and have a good impression about it;  a huge success if you can make them remember the name of your winery, there is no chance they can remember the name you give to the wines. 

if you don’t label the region and grapes clearly, customers don’t understand anything about this wine and they forget about it immediately. This kind of wine stays unknown to them, and they still won’t choose it in the future and won’t pay extra for the brand.

In conclusion , all the Italian wine producers should try to make their wine easier to understand and easier to remember for customers, because great Italian wines need a chance of fair competition in the international market.