Hi folks, looking for advice on how to talk to customers looking to avoid sugar in wine. I work retail and have had a fair number of customers ask for “low” or “no” sugar wines. Folks just don’t want to hear that most wines without RS just aren’t labeled as such despite my offer to point out a few. I want to be respectful of their dietary restrictions and keep the conversation short, but don’t want to perpetuate the misconceptions about residual sugar that industrial wine marketers have created to convince folks to buy their watered-down garbage.
“You can’t use reason to convince anyone out of an argument that they didn’t use reason to get into.”
pull some tech sheets on a bunch of wines that have R/S on them and have 15-20 ready to go
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This. I don’t think the customer you’re describing is looking to learn, I think they’re looking to be reassured.
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pull some tech sheets on a bunch of wines that have R/S on them and have 15-20 ready to go
This is perfect, I’ll pull tech sheets for wines with zero R/S. I love it. Thanks, @J_Dornellas
And @Ben_M_a_n_d_l_e_r - I think you summed it up precisely: they want to be reassured.
I’ve been taking the request seriously, but I know my attempts so far are just being read as dismissive. I really appreciate the advice, plus it will be useful to the other staff that aren’t wine specialists. Thank you!
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honestly, you can put some of this work on your distributor sales reps as well, assuming you work with about a handful you can ask them to suggest 20 wines each across various categories and just keep compile it all to a spread sheet to keep behind the counter
I ran into a similar problem when I worked wine retail a few years back with sulfites. People kept asking for sulfite free wines and I had to try and educate and explain to them that most yeasts will naturally produce sulfites. What they were really looking for were wines with no added sulfites. Most people didn’t really engage with this specific type of education because they wanted to be reaffirmed that sulfites = bad and headaches and such. When I tried to educate people about more general wine knowledge they were very receptive. I think people almost get conspiracy theory brained where as soon as you say something to counter what they think they shut down rhetorically, and do mental gymnastics to convince themselves that are right.
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