From Everyday Drinking: "People in Dallas Don’t Drink What We Drink."
What wine lists in Big D, Robert Parker, selling Prosecco in China, and an analysis of 172,000 wine listings taught me about how taste is made.
Here’s yet another wine writer taking Robert Parker’s name in vain.
In my second piece for Everyday Drinking, I explore the question of taste: how much of what we like is truly our own, and how much has been shaped by critics, restaurateurs, importers, geography, taxation, and the bottles we’re offered in the first place? Along the way, we encounter Dallas steakhouses, London wine bars, Immanuel Kant, and, inevitably, Robert Parker.
Also, I would like to thank WineLabs for providing the data that made this analysis possible.
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A trendy Barolo grower who had just returned from a work trip to the US told me that “people in Dallas don’t drink what we drink.” Their tastes are different, he said, they want different wines. From what he had observed, Americans gravitated towards richer, more powerful wines with riper fruit, while the lighter, more savory expressions prized in Europe were largely absent.
Beyond the obvious observation that restaurant wine lists differ from place to place, what intrigues me is the idea that taste is somehow of a place: that people develop preferences so deeply rooted in culture that they become difficult to translate across borders. A bit like the butter-versus-olive-oil divide: you are either an olive oil person or a butter person. Or, worse still, a margarine person. We tend to speak of such preferences as though they were innate rather than acquired.
His assertion also seemed straightforward enough to test. With WineLabs, I analyzed more than 172,000 wine listings from 501 restaurants and wine bars in Dallas and 1,310 venues in London.
At first glance, comparing Dallas with London may seem unfair. But I wanted to avoid skewing the results by choosing a wine-producing capital such as Paris or Milan, where domestic wines would naturally dominate restaurant lists. London, by contrast, combines an unusually international wine trade with comparatively limited domestic production, making it a more neutral benchmark against which to assess whether tastes really do differ across cultures.
According to the data, my Barolo-producing friend isn’t wrong.
In its restaurants and wine bars, Dallas serves wines with average alcohol levels around one percentage point higher than those in London (14.9 percent versus 13.8 percent ABV). The difference is driven almost entirely by the cities’ red wine selections. Nearly 60 percent of the wines on offer in Dallas are red, compared with less than half in London. Meanwhile, London offers a greater share of sparkling and dessert wines.
London is resolutely Old World: nearly 70 percent of the wines listed originate from France, Italy, and Spain. Dallas, by contrast, looks westward, with wines from California accounting for around 23 percent of all listings. French wines alone make up 46 percent of London’s wine lists, while Dallas offers a broader mix of New World regions, including Oregon, Mendoza, Marlborough, and Washington State. The difference is equally evident at the regional level. Burgundy and the Loire Valley feature prominently in London, whereas Napa Valley occupies a much larger place on Dallas wine lists.
Interestingly, Italian wines feature prominently in both cities, although…
…continue reading on Everyday Drinking.
