Challenges for a wine style taxonomy and classification

The amount of work involved in classifying all wines

With over hundred thousand wines from ten thousands of producers, the value of any wine style taxonomy depends on the quality and quantity of classification data. Each wine will have to be put into one wine style class, and the act of defining that class can be done by producer, retailer and consumer. To speed up the work of classification all wines, consumers and retailers may cooperate However, eventually the producer has the overriding decision to define the class where any of his/her wines belongs, as this is the market segment it will compete it (in category management terms).

Mapping to other taxonomies

Large wine producers or retailers already use taxonomies for wine, for example for public (website) or internal business use (category management). In order to provide value to the industry, any new and shared framework has to provide a translation or mapping to the company internal business taxonomy for wine.

Product variance

The variance in a wine product and its taste over different vintages may mean that the wine style is not the same for all these vintages. In other words, an extreme year may cause that vintage of a wine to fall outside it's 'normal' wine style class.

It is clear that for reasons of wine brand identity, the wine producer should aim that the style of a wine remains stable across vintages because ultimately producers benefit from providing product transparency to consumers who buy and drink a wine again repeatedly because of taste expectations.

One of the key strengths of the ISWN code is exactly that its design allows to reduce complexity when managing wine information, thanks to the ISWN-W wine code that groups all the underlying vintage variants for a wine (on ISWN-V level) to a 'brand level' across vintages.

Again the ISWN WSF was designed and developed for the above complexity and is equipped with software to manage wine styles at both ISWN-V and ISWN-W level.

Note on generic product classifications

The above also helps to understand why generic classifications for Consumer Goods or the Food and Beverage sector largely fail when applied to wine. Base attributes such as originating wine are and grape are not enough to describe and classify wines in a way that 'works' for end consumers. Wines are often mixes of multiple grape types in varying degrees, with grapes coming from multiple wine areas. Different producers can have very different wine production processes causing large differences between wines that still, broadly speaking, have the same base grape and origin.