Would you know how to define a hard sell?  I don't, hence the question.

For me the words seem self explanatory; rainbows would be a hard sell in the land of the colour-blind. Whisky is a hard-sell in the land of free narcotics. Wine, on the other hand, is a hard sell, period. No conditions required. It’s just hard.

The thing is this: wine seems complicated. It really isn’t complicated, but people make it so. They confuse it with something that is truly complicated, like a tourbillion or a minute-repeater watch. Or for the sake of a more associable example, women. Wine is like women: they are both elegant and attractive, but only one of them is a work of grand complications. Wine isn’t the one.

Despite being fairly uncomplicated, wine doesn’t sell itself. It has to be sold. And not just at one point of sale. Wine is in fact the only product I can think of that needs a sales push at every point; the earlier you are in this chain of exchange, the longer you have to see the wine through. Eventually, all the people involved have to pretty much be there when the final consumer buys it and downs it. Such grand events are called Wine Dinners!

No other industry is so laborious. If you make, say car steerings, you don't have to convince the customer about the entire car in the showroom. No sir; just make a good steering wheel and sell it to the car company and the rest is their headache. It’s the same with every other product. The individual points of production need be bothered with the final assembled product. In fact, once the wholeseller passes the buck to the retailer, even that is justifiable grounds for further disassociation from the sales process.

Wine, however, is the real spoilt child here. The winemaker may sell it to buyers but then he has to visit the buyers’ clients to talk about the wine. The outlets that buy the wine will then ask the person they bought it from as well as the winemaker to be present at the dinner he organises for clients. The clients in return will host galas and ask the entire wine chain behind it to turn up and wax lyrical about the wine!

Wine is thus a hard sell. This alone is reason enough to remember that when selling wine, it won’t suffice to know only about your stage of transit of the wine. Everybody needs to know something about the wine as a whole, in its entirety. The salesperson needs to know something  about winemaking, and the oenologist needs to understand the consumer’s preferences. So let’s hear it once again, wine is a hard sell.

And all this to impress who? Ourselves? Surely a sip is greater proof of taste than anything else? It helps to know the story behind the wine, but do we as consumers need so much spoon-feeding? Is it that tough to just walk out and instead of our usual tipple, order a glass of wine and see what it does to us? If it doesn’t talk to you, don't order it next time. But if it talks back to you, if it tells you about all the places it has been, how it was made and just what fruit orchards lie nearby, then enjoy it.

And if you find yourself talking back to this wine, call a head doctor! You may need one, bad...