Coffee podcast 5th Wave - The Business of Coffee interviewed Morten Scholer and Rob Robinson from Notes Coffee in London to capture the differences between wine and coffee.

Scholer opened by outlining four key differences between coffee and wine:

  1. Where it happens: growing, harvesting, processing and bottling can happen on one winery, where the supply chain is long in coffee.
  2. Quality improvement: even with bad grapes, good wine can be made. Not the same with coffee bean where the raw product determines the cup.
  3. Ownership across the industry: far more distributed in coffee versus the consolidation of wineries.
  4. Global standards for coffee, whereas with wine, each country has its own for wine each country had their own.

The aroma wheel developed by University of California, Davis to display sensory terms has since been copied by the coffee sector in the 1990s. Meanwhile Robert Parker’s points system first started in the 1970s is being emulated by coffee.