March 25 2007
Two weeks ago I wrote a post called “The Endless Harvest” observing the increase in wine brands that are globally sourcing fruit and/or wine to create wine brands that definitely capitalize on the increasing “World is Flat” mode of operations.
I also observed that, from a marketing perspective, having somebody do a documentary, following harvest at various wine regions throughout the Europe, South America, Australia, Africa, etc would be a pretty good idea in order to connect with a younger audience attuned to import brands and travel.
One of the brands engaged in this global sourcing that I could have talked about is Don Sebastiani and Sons. I more heavily referenced Betts & Scholl for no particular reason, but they are much smaller and less well known than Don & Sons.
The post was timely enough, particularly because the Sonoma Valley Film Festival begins on April 11th.
In response to my post, lo and behold, I got in touch with a Napa Valley-based filmmaker, Bret Lyman, who is creating his current work using the pseudonym B. Napa. B. Napa not only is working on a project called “Crush,” but he is doing so with sponsorship from Don & Sons.
The short film is going to premier during the Sonoma Valley Film Festival on April 12th.
Damn. What a good idea. Those guys are smart--so smart they are at least nine months ahead of my post, which now looks simultaneously prescient, sanguine AND silly. Silly because I didn’t connect the dots that this was a project already coming to fruition, no pun intended.
I had the opportunity to catch up with B. Napa and talk about his project. As something akin to the “Warren Miller” of wine films, I sensed a vigor, hardened by his 15 years in New York, which belied his languid California wine country locale.
Plunging deeper, B. Napa is striving for greater permanence, working on a documentary that will take him to Chile and Argentina in the next several months while trying to create an oeuvre akin to the aforementioned filmmaker Warren Miller, an artist and documentarian whose work, primarily, focused on outdoor sports and embodied a grace, subtle wit and deep reverence for its subjects.
Asking, “What does wine mean” B. Napa is exploring this question after living in a post 9/11 New York City, coming to something of a career crisis and crossroads and subsequently moving back to the Valley while experiencing significant family upheaval.
Many good documentaries (and artists) use their subject as a medium to explore greater and more significant issues than what a first blush look would lead you to believe. The documentary “Hoop Dreams,” for example, used inner-city Chicago basketball as a tableau to explore social issues related to race.
“What does wine mean” is a good question, and in the hands of this talented filmmaker I’m pretty sure that question, in its exploration, will cut deeper and with more meaning than what we can imagine.
B. Napa’s work shows itself to be almost lyrical in its aesthetic beauty with a keen eye and a trained ear for the right music and, yes, the subtle wit that is a hallmark of Warren Miller. Check out the world premiere of his short film “Crush,” that will be a part of the Sonoma Valley Film Festival “Cinema Epicuria” on April 12th at 5:30 pm PST.
Check out some of B. Napa’s work at the following links:
“Crush” Trailer:
http://www.donandsons.com/films/
“Topaz” Film Short:
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March 23 2007
Stop the press. An Indiana native son winery, Oliver, dropped a press release today announcing anticipated growth. Significant growth!
My headline was going to read, “The Arbor Mist of the Midwest,” but I didn’t think that would be fair. The crown jewel of the Indiana wine market makes a lot of good wine and they do a lot of good for the Indiana wine industry. Even so, and separate from the point of this post, I was shocked to see that they have released some new wines that pay homage to Arbor Mist—a Mango, Black Cherry and Strawberry wine. Um … yeah. As a nice contrasting juxtaposition between big and small wineries, consider Josh at Pinotblogger’s recent post and this winery start-up spreadsheet.
Despite Oliver’s egregious affront to fine wine lovers via Mango wine, every NBA team needs a franchise player, and Oliver Winery is the state of Indiana’s franchise. And, fortunately, Black Cherry wine aside, there is no Allen Iverson-type of baggage associated with Oliver, either.
Just the same, Oliver makes a lot of wine that would make a staunch wine lover cry in their Bordeaux. I’m talking many other semi-sweet wines besides the Strawberry. The #1 selling wine in the state, based on the concord grape, is called “Soft Red” and it sells by the pallet at Sam’s Club.
But, hey, this is John Mellencamp, Chevy Truck, “Our Country” territory.
Oliver has built their business by creating high-quality products that appeal to many residents taste preferences, and frankly, they lap other Indiana wineries in packaging. Their packaging competes with anybody’s in the country, whereas most other Indiana wineries are still fussing around tweaking their own computer (read: bad) art and printing on third-tier labels, Oliver invests in packaging to the extent that nobody looks both ways to make sure nobody notices when picking up a bottle of their Muscat Canelli or their Blackberry wine with enough residual sugar to use it as an ice cream topper. Check out their new “Late Harvest” packaging and tell me that it’s not attractive.
Their tasting room is very nice as well, competing with 80% of the tasting rooms I’ve been to in California. I can’t be certain, but Bill Oliver, the president and son of the founder, must subscribe to the current design ethos that indicates that quality in the product is no longer the primary purchase driver—it’s quality in aesthetics, a fundamental value that Target retail stores understand very well.
But, Oliver does other wines as well, including some fine wines that are distributed in 10 states, mostly in the Midwest but as far afield as Colorado and Louisiana and Virginia. Their Merlot, Cabernet, Shiraz and Zinfandel are all fine representatives of their varietal.
And, if today’s news release is an indicator, the # 4 hottest 2004 small brand according to Wine Business Monthly may not be considered small for much longer. Oliver has already grown from 250K gallons in ’03 to an expected 600K gallons in ’07.
This news report indicates that in order to ramp up to the 600K gallons, Oliver Winery has just purchased 12 new stainless steel tanks creating a total additional capacity of 258,000 gallons. Or, if my math is correct, the tanks will afford an additional 107K cases of production.
The news release indicates that the tanks will be used to produce four main varieties of wine.
I’m not certain, but my guess is that those four varieties will be the aforementioned fine wines and Oliver is going to make a push into national, or at the least, expanded regional distribution.
Congrats to Oliver--a nice drinking companion to the Indianapolis 500 and John Mellencamp--something to make all Hoosiers proud.
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March 20 2007
One of the things that has not coalesced in this hyper-age of wine marketing is branding towards Baby Boomers.
I mean, sure, we have every “adventure” label you can think of aimed at just about every demographic segment—everything from “White Lie” to “Red Truck” and a marketer somewhere probably could tell me who “Gnarly Head” appeals to, bonus points if it resonates with Gnarls Barkley music fans. Everybody gets a turn except, it seems, for upper middle-class Baby Boomer’s.
Maybe it’s because wealthy Baby Boomers have a corner on their own slice of the wine market—it’s called the allocated and futures market.
Allocations notwithstanding, I know some of these wealthy white guys are still rocking out to Jimmy Buffet whenever the Margaritaville Parrothead party rolls into town, bumbling the words and doing the standing weave dance whenever “Pencil Thin Mustache” is played.
And, I know some of these guys are pulling out and wearing the Tommy Bahama shirt at the concert.
Tommy Bahama, for the uninitiated, is what can best be called a “lifestyle” brand—a purveyor of the “island lifestyle” as they like to say. They sell everything from Hawaiian shirts to furniture and a lot of things in between. Bob, the accountant, arm chair sport fisherman and grillmaster weekend warrior might be a customer, for example.
So, when I was reading Food & Wine magazine and I saw an ad for Tommy Bahama rum, found at www.tommybahamarum.com it hit me like a ton of bricks … that could be the Baby Boomer marketing angle for wine—what a great idea for a winery to license and/or work with the company that manages the Tommy Bahama brand to produce some vino--I’m thinking a nice summer deck Rosé and white to start, hints of pineapple on the nose, an island paradise in a glass of chardonnay.
So, this is how a blog post originates at Good Grape … I see something that leads to an idea, that idea bounces against another idea, I do some cursory research and then all of sudden it spills out. However, something is wrong with this situation. The underpinning element of this blog post was the fact that surely I would go to godaddy.com to do a URL search and find that http://www.tommybahamawine.com was already registered by the same good folks that are pimping the rum. I could then give a scoop, some omnipotent scoop based on deductive reasoning.
Not the case. The scoop I was going to deliver is, apparently, not to be—there are no plans for a Tommy Bahama wine, at least not as measured by a registered URL name.
In fact, I registered the URL today. Cybersquatter I am not, but, what the heck it’s only $9 bucks.
So, if you’re a winery or a brand-builder and you think this is a good idea and want to approach Tommy Bahama with a proposition AND the URL, send me an email I’ll give you the URL for cost and a bottle of the to-be-made wine.
And, I suppose, the beat still goes on for the lack of Baby Boomer wine marketing … the good news is though that we’re getting closer and closer to chilling the Rosé, and firing up the grill, Tommy Bahama notwithstanding.
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March 8 2007
As much as we would like to think that wine blogs are upsetting the traditional media apple cart, there is still a ways to go before potential equates to influence.
Because of this (and because it’s sometimes good grist for the mill), I still read a lot of mainstream wine media. Just to keep up, you know.
But, where the monthly glossies are easier to keep track of, most syndicated weekly print columnists are a little bit more difficult to track down; not every news paper is on the RSS bandwagon, either. And, for precisely that reason, I signed up for the Wine Opinions “Wine Review Weekly.” It’s on a trial basis and I like what I see in the first issue.
What a handy little service—kind of like a public relations clip service or the News Coverage Index, except for wine.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has an influential weekly service—the News Coverage Index--where they summarize the broad news stories of the previous week. Each week the NCI collects and reviews coverage from top news organizations across five major sectors of the media: newspapers, network television, cable television, radio and the internet. Every Tuesday, the News Coverage Index is updated on PewResearch.org to identify the top stories covered by the media during the preceding Sunday through Friday.
Wine Opinions, a side project by John Gillespie from the Wine Market Council, strikes me as a project that might end up heading in that direction, except devoted to wine. It’s an interesting idea and one with merit--information consumption around wine is only growing commensurate with the amount of content available; that is to say there is plenty to go around.
Eventually somebody has to figure out how to keep track of all of this information. The difference between reading and knowledge is wisdom and that can only be had by experience, but in the interim, and just launched it should be noted, Wine Opinions keeps tracks of the major dailies and their wine columnists for wines tasted.
And, while I won’t even begin to broach the subject that Tyler Colman’s palate has more relevance to me, then, say, Bob Hosman from the South-Florida Sun Sentinel, I will say that having national columnists linked in an email digest is a handy little thing.
Unfortunately, I’m on a *free* trial subscription, open to anybody that responded to the Wines & Vines promo email, and I think regular priced subscriptions will be an incredibly outrageous price of $349 dollars annually. For an email. Priced, undoubtedly, like a clip service and not a wine enthusiast service. Did I mention that Wine Opinions creates no content of its own in this email digest?
Frankly, I’m torn because I like what I see, but not $349 dollars worth of like.
Check it out at the following link and weigh in with thoughts. Too much money for the price of convenience or incredible time-saver?
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March 4 2007
It has dawned on me, on the cusp of the rock band Van Halen’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 12th, that the band saga over the course of the last 30 years is something akin to a vertical wine tasting, what with Van Halen’s myriad of singers (three at last count) within the same framework of music and opinions on superiority so scattered as to almost be divisive.
Everybody has an opinion on which vintage from the same wine type from the same winery is best, so to speak.
When Van Halen’s seminal album “1984” was released (the last album with singer David Lee Roth), I was in 5th grade, just getting into music and still developing my love for hair metal.
Kiss “Animalize” and Motley Crue’s “Shout at the Devil” (members from both bands would go on to make wine, it should be noted) played on my cassette deck as my twin brother and I stomped and pounded our way to a sustained level of Nerf Hoop prowess in our shared bedroom. My parents graciously allowed us to earn valuable body-checking skills against a repeated symphony of door thudding--legacy Dr. J finger rolls and nascent Michael Jordan exalted dunks the reward, even if it was on a 7-foot door.
A couple of years later when I went to a week long basketball camp at Notre Dame, I had Van Halen’s new album, 5150, with new lead singer Sammy Hagar on my Walkman, all the rage in 1987.
In the still-simmering war of which era of Van Halen was better—David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar, I choose Hagar—blasphemy to most.
But, interestingly enough, while David Lee Roth is a public liability saying all of the wrong things while introducing his reunion with Van Halen for a world tour within the same 10 days that the tour is called off, Wine Spectator had a feature article on their web site with Sammy Hagar, who is a noted wine lover with a 10,000 bottle cellar.
Thankfully, the WS writer mentions nary a word about Van Halen, but readers are treated to a pretty good interview with Sammy who reveals that his very first wine experience, in the mid-70s, included a 1927 Martinez Port, a 1960s Yquem and a 1950s Latour. We should all be so lucky. The thing that sticks out about Sammy is his obvious humility as he talks about his learning curve and trying to age Beaujolais and the fact that he’s never visited any regions in Europe.
Some excerpts below:
My first misconception was that the older the wine, the better it’s going to be. I was under the impression that I had to age all these wines forever. That was because of that Port. I started putting everything away, and then I started figuring out later in life that not everything ages that well. Like when I first got into Beaujolais, I bought some and laid them down, and they were awesome until about three years later!
I saved my money--I wasn’t rich back then--and I got hip to prearrival Bordeauxs, because they were about nine bucks back then. I’ve always tried to buy a case and put one bottle away. I have an area of my cellar that’s one bottle from each case I’ve ever bought, unless I found as I drank the case that the bottles didn’t hold up. A lot of the ‘73 Bordeauxs didn’t hold up too well. I think I have a 1973 Mouton left because of the Picasso label. But back then I was buying some of the fourth or fifth growths, and they weren’t holding up.
I’ve never visited any wineries in Europe. When I’m on tour, I’m on tour. And when I’m finished I’m going to an island rather than to wine country. I’m a coast guy. But here in California I’ve been to pretty much all of them. I used to love going up there because I knew the people, and I knew the Bundschu family. Dick Arrowood became a good friend. [And] I used to go up to Caymus when Chuck Wagner Sr. was selling wine out of his kitchen. But lately if I go up there, I just go to one of the restaurants and just eat and drink … and take a limo home!
And, in response to a question about any other musicians he knows of and their appreciation of wine:
I’m kind of the guru, but in the old days I met Al Stewart, the guy who sang that song “Year of the Cat.” I was with the original bass player from the band Boston, Fran Sheehan, who has a palate and a collection that will blow your mind. He was buying ‘45 Bordeauxs, like four or five of them at a time, and we’d do blind tastings. So one time we were at a restaurant in Boston, probably in 1979, and Al Stewart walked in while we were doing a blind tasting of six Bordeauxs, in decanters. He asked, “What’re you drinking?” and we said, “We don’t know, it’s all blind.” He said, “Mind if I take a sniff?” So he takes a glass, sniffs the first one and says, “That’s ‘66 d’Estournel.” The next one, “That’s ‘76 Mouton.” He nailed every single one of them just with the smell! I’ve never met a guy in my life who could do that. He’s the man!
Interesting, in the context of Rock and Roll, the Hall of Fame and Van Halen that most of the fan debate and questions are pointedly around which lead singer was better, leading to the question of whose music holds up the best as “art,” the ultimate legacy.
Wine is the same way, as the classic vintages from the classic wineries are held up as defining examples of their times.
I’m not sure how the Van Halen soap opera will end as their induction date looms, but knowing that Sammy partakes and appreciates the good grape somehow provides me comfort in my opinion on the winner in this vertical tasting.
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