champagne discount generic+trademarks heidi+barrett howell+mountain+cabernet lamborn+vineyards napa propaganda tasting tour wine wine+blog
May 3 2007
I did a podcast the other week with Tim from Winecast, Paul from Inertia Beverage Group and Mark, the Wine Writer for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News and the blog Uncorked.
It was a lively and good conversation. Tim, technophile du jour, is putting the finishing touches on the podcast which should be available shortly.
In that podcast Mark made note of something that astounded me—he said a local retailer was bringing in 13 different Rośe’s for the Spring.
Wow. Ohio is a pretty good wine drinking state, but 13 different SKU’s surprised me a little bit.
Something of a trend is a-brewing, er, fermenting.
The current issue of Wine Spectator also has a cover package on Rośe.
In excerpts from an article in Wine Spectator, writer Mitch Frank notes:
Rosé is the underdog of the wine world. But rosé is moving up fast, powered by rising quality and an inherent food-friendliness.
Rosés can show lovely cherry, melon and berry flavors, backed by a hint of depth and tannins as well as refreshing acidity … they are best enjoyed as a lively quaff at the end of a long day. “Save your Cabernet Sauvignons for a cold winter night,” says Alpana Singh, wine director of Lettuce Entertain You, the Chicago restaurant group that includes Wine Spectator Grand Award-winning Tru. “On a summer day, when it’s 90 degrees out, I’m drinking rosé.”
American wine drinkers have shown an increasing interest in rosé in the past five years. Sales of imported rosés grew 40 percent in 2004. The southern French region of Provence, the spiritual home of rosé, exported 50 percent more of the wine to the United States in 2006 than in 2005.
Last summer, rosé appreciation in the United States reached a critical mass. Restaurants began putting pages of rosé specials on their wine lists. “For some reason, rosé sales popped last year,” says Efrain Madrigal, wine director at Sam’s Wine and Spirits in Chicago. Rosé sales at Sam’s stores climbed about 25 percent in 2006, Madrigal estimates.
I’d say that Rośe’ time has come. Sales of imports growing at 40% in a year and 25% year over year at a large retail location are astounding.
One of the frustrating things about the wine industry is you can never really isolate why these sorts of hockey-stick growth curves happen. In the wine industry, catching lightening in the bottle is just that and the best you can do is catch a wave early.
Given that, you have to give some credit to Stormhoek winery for not only catching the wave, but doing as they do and waving off the other surfers to jump the wave alone. The passionate and engaging South African winery is having a little fun in the U.K. with a Rośe that has been created to drink on the rocks.
From a South African wine web site:
South African brand Stormhoek this week announced the imminent release of a concept wine in the UK named Couture – a Rosé made by Stormhoek winemaker Graham Knox, in a style intended to be consumed with ice.
Couture - a blend of Pinotage, Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon - launches in June in a major UK retailer at £6.99. It is packaged in a tall, colourful, modern, and chic bottle, its developers say, and its secret recipe and different serving techniques, including draught on tap for the on-trade, they believe give the product an edge in all market sectors.
Sixty-thousand consumers at Taste London 2007 will witness the launch of Couture, where an Interactive Ice Bar filled with huge blocks of multi-coloured ice, will have a mixologist serving Couture in its four guises: wine glass, tumbler, martini glass and champagne flute.
Jason Korman, the CEO of Stormhoek Vineyards is so damned wicked smart. As he told me in another communication, “Wine isn’t a distribution game, it’s a communication game.”
Regardless of what kind of game it is, he’s playing it well—catching the Rośe wave and putting a unique twist on it. Stormhoek just seems to get “it”—that same indefinable thing that also seems to go hand-in-hand with unexplainable growth. And, they always deliver above price point, which is a nice attribute, as well.
Now, if only we could get them a little bit better penetration in the states … that would be a really nice wave, for them and us.
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (2) | Print |
April 29 2007
On Saturday I made the 1.5 hour drive south of Indianapolis to Story, Indiana, a town, no scratch that, a village, on the southeastern rim of Brown County State Park in south central Indiana. Story sits, as the crow flies on route 135—south of Bean Blossom and Gnaw Bone, but north of Spurgeons Corner; a collection of buildings led by the quaint, charming even, Story Inn.
Founded in 1851, Story is a small set of buildings set off by the grand ole dame, the Story Inn, once a general store and now a restaurant, resplendent in, well, the kind old charm that comes with being a 100 year old + weathered wood-framed building in the middle of hill country in Indiana.
I have been to Brown County plenty of times; it’s something of a day-trippers vacation and boasts some spectacular fall scenery in October.
I made the trip without my wife, Lindsay, she being busy with a couple of other things and I committed to volunteering for a new wine consumer advocacy organization called Vinsense.
The larger occasion for the trip was the Indiana Wine Fair on the grounds of Story—featuring over 20 of Indiana’s 30 + wineries; pouring and tasting. Listen to the radio commercial here (no comment on the coherence of this particular gem and example of Indiana creative work).
I always enjoy these sorts of festivals, if only to cut through the crowds and the peach and blueberry wines to taste the dry reds and see how the industry is developing. It should be noted that I unapologetically do like Cherry wine, but I only measure quality and progress based on the dry reds. If Lenn from Lenndevours casts a brotherly nudge and occasionally wary eye at the state of New York for quality, he’d be downright snippy at Indiana, but that’s part of the charm, frankly, here and in virtually every other state not California, Washington, Oregon, and New York.
This trip, in particular, was of interest to me because I’ve been reading about the cold snap that hit the Midwest which is going to have a significant impact on the grape and wine industry.
An article in the April 27th edition of the Kansas City Star indicated that as much as 95% of the Missouri grape crop was lost. In Missouri, as in Indiana, if I’m not mistaken, Missourian wineries have to use 85% of their own grapes and juices and can use 15% from outside of the state for wine production.
In their wisdom, the state of Missouri is waiving that requirement and allowing wineries to bring in 95% of their grapes and juice from outside of the state. I have a hunch that this might be a good thing for many, many young, small wineries in states in the Midwest who will now have a legitimate opportunity to put a very high quality product in the bottle, further opening up awareness to consumers of the skill that can be found when winemakers work with quality ingredients.
Meanwhile, Vinsense, a consumer group dedicated to creating a consumer coalition to overturn Indiana’s archaic wine laws, is building up a full head of steam to take the fight to the legislators in order to truly have the laws of the state be in the spirit of Granholm, allowing direct shipping to consumers.
It’s a tall battle, particularly because an accommodation was made in ’05 in the wake of Granholm that, while half-assed and Indiana-esque in its execution, does allow for some direct-shipping while preserving the three-tier. It also allows wineries to secure micro-wholesale permits and sell to the trade, if under 12,000 gallons (5000 cases). Despite Vinsense getting some of their facts wrong indicating that 36 states have abolished the three-tier system, their heart is in the right place. This is exactly where most Indiana wineries find themselves today—with their heart in the right place.
It’s sometimes easy to be critical and very easy to fall into a trap of sitting on the high-horse, but I, for one, am very glad that there are people like Dr. Allan Dale Olson, the founder of Vinsense, willing to take up the fight, however difficult the challenge may be and I’m doubly glad that there are pioneers in the state of Indiana continually refining their craft and striving to make better and better wines. Usually in periods of strife—whether it be a fight with state over laws or a battle with Mother Nature over her fickleness, things do tend to always get better over the long run. Here’s to raising a glass to fightin’ the good fight for consumer access to wine and quality improvements in wine from wineries in the heartland.
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print |
April 25 2007
Josh at Pinotblogger was kind enough to tag me with a conversation thread making its way around the blogosphere around the topic of “Why I blog.”
It’s simple enough, and restated the question is: ‘Why the hell do you write stuff (essentially) for free on the internet.’
I got the idea to start blogging in February of ’05 as I read Business 2.0 magazine pool side in Naples, FLA while on vacation with some friends and my wife. The article was about a 20 year old kid who wrote a cell phone blog and was making $5000 bucks a month and I thought, ‘I can do that.’
At the same time, I was writing a business plan for a wine retail shop.
Ultimately, the wine business plan was front and center for my free time as I legitimately tried to get it off the ground.
When I realized (actually it was pointed out to me) that if you rub two nickels together you still only have 10 cents and that I didn’t have the financial wherewithal to start a business that was inventory intensive and required, by law, payment to suppliers within 15 days, I started looking at alternative outlets for my wine passion.
I came back to the blogging thing as a way feed the beast, so to speak; a way to express my ideas.
At the point I wanted to finally start a blog (September of ’05) I wasn’t terribly in tune with the blogging services aside from Blogger.com and I wanted to have greater control over the site than what Blogger afforded so I got stuck in a tangle of open source content management software review and chose a program called Mambo. Mambo, at the same time and unfortunately for me, had the open source project forked by its development team and they went off to create Joomla.
At the same time I couldn’t get the damn Mambo install to work and documentation was scarce. Nor, in fact, could a buddy of mine who is an administrator for a large-scale content management solution get it to work, either.
Having burned at least four months monkeying around with Mambo, I finally scrapped it for a TypePad account figuring that the most important thing was to just get started—which I did, finally, in January of ’06.
That’s the backstory to how I started blogging, but the real question is, ‘why do you blog?’
I blog because I have a tremendous passion for wine, it’s my #1 hobby, and I also have a lot of creative energy that needs an outlet. I can’t draw or do anything artistic even though I feel like I have an artistic sensibility. But, I can write a little bit. I had neglected this outlet for 10 years, not realizing that I needed to express myself creatively in some form. If I didn’t blog, I would probably start writing a book. It’s cathartic to me and a stress reliever to take ideas and put them together in ways that maybe haven’t been put together before.
I think it might be cliché to say so, but for me it’s the process of writing, it’s not the result. I don’t do it with any motives other than self-satisfaction.
My blogging is completely narcissistic and self-indulgent.
I really didn’t have any traffic at all for the first couple of months and if you check out some of my posts from early on you’ll see that my style hasn’t really changed in between doing it for myself without anybody checking it out and doing it today for a slightly larger audience. Blogging for me is really more about me getting stuff down on paper and mentally reconciling ideas than it is for other people’s enjoyment—which is why I write 500 – 1000 word posts when blog wisdom suggests that this is ridiculous. Nobody wants to slog through 900 words on a blog post, but I approach it like a newspaper columnist would – with context and a narrative where you have a beginning, a middle and an end with an opinion. And, I also write like a live rock show. One take. Everything I write is written in one stream of consciousness and one sit down session. Only, perhaps, three or four times have I ever written something and slept on it to come back to it. I like the immediacy of tapping a vein and then publishing it for permanence.
I redesigned the site professionally because I wanted the aesthetic to reflect the content, like a great cover to a book.
Ultimately, I blog for myself; it’s my hobby and is centered around something that I really enjoy—wine. If other people like the site than that’s great, and if they don’t that’s okay too, because I’d still do it. The original inspiration of a dude making $5000 a month is a moot point because I do it for free and that’s a part of the creative process and the purity of writing about ideas that amuse me.
I’m tagging Renee at Feed Me/Drink Me. Renee, why do you blog?
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (1) | Print |
April 20 2007
As a young sales buck, I was quickly exposed to the, “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with b.s.” school of selling.
This was quickly followed up with a quick tutorial in “tap dancing” school of sales when responding to a question that doesn’t have a good answer, or the answer that’s correct at the time.
Fortunately, shortly thereafter I learned that b.s. and/or dancing doesn’t work. Rarely to does the ‘dazzle ‘em’ part work, either.
Educated as a journalist (before I get any snarky comments or email about my grammar and English, let me be the first to say that I essentially went 10 years writing nothing more than emails and birthday cards, btw), I quickly fell back on simply asking good questions. Asking the five “W” questions is second nature to me. Who, what, why, when, and where. By virtue of my journalism education, I had designs to go into the advertising world and work for a large agency—you know, crafting the next Nike ad campaign and combining my perceived acumen in strategy and creativity.
This experience, in addition to building the ability to ask questions, also gave me educational experience in developing campaigns for brands. No Nike here, however. In fact, one professor took particular pleasure in making his students work on goofy projects like Vienna Sausages—his rational was that getting fired up about any brand you work with is important, so he was going to start the process for us with a bang. I spent a glorious semester working on an advertising campaign for mini sausages in a gelatinous goo in a small can.
The interesting thing is that advertising doesn’t start with an idea, it starts with research. So, off we trekked to the library to review this tome of a book that gave us information on where Vienna sausages were primarily consumed (the Carolinas), by whom, household incomes, high points for consumption in the year, so on and so forth.
This information gives a person strategic information in order to do a project charter to drive strategy for the creative folks to use as a jumping off point.
Running parallel to this and the point of this post is the recent launch of radio advertising for Rancho Zabacho Dancing Bull wines.
I’ve been in San Francisco, Miami and Indianapolis over the course of the last two weeks and have heard the same radio ads for Dancing Bull wine on the local market sports talk radio station in each market. I don’t listen to radio that many hours, so if I’m getting hit in three different markets it must’ve been a big media buy.
I find this very interesting, curious almost. I’m wondering what research the folks at Gallo did that justified what can be assumed to be a national media buy.
It seems like the entire campaign is ill conceived—starting with the tag line.
Curiously, the tag line for the wine—definitively geared towards men is, “Dancing Bull takes wine seriously so you don’t have to.”
Consider for a moment:
1) The wine comes from the Gallo label Rancho Zabacho with “Dancing Bull” as the secondary portion of the brand—and it’s not immediately intuitive if you’re a wine layperson
2) There are no verbal cues in the ads that prompt the listener to look for any specific images associated with the label
3) Men, generally speaking, in most situations, wine included, act as if they know more about a given subject then they actually do making the simplification of wine a potential mis-step, especially to sports wonks that listen to talk radio thriving on knowledge in a particular subject
4) The tag line sounds like a re-worked version from a deodorant ad, “We fight odor and wetness, so you don’t have to.”
5) No mention whatsoever of the two varietals that make up the product lineup—Zinfandel and Sauvignon Blanc
6) If you search for “Dancing Bull Wine” on Google the first result takes you to the Rancho Zabacho site, creating potential confusion in brand integrity
7) There is *NO* mention on the web site related to sports fans or the radio advertising, so a radio listener can’t actually confirm that they might be at the right sight if they did happen to Google the wine.
I’m all for wine advertising to create more mindshare with non-core wine drinkers, but I think this attempt is too flawed to be successful for Gallo.
The questions I’m asking lead me to believe that Dancing Bull radio ads may well just be b.s or tap dancing, I can’t tell which and it doesn’t take a journalist to figure that out. Tune in to any sports talk radio station during drive time and tell me what you think.
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print |
April 13 2007
I love it when Indiana and wine intersect. In fact, I never miss an opportunity to highlight the offbeat charm of my home state and ties to the wider wine world.
My favorite trivia question used to be, “What was the name of the team sponsor for the ‘Bad News Bears’” and now my favorite trivia is going to be, “What do funeral caskets, hospital beds and Monkey Bay wine have in common?”
The answer is Peter H. Soderberg, of course.
Mr. Soderberg, president of a company called Hillenbrand Industries based in Batesville, Indiana, was named to the Board of Directors at Constellation Brands, the #2 largest wine company in the country, this past week.
Now, to most people, the burial casket (not too mention hospital equipment) industry is completely foreign, but my father was in the funeral business for 35 years, so the name Batesville caskets, isn’t completely out of left field for me.
And Batesville is in the Ohio River Valley appellation, as the crow flies, southeast of Indianapolis on the way to Cincinnati.
Yet, anybody that pays attention to Board appointments would surely scratch their head at somebody with a business-to-business healthcare background like Soderberg being named to the board at a consumer brand company like Constellation. A quick search of the Internet indicates that Soderberg has a lengthy business history in New York before his relocation to Indiana in March of 2006 to run Hillenbrand Industries, so he likely made some long ago connections that are yielding results today.
We’ll assume that the Soderberg was hired for his overall business acumen and not his casket knowledge. Though, perhaps, Mr. Soderberg can help Constellation bury dead brands.
Another Indiana company, highlighted in the April 7th issue of the Indianapolis Business Journal, called Taliera is actually trying to resurrect dead or dying wine and spirits brands.
Started by J. Smoke Wallin, also the President of a technology company based in Indianapolis serving the wine industry called eSkye, Taliera recently pulled back from a “blank check” IPO due to “adverse market conditions.”
Basically, Wallin and some industry colleagues are trying to raise money in order to buy languishing brands and re-build them.
From the article in the Indianapolis Business Journal:
Taliera will focus on finding alcoholic beverage brands that your parents or grandparents once enjoyed, but that now languish. Wallin said regulations on alcohol advertising, particularly for liquor, make it much easier to reposition an older brand than to introduce a new one.
Interesting concept.
I’m not sure too many institutional investors (or individual investors) actually invest in an IPO based on the idea and only the idea of taking a sow’s ear and making silk but the idea has merit because there are some brands in wine that I think are ripe for re-marketing, particularly to younger generation steeped in nostalgia marketing.
From the article in the Indianapolis Business Journal:
Jonlee Andrews, a professor of marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and director of IU’s Center for Brand Leadership, said there are many reasons why brands fall out of favor.
Sometimes they just don’t get enough attention or marketing money, and all it takes is a fresh idea to reinvigorate an established brand. Other times, the brand has developed a negative reputation that’s difficult to overcome. “Have consumers ever heard of it?” she asked. “Is it like Oldsmobile? Will it be hard to change the ‘Brand of your grandfather’ perception? Or is it like Ovaltine, and you just haven’t seen it in 30 years?”
Just two weeks ago, for example, California Coolers, an icon of the 80’s before being usurped by Bartles & Jaymes, was re-introduced to the market after a 15 year hiatus.
I would love to see brands that pre-date my drinking days, some of the icons of the 70’s like Italian Swiss Colony, Blue Nun, Cold Duck and Lancer’s picked up off the scrap heap and given a dose of cool.
Perhaps Taliera will do something interesting in the wine world, maybe not, regardless, having the opportunities come from Indiana is a good thing and certainly worthy of a toast.
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print |
Enter your email address for a monthly summary of posts, additional news and information available only to email subscribers. Your email is never rented, nor sold to anybody else!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Design by The Blog Studio
