Good Grape: A Wine Blog Manifesto

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March 24 2006

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice—Cluetrain Ma

The Derision Decision. Pt 2 of 4

The Emperor of Wine

I’d like to suggest that in the consumer lifecycle there isalways a point in time when our champions become our scapegoats … when ourfavorite son’s unwittingly take on the black hat; the point at whichpopularity, widespread popularity, turns against you and you become the objectof scorn.

This is frequently seen in the music—Hootie and theBlowfish, Alanis Morrisette and even Britney Spears have gone from publicdarlings to the close-out bin.

Robert Parker, esteemed wine critic, tastemaker and titan ofthe industry for better then 20 years seems to be experiencing his own versionof the derision decision.

This phenomena can’t be isolated to a single event—thedocumentary Mondovino, the influence he wields in sell-thru with consumers, anda thirsty new public that doesn’t know who he is, and nor do they care.

This from the New York Times on March 22^nd:

It has been a difficult couple of years for Robert M. Parker Jr., the winewriter who has famously been labeled the most influential critic of any kind inthe world. Though Mr. Parker has gotten used to living with a big fat targetpainted on his back, the most recent series of attacks was especially gallingto him.

Jonathan Nossiter’s documentary "Mondovino," released in the United States in 2005, juxtaposed Mr. Parker with aBurger King sign and portrayed him as an emblem of opulent globalized wine andan enemy of diversity, terroir and nuance. A 2005 biography, "The Emperorof Wine" by Elin McCoy (Ecco), expressed concern about a world dominatedby "the tyranny of one palate."

In this article on Decanter.com on March 23rd, Parker had this to say:

‘People who are leaders in any field are copied,’ he said. ‘There’s a reasonwhy every wine newsletter tends to look like mine. They see someone who’s beensuccessful, so they sort of copy the same ideas.’’When somebody wants to write an article attacking a scoring system or theinfluence of wine writers, who’s right in the cross hairs? It’s me,’ he said.

Parker went on to say that his palate was much more complex than the’simplistic view’ that he likes big, extracted, so-called fruit-bomb stylewines and rates them highly in tastings.

Despite his complaints, the wine critic, who publishes his bimonthlynewsletter, The Wine Advocate, also boasted of his success.

Or this from MSNBC.com from the summer of 2005:

It is hard to drink wine without running into RobertParker.

With his often-imitated gradingsystem, Parker is indisputably the world’s most powerful wine critic. Hisinfluence within the wine industry is akin to Alan Greenspan’s sway overfinancial markets: When Parker talks, wine people tend to listen.

With the wine tiger eatingits young and a new, young generation embodied as the gaping maw with no regardfor hidebound tradition, who is going to step into the fray and become thevoice that connects with other humans that speak a different language?

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March 24 2006

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice—Cluetrain Ma

Part 1 of 4

The most intrepid of travelers felt intimidated, nervous even,the first time they ventured to a country where their native and only tongue, English,was not the primary language spoken.

Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, and The Wine Advocate havea combined subscriber base of less than 2 million people, but there are over 25million people nationally that drink wine at least once a week—making up a fastgrowing group of consumers called “Core” wine drinkers.

Simple math indicates that just 8% of serious wine consumersread magazines that largely drive the marketing of the U.S. wine industry. Authors Kirby Moulton andJames Lapsley, in their book, Successful Wine Marketing say, “(Wineries) are facinga market where 80% of consumers are waiting for an efficient and relevantmessage.”

That quote is taken from their book published in 2001—five yearsago. In that time, what have we foundout? Generation Y, a generationalsegment that represents 70 million people has only just begun to exhibit thelong-term consumption habits that will shape our consumable society for atleast the next 10-20 years. Oh, and bythe way, according to Wine Market Council research 39% of them are drinkingwine—most of them coming online as “Core” wine drinkers.

Everyday a new generation of wine drinkers is accepting wineas a beverage of choice, yet their native tongue doesn’t speak the language of “wine.”

And, yet, wineries are still facing a market where 80% ofconsumers (and growing) are waiting for an efficient and relevant message.

The challenge is, the new generation, Generation Y, theso-called Millenials, is different. They’rewired. They are agent provocateur s. Theyhave grown up consuming media since birth.

In my estimation, there are at least three converging trendsthat are all interrelated to how people interact with and want to interact withwine i.e. how wine media and marketers don’t connect with wine consumers—at retail,or elsewhere—essentially how the voice of the wine marketing isn’t human, atleast in the context of the human on the receiving end.

1) TheDerision Decision

2) Barbariansat the Gate

3) Anew lingua franca

Each of these intersect--the old guard is being challenged, a younger set of customers challenge authority and the way we buy; there is a new langugage being spoken.

In order--at least in the world of wine--for humans to have a conversation that sounds human somethings got to give.

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March 22 2006

New World

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March 22 2006

When You’re Here, You’re Family

I don’t eat at Olive Garden, nor do I know anybody that eatsat Olive Garden.

It’s nothing personal. I don’t eat at Max & Erma’s, Applebee’s, O’Charley’s, Houlihan’s,TGI Friday’s, Bennigan’s or any of the dozens of other chains that rip angrily at the bodice of local restaurants.

As a wine outsider—i.e. a person that never has made atax-loading W-2 dime off of the wine industry, I do enjoy reading about all aspects of wine—for that reason I have had a subscription to Wine Business Monthly(WBM) for several years.

Normally very polite, as most trade magazines are, WBM doesa pretty decent and serviceable job of providing a generally interesting point of view of the wine industry and their sales and marketing articles are usually of the nature that lead the conversation thread in debate.

In the March 2006 issue however, there is a two dimensional, if notfawning portrait of Olive Garden as a restaurant that serves fine wine—so much in fact that it’s the leading restaurant(s) in the nation in wine sales.

According to WBM:

Michelle Kern is Olive Garden’s director of beverage strategies and is solely responsible for purchasing all wine, spirits, beer and non-alcoholic beverages for the chain. She puts the emphasis on wine in boardroom language: “Research shows what we’ve always known anecdotally: when guests enjoy a glass of wine with their meal, the entire experience is better and the meal is better received.”

Michelle Kern goes on later in the article (context remains unchanged):

“We want to do for wine what Starbucks did for coffee. Before Starbucks went nationwide, few people had ever heard of a latte, and now it’s part of the language. We’d be happy if we could encourage people to become equally knowledgeable about wine.”

The article continues with a discussion of the various wines that are served (think supermarket at the $8.99 price point—Sutter Home, Beringer, et al) The article continues …

“We want our wines to be mainstream, and we look at trends in the industry to learn what sells,” said Kern. White Zin, primarily from Sutter Home and Beringer, accounts for 40 percent of still wines.

I feel like Daffy Duck barging into the frame of a BugsBunny cartoon exclaiming, “What a second, hold on, hooooold on.”

Or, as Harry G. Frankfurt so eloquently put it in his book,On Bullshit, “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”

The WBM article concludes by writer Mort Hochstein saying:

“For more than half a century, wine producers have worked to remove the elitism stigma that plagues it, and to make wine as popular as beer and softdrinks. There have been figures recentlythat show that effort starting to yield dividends. At Olive Garden, one out of every four tableshas wine on it, and Kern says the chain will continue to make wine more accessible for its customers. The chain’s dedication to wine can only help the industry.”

I initially earmarked this article because of the blatant and very incorrect reference to Starbucks and how Olive Garden wanted to make wine accessible like Starbucks did for Italian coffee drinks.

First this statement is completely incongruent and diametrically opposed to the fact that 40%of their wine sales is White Zinfandel. Starbucks started out as luxury brand and has now spread to luxury consumer acceptance. There ain’t no Starbucks in Wal-Mart. They’re in Target. Big difference. And, it’s not like Olive Garden customers are starting out on White Zin and trading up to the A. Rafanelli Zin akin to Folgers to $4.00 Grande Latte’s sugar free, non fat, no whip. And, in fact, Starbucks recognizes this brand dilution that is inherent and they are taking their Seattle’sBest brand to widespread consumer acceptance while trying to hold onto some cachet as premium brand.

I’m not an expert on branding, but I would have to say categoricallyrarely, if ever, has a brand been populist and been able to move to higherground demographically. Quite simply itdoesn’t happen. If you’re Paris Hiltonor Pamela Anderson, you just don’t get the Louis Vuitton ads, that’s the whylife is.

So, at the very level best, what Olive Garden can hope for is the expansion of the slice of the world in which they operate, which might be all that bad, but, generally speaking, I’m not sure if they’ll be able tograduate those drinkers to more expensive wines, they’ll graduate to different kinds of wines at the same price point.

And, on the contrary, there is an entire underbelly of rantsand angry screeds against Olive Garden by wine consumers who abhor the absolute hard sell on the wine at the restaurants.

This web site has several posts on the practice and the netsummary is essentially it’s a tactic to increase profits.

I actually had one table COMPLIMENT meon the fact that I didn’t bring a bottle and try to sell wine to them and they tipped me, like, 40%. That was pretty cool.

The funny thing about seeing those GSS survey (guestsurvey) results every week is how few people actually claim to ENJOY being offered wine.

There are three wine questions on the guest survey.
"Did your server offer you wine?"
"Did you you enjoy the wine offer?"
"Did you have wine with your meal?"

The first question is one the management is always concerned with. "Make your presentation memorable so the guests willanswer yes on the survey", the management says. When that number is low, management is not happy.

However, the second question usually gets few positiveresponses (at my restaurant typically only 22% of guests claim to actuallyenjoy the wine offer) and no one seems to care about that at all. So, guests don’t have to enjoy the wine presentation. They just have to hear it, I guess.

On the new wine blog, Wine Sediments, there is a post today that reviews the wine do’s and don’t for a restaurant. Oddly, Olive Garden probably follows most of them.

But, Mort Hochstein, the writer, endshis article with the following sentence, repeated here for effect: “The chain’s dedication to wine can only helpthe industry.”

Mort’s a smart man, probably a decentfellow, too. He wisely doesn’t suggest how this dedication would help the industry, just that it can in some kind of nebulous far-off kind of way.

I think the lesson here, though, is the fact that naked greed and bullshit usually go hand-in-hand and that cool breezeI feel is Olive Garden blowing smoke up my skirt. Fortunately, I don’t have to show my displeasure with me feet. I already have, unconsciously. "When you’re Here, You’re family" might actually be true because usually its only family that works loose and fast with the boundaries of relationship decency and shakes you down because they can.

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March 21 2006

Post Updates & Dusty Bottle Items

Last week I posted about a wine idea for a mobile tasting room--you could do trade shows, etc. I ultimately suggested that it probably wouldn’t work because the environs--charming concrete floors of convention centers and fluorescent lighting are all counter-intuitive to enjoying a nice glass of vino.

Well, no sooner than I write that then I stumble across this tidy little business that does exactly what I suggested. Hmm ... maybe this is a good business idea ... especially when you consider this company is run by a bunch of limey brits--leaving the whole U.S. to conquer.

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This website: www.winelearningcenter.com is pretty fun. If you want to take the time to go through a quiz or two AND register for the pleasure of the results, it will take you through quizzes like: Which Grape is Most like Your Personality, Would you Be a Good Winemaker and other sidebars. I am, by the way, like the Gamay Noir grape, according to the test.

I am: Fruity, Charming, A Good Worker, Limited in Geographic spread, Slightly high-maintenance, Eager or quickly Ready for Action, doesn’t age well.

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I recently read the Blog book called Naked Conversations, it’s really a very good book and there is the ongoing blog by the same authors here.

Their post on 3/21--Are Blogs at theTipping Point ? is very interesting. An excerpt:

Instead, let me quote from Malcolm Gladwell,an author and speaker who I hold in extremely high regard; whose publicpresentations and two books have influenced how I think and what Iwrite.

"...ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just likeoutbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us."

The answer is Yes. The fact that Malcolm Gladwell started a Blog this year is proof of that. But, also interestingly, one of the Blogs cited on several occasions in the book Naked Conversations is Gaping Void . He does provocative line art on the back of business cards in the form of a blog. (An extra nod and flattery because I’m posting a copyrighted jpeg of his, and, well, some people don’t like that much).

He has a post on his site from December that details a winery called Stormhoek from New Zealand that supposedly doubled their wine sales in 12 months by the use of blogging.

So, the context is this: nobody really knew that the bottom dropped out of the tech market in March of 2001 until, really, with all sensitivity, September of 2001 when we started looking at the year and the unfortunate turn of events. Hindsight is always 20/20.

My question is: is it possible that blogging hit its tipping point in the late fall of last year--2005 and wine blogging (the social epidemic) was the catalyst--several months earlier than what others may be seeing and saying right now?

http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001646.html

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Yesterday I wrote about wines and scarcity as a marketing tactic. Today, I read about a company that is applying technology to streamline the process of allocation to customers when supply is limited. I’m not sure they’ll be able to scale to build a real business out of this, but it’s mildly interesting to see that outsider’s are bringing new ideas to the wine industry and not just trying to co-opt the lifestyle.

Article is here:

An Excerpt:

More than 50 wineries—including Vineyard 29, Araujo Estate Wines, Bressler Vineyards, Pahlmeyer Vineyard and Switchback Ridge/Peterson Family Vineyard-- use web-based ASP technology to allocate their wines among wealthycollectors, corporate bigshots, Hollywood stars, and others on theirpreferred customers’ lists, officials at Yountville-based Cultivate Systems,told the San Francisco Business Times on Friday. It provides the onlinetechnology the wineries use to sell their goods online.

And for wines that cost as much as $100 or more per bottle, demandoften far outpaces supply, forcing cult wineries to allocate theirscarce resources carefully.

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