April 30 2006
Compelling proof that Jancis Robinson’ stiffness might in fact be rigor mortis. Empirical research indicates her writings are only 41% likely to be generated by an authentic human.
Last year a groupof MIT students created an generator capable of creating"random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, andcitations."
One of the papers created by thisprogram was accepted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference onSystemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.
In response, researchers at the Indiana University School ofInformatics invented an Inauthentic Paper Detector.
It’s supposed to be able to tell whether a paper has been written by ahuman or a machine. The researchers write:
This web site is intended for detecting whether a technical document ishuman written and authentic or not. Predictions may work for documentsintended for entertainment (novels, news articles etc.). The mainpurpose of this software is to detect whether a technical documentconforms to the statistical standards of an expository text.
I allowed the site to review her recent article on the 2005 Bordeaux vintage in the Financial Times--it included such prosaic prose like:
But the great thing about the successful 2005s is their purity. Theyhave power but they also have refreshment value. They have keepingpotential - witness the high levels of tannins in virtually all thewines - but in the best, those tannins are ripe, beautifully managedand so well hidden by fruit that the wines are already delicious. Onewould like to call the wines classic claret, but Bordeaux has surelynever known a vintage quite like this.
In order to validate my own research into this, I used a control group--a blog post of my own. My blog post on Wine Sediments last Wednesday came back as INAUTHENTIC with a 28% likelihood of being authentic. Darn, Jancis beat me with a 13% greater likelihood of having come from a live human.
For further validation, David Sedaris and Dave Berry were 48% and 29% likely to be authentic.
In other news, wine terroirists are looking into the technology for wine.
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April 27 2006
I’ve said a couple of times here that I don’t drink French wine--partly because I don’t understand all the domaines, and partly because of how damn serious they are. I watched Mondovino and jeez louis, you’d think some of these guys were absolutely without a sense of humor.
Nonetheless, a very charming woman, Melanie Tarlant, from the blog http://www.champagne-blog.com wrote to tell me that I do indeed drink French wine--the kind with tiny bubbles in it.
Yeah, you’re right, Melanie. I do drink Champagne. I didn’t have the heart to let her know that I’m a little down on the Moet & Chandon product food chain and more likely to quaff anything but Dom Perignon.
The Champagne blog just moved to Typepad and they have video’s. In the spirit of the Francophile, I’m including a short recent post in French and the same translated in English.
Rat-de-Cave
Quand le silence règne dans la cave, l’atmosphère y est très particulière. Ici aussi la bougie est de mise, mais pas pour la prière. (Saint Vincent est passé, nous attendons les Saintes Glaces.)
Seule la main de l’homme compte, la flamme allume la mèche, le souffre s’enflamme et va protéger le tonneau. Le futur vin de réserve va pouvoir être transvasé.
Twisted taperWhen silence reigns in the cellar, the atmosphere is very particularthere. Here also the candle is of setting, but not for the prayer.(Vincent Saint passed, we await the Holy Ices.)Only the hand of the man counts, the flame lights the wick, suffers itignites and will protect the barrel. The future wine of reserve couldbe transvased.
And, in the spirit of some fun, here are some sample lyrics from Don Ho’s Tiny Bubbles:
Tinybubbles in the wine,
make me happy, make me feel fine,
tiny bubbles make me warm all over
with a feeling that I’m gonna love you ‘til the end of time.
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April 26 2006
A couple of weeks ago I posted on Stormhoek Winery--a S. African winery that had extensively used the blogging community as it rolled out its product introductions in various geographies--the U.K. and elsewhere.
Stormhoek is set for their U.S. debut and Hugh at the popular blog Gaping Void has been the lead on their introductory marketing. A recent article from the BBC had this to say and in, general, Hugh is following the "wine blogging as marketing disruption" model.
In the firstphase, he sent out free bottles of wine to about 100 bloggers in the UK, IrishRepublic and France. Only those who had regularly kept up a blog for at leastthree months could apply, but the size of their readership didn’t matter -"just so long as they were genuine bloggers".
As a result, a lotof those bloggers ended up writing about Stormhoek wine. In the wake of hiscampaign, sales doubled, rising from 50,000 cases in 2004 to 100,000 last year.
Micro-brandboost
In the next phaseof the campaign, Stormhoek has started sponsoring "geek dinners",offering to provide free wine for bloggers’ dinner parties.
As part of itsforthcoming launch in the US, the firm wants to have "100 geek dinners in100 days", running from 1 May to 9 August.
"WhatI’m interested in is what I call the global micro-brand," says Mr Macleod.
"Now with theinternet, creating global micro-brands is cheaper and easier than ever before.You can start off and have a product and market it on a global level much moreeasily than even 10 years ago."
I find this incredibly fascinating. I’m supposed to be on the dinner list for the States, and in fact, I need to follow-up on my initial confirmation.
Hugh, at Gaping Void, for his part, is a smart, interesting guy, at least based on his blog. And, even though I try and draw some loose and fast correlations in between the world of wine and the Cluetrain Manifesto, Hugh is really doing it. In the blogosphere, which is still a small community, overall, this is akin to a high school sophomore (me) and a college professor--Hugh.
An excerpt from a Gaping Void post on Stormhoek:
I told Nick Dymoke-Marr the Managing Director of Stormhoek: "You’renot competing with Jacob’s Creek or Blossom Hill. You’re competing withGoogle and Microsoft and Apple and Skype.
Yes, the product category is always irrevelvant. It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it etc etc.
So I’m now on the hunt for a label & bottle design thatbetter reflects the whole post-Cluetrain/Hughtrain schtick thatStormhoek is slowly becoming internally, that telegraphs this instantlyto the external market.
Why shouldn’t a small wine company see Apple or Google as its competition? Think how more interesting the world would be if more small, non-techie companies thought the same.
Hugh admits on his blog that his cartooning/art isn’t paying the bills, so he’s taken a small slice of equity in Stormhoek in exchange for the marketing support he’s providing and according to him:
Hey, if you want to put the work on paper, t-shirts,business cards, stickers, homemade greeting cards, Powerpoint slides,or whatever, as far as I’m concerned, as long as you’re not trying tomake money off it directly, and giving me due accreditation, I’mtotally cool with the idea.
So, if people aren’t paying me for my work, then how do I make a living?
A good question.
Well, years of messing around in various enterprises have led me to the following conclusion: People don’t buy art. Not really. But they do buy wine.
Which is why I have a commercial interest in the Stormhoek winery. Basically, the more cases that sell, the bigger a car I get to drive. It’s that simple.
Check out http://www.gapingvoid.com and search for "Stormhoek" to see all of the re-occuring posts. What’s happening here is very interesting and compelling. If the wine delivers, this could be the seeds of the next great wine case study ala Yellowtail.
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April 24 2006
Wine makes its way into the funny pages with some regularity. Our local wine shops proof positive of that as the yellowed clippings from the paper adorn the checkout area.
Though, most Americans, I think, identify more with Charlie Brown then Rex Morgan, MD.
Leave it to the Japanese to eat our lunch in this regard. A little over 10 years ago, a manga (a comic strip for adults) called "Sommelier," published in a Japanese daily, made reference to an obscure (at the time) California Pinot Noir from Calera winery.
The strip stars Satake who is a wine taster with an encyclopedic knowledge of the premier crus and in between wine tastings he solves complicated crimes. And, in the heroic tradition, he apparently gets the girl, too. Channeling some obvious zen energy for the protagonist, a writer for the strip had this to say on the back cover of the graphic novelization:
"At France’s sommelier’s contest, Joe Satake, while winning the championship, declines the honor. A genius walks the road of proud loneliness. He says, ‘There isn’t bad wine. When encountering wine, there is only a suitable time.’ Wine’s many jewels are made as partners—occasionally a sweet and sometimes bitter story is woven. Wines don’t lie—sommeliers see the truth inside wines. When Joe Satake holds it, it’s a new encounter!!"
A press release was issued on this on the 21st. But, here’s an article from an Anime magazine dated 1999--same story angle.
The full release can be found here.
The connection to Calera winery is tied to the manga
In this one single day’s strip of Sommelier, drawn and written by KaitaniShinobu and edited by Kenichi Hori, our fearless Joe Satake recounts that hewas at a tasting where he was given two wines to taste "blind." One was thesuperstar wine, Romanee-Conti itself, from the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti,the pride of Burgundy; the other was a California wine, Calera Pinot Noir fromthe "Jensen" Vineyard, named for the owner’s father. The rival sommelier, anevil and jealous man, tried to trick Satake by describing the wines and thenconcluding that the better wine was the DRC. However, at the last minute,Satake realized that there was only one wine similar to the DRC and that wasthe Calera, which Satake deemed the winner. He not only saved "face" anddefeated his evil nemesis, but also got a dreamy eyed-girl racing to his side.Hey, this is a comic strip!
It might be a comic, but certainly no laughing matter:
Today, our sales in Japan are stronger than ever, in spiteof the slow economy in Japan over the past decade. Looking back, nothing couldhave prepared us for this. The idea of a comic strip "launching" our brand insuch an important, newly emerging wine market as Japan might be seen as merecomic relief, were it not for the fact that still today, ten years later, oursales to our two importers there are still growing—rapidly!"
Calera’s web site can be found here.
In an yet-to-written post 6 months from now, an American winery, taking a cue from Sommelier does product placement with the kid from Zits, Cathy, and Jon Arbuckle from Garfield. Said winery’s sales increase by .003% at Costco on the same day that there is a a retiree sampling brioche near the wine section in Naples.
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April 19 2006
I’m in technology by profession. Technology and wine have a lot in common in that anybody that buys either one can do so only with validation from a third party. In the technology analyst space there’s a company called Gartner that essentially research’s technology in order to categorize their relative value against the competition and then they put together these research summaries with graphics called Magic Quadrants and then decision-maker’s read them to figure out if all of the spin you’ve been giving them the past 4 months is valid or not. But, then you can sponsor research from the same people and it really ends up being like advertising in the Spectator--on either side people swear that money doesn’t have an influence, but we all really know the truth.
The Magic Quadrant is interesting in this sense because a new wine concept has opened up at Dulles Airport called Vino Volo. Vino Volo (stands for wine flight in Italian) utilizes a very, very similar concept translated to the world of wine to categorize wine into four flavor profiles:
1) Bright 2) Rich
3) Light 4) Brooding
It’s an interesting concept in that they are combining tasting flights with food and retail at an airport with shipping.
I question the 4th category--brooding, though. That’s not really a word that resonates with people that have a likely affinity for wine. But it also strikes me as something that people labor on in a room for a while and then say, "Ah, to hell with it, I can’t think of anything else and my wife is blowing up my cell phone." "Brooding, it is." Then the intern writes a line item on his resume about his participation in brainstorming sessions at Taste, Inc. the company that operates Vino Volo.
Another interesting airport concept is the regional wine bar featuring wines of notable local distinction. The wine writing duo at the Wall Street Journal reported on this last year, and here’s an excerpt from their syndicated column. The entire article can be found here.
At Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, tuckedinto a little space on the way to Concourses D and E, is the best ideain airplane travel since the jet engine: the Yadkin Valley Wine Bar.The day we were there, the bar offered 57 different wines from ninewineries in the Yadkin Valley region of North Carolina—a glass for$5, a taste of four wines for $3. This is such a terrific idea, bothfor travelers and for local wine industries, that airports and vintnersthroughout the country should follow suit—and, in fact, several areconsidering the idea.
All in all, I expect to see a continued proliferation of wine concepts as the idea takes root in a significant growth pattern.
And, just as soon as we think there’s a saturation point, it will likely explode beyond the expectations of everybody that follows wine as more then just a passing hobby. 10 years ago we did not have 3 things that today seem intrinsic to our daily life: the Internet, cell phones, & Starbucks.
Wine is heading down that same path.
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