May 14 2008
Here’s my news cycle from the last two days: Indiana University basketball continues to be in the news based on an NCAA investigation into alleged recruiting violations. The New England Patriots continue to be in the news based on an investigation of potential cheating. Senator Arlen Specter is on the case. Brunello wine imports may be blocked by the ATTB.
With all of these people spending time investigating things, who is actually doing any work?
Wasn’t my crisis in conscious against elected officials supposed to have occurred when I was in college, not half a life later?
And, for the love of pete, where were the gov’t officials a year ago when toys with lead and toxic pet food was coming from China?
Messing with wine ... sheesh. This is a pimple on the ass of life. As my 99 year old grandmother says as she looks off into the distance ponderously, “I worry ...”
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May 13 2008
Our brains work in mysterious ways. Ever since I got my Fusebox wine blending kit from Crushpad Wine, all I think of when I think of the beautiful box of wine designed to create a custom blending experience is the notoriously sexual and metaphorical “The Who” song, Squeezebox. This, all told, is somewhat apt because if the Fusebox were not an inanimate object, I would want to make love to it.
I had the opportunity to join Indianapolis wine blogging pal Mark of winecanine.com and Renee, the doyenne of the Indianapolis food blogging scene from her outpost at Feed Me / Drink Me, along with a few other notables, including a wine distributor, on Saturday night. Couched in conviviality was the desire to put the Fusebox to work.
If you are interested in the Cliffs Notes version, I will simply say this—the Fusebox is incredibly well executed and an absolute smash for a party. At $120 bucks, it is well worth the money. In addition, the wine, six bottles of 375 ml blending varieties, is very, very good individually, let along as the sum of the parts. On top of that, the wine distributor in attendance wanted to distribute the Fusebox and Mark from winecanine.com, who works part-time at the best wine shop in Central Indiana, said the storeowner thought he could move an easy 150 units at the holidays. The Fusebox has my unequivocal Good Grape endorsement.
If that is not enough, Alder from Vinography is represented in the Fusebox with his Wine Aroma cards. It felt like a karmic match with the wine blogger representation. Though, as a sidebar, I will admit that I chuckled to myself at the end of the night, much drunken wine later, when I read “peeling willow bark” as a scent component on the wine aroma card from Alder. Ahem … note to Alder: stay away from your wife’s high-end, wacky-scented body lotion, my friend.
What transcends the Fusebox from the merely interesting to the compelling is both the organization and the quality of the wine. It is primarily comprised of six 375 ml bottles of blending wine including Cabernet Sauvignon (two bottles), Merlot, Petit Verdot, Malbec, and Cabernet Franc that top to bottom are of excellent quality.
The kit also contains a mystery wine for some palate testing and all of the accouterments necessary to blend to your heart’s content—graduated cylinder, pipettes (mini wine-thief’s) and some schwag like a corkscrew and some evaluation cards, etc.
As I noted, the thing that makes this kit sing is the quality of the wine and the fact that it works. With the ingenious recipe cards, you can custom blend your own wines adding a dash of this and a dash of that and it is a true aid in helping to understand how components add different qualities. We all know that Petite Verdot and Cab Franc are frequent blending partners, but if you have a bit of Cab and you add in the Petite Verdot and the Cab Franc it brings the whole picture together for your palate.
The other masterstroke of this kit is the recipe cards they include. They offer blending suggestions to mimic a 2002 Joseph Phelps Insignia, 1996 Lafite Rothschild, 2000 Chateau Margaux, and a 1997 Opus One, amongst other things.
Those at our party all took turns creating blends from the recipe cards and sharing. It’s vicariously thrilling to put a blend together and imagine for a moment that it may approximate a wine that retails for $2000 +
If I had to give one recommendation for the kit, it would be to include tasting notes for the marquee wines on the recipe cards so users of the kit could subsequently take some of their own notes on the created blend with a baseline. I kind of want a little more context to why my blend is supposed to equate to a very premiere wine, but, in the end, that is just a quibble.
Next time, I am going to buy a kit to do on my own blending, at home, as a self-study aid, you will want to, as well. The Fusebox is fantastic for a party, but probably equally as valuable, in a different light, as a way to hone your palate chops in a more intimate setting. In fact, I hope and fully expect Crushpad to change it up every year to keep customers coming back and trying different things.
Either way, using the Fusebox in a crowd or in your kitchen with your significant other, it’s a smash hit. Make sure to turn on “The Who” and croon with me, “Come on and tease me like you do, I’m so in love with you, Mama’s got a Fusebox …”
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April 30 2008
A post inspired by the realization that you’re at a party and all of a sudden, you’re “that” guy. The wine guy that at once inspires interest and disgust. It happens without forethought, or even an ‘in place’ realization. After the fact, as you contemplate the evening, you think back and know that you’re guilty of providing too much detail-- you discussed cellar space, wine club memberships, bottle prices, climatic conditions and varietal nuance that completely goes over the head of your small talk partner. He or she just asked what you were drinking.
You’re a wine snob, and it happens so innocently.
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April 14 2008
If I could, I would lower my voice an octave and intone in my best Elwood Blues voice, “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.”
The band is getting back together.
I am not sure if it is a mission from God, and, well, it may not a band, per se--more like a band of good people.
And, if you are not a fan of the movie The Blues Brothers than you really have no idea what I am talking about.
Likewise, if you have never heard of Stormhoek wine, then you doubly have no idea what I am talking about. However, you can get caught up at the Stormhoek blog.
Stormhoek, the wine brand, previously owned by Orbital Wine and later sold as a brand asset, was alleged to have been moving over 200,000 cases of South African wine in the U.K., before falling into a spat of financial trouble.
Despite only having slight distribution in the U.S., their importer, Palm Bay, seemed to be making headway in the latter half of 2007 and after a little air turbulence in the form of a business dissolution, Stormhoek is now re-organizing with a similar cast of characters that brought them well-earned fandom amongst the dork blogger set both technology and wine-oriented. This dork included.
Internet wine denizens know the wine brand very well, as many of us hosted “Geek Dinners” in the summer of 2006.
Just a week ago I opened a bottle of their Pinotage at a late Friday afternoon team meeting at work and we quaffed some South African goodness. It is good wine. It is not particularly profound, but certainly good at price point (around $12 a bottle) and it hits the spot with the folks that were drinking it—mostly people in their 20’s who claim themselves wine fans, but aren’t terribly caught up in brands and/or nuance.
When news came out late last year that the parent company was having some difficulty it was met with some level of intrigue, and not a whole lot of information.
Hugh from Gapingvoid.com, a very popular blog, breaks the silence and indicates he will again be participating in their business efforts as a marketer, and by all accounts, their previous marketing was blazing some incredible new trails in technology-based social marketing.
And, while they break new ground in Internet/Web 2.0/Social Marketing, one thing they do not do is sell online--which is dubiously curious.
I met with Jason Korman, the former owner of Orbital, who is engaged in the brand under new financial backing, at a posh condo with a fantastic view in Miami, FLA early last year. I was dressed in a sports coat during Spring Break time and looked like a narc at biker rally, but that is beside the point. While my primary discussions with Jason were unrelated to consumer ecommerce and related to my previous employ, one thing we did talk about anecdotally was the reasoning behind Stormhoek not selling consumer direct. At the time, it was implied that building a mass-market brand at that price point with an importer well versed in navigating the three-tier system in brand building efforts precluded a direct sales strategy. It made mild sense if U.S. distribution was strong, but at that point in time, the brand was only available in a couple of U.S. markets.
Oddly enough, and despite their previous sales strategy, I think it is safe to say that Stormhoek’s U.S. based mindshare is confined almost exclusively online.
Hmmm … speaking of which, Hugh generously offers to take in suggestions via email for Stormhoek v2.0. I will not necessarily send him an email, but I will write this blog post and say, “Don’t be a bunch of damned fools. If you are going to leverage technology for wine marketing, then by golly go all the way and sell the damn stuff online.
I hope they listen.
I am raising a toast to Stormhoek. Welcome back. Godspeed to a truly fun wine brand with derring-do. May all of your days be dandy and your evenings brilliant. Now, go set yourself up to sell some wine to people that want to buy it. If not, you may be re-visiting issues of mindshare that do not equal wallet share. I hope that’s never the case, but in the event that it is, Jake Elwood would say,
I ran out of gas. I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! It wasn’t my fault, I swear to god!
Mistakes can happen once and it is an aberration. If it happens twice, well, no amount of Jake Elwood excuses will fly.
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April 13 2008
It is a provocative question: one that is as likely to divide a room of people as any hot button issue around religion, politics, the death penalty, etc.
I exchanged a few emails with a person that is in the business of creating successful wine brands and he posed the following question:
Questioner:
You have $3 million dollars starting tomorrow to pursue your dream to make a wine, what are your top five priorities?
Exclude the legal elements, (i.e. lawyers, business set up).
1) Where would you start?
2) What kind of wine would you make?
3) What would it cost?
4) Who is your winemaker?
5) How would you utilize the money and why?
My response:
I think before you get to any of your questions, you have to ask who you are trying to sell it to and build backwards.
It starts with the customer and the market.
Part of the problem with marketing in the wine industry is there is very much a gulf in between large production wines with distribution muscle and the lifestyle-based ivory tower approach to wine marketing.
I would spend $2M on researching a market that I could capably penetrate with the remaining $1M buying high quality bulk juice (in a negociant model), if that would yield the best results with a targeted customer.
Questioner:
I like your answer; the only problem with the bulk concept is it seems more and more apparent that the consumer is demanding some ownership of the land, vineyard or the appearance thereof. We launch brands constantly that have no soul yet, it is a tough launch…
However, I do agree that I would want a sound outlet prior to making the project real.
My response:
You are right; people are looking for provenance, at a higher price point. I think it depends on what market you are going after. Yellowtail still sells by the boatload and I personally have a lot of friends and family that, if asked, would proclaim themselves a wine lover, but they show up with Alice White at parties.
It begins with the target. I think the ultra-premium category that was formerly $12 - $15 and is going upstream to $16 - $19, but below $25 is going to be very crowded with small and medium size producers.
I would do what K-J is doing with Vintners Reserve and target that $13 affordable luxury mapped to a target market. Claritas can help you find a market, positioning that resonates, and that price point is not really all about the dirt.
My two cents.
Questioner:
The one piece of this theory that we are talking about is it lacks soul ... I think those with finances to hallmark their lives with a wine have to be involved, I am growing weary of the contrived brand. The marketing think tank putting Barney on a bottle … it has no heart, no one to tell the story.
As we continue to launch brands, I see a big difference in the absentee owner and the one that is buried up your backside. The biggest difference is in those who truly care for what they are doing and live it ...
My response:
I do not disagree with anything you say, but your initial question was related to what I would do first. And, if I had to do something first, I would first find a customer. Presumably, I’m interested in turning a profit, so in answering this question I’m more capitalist than soulful humanitarian, therefore I’m less discriminating in building a brand with heart, soul and passion and more inclined to build one that will sell wine.
Fred Franzia is never going to be accused of being Mr. Rogers, and I am taking a pure business approach to the question.
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I guess the real litmus test is how you interpret the question and the part about, “your dream to make a wine.” It could, literally, be done a hundred different ways. Personally speaking, if I was coming into the business cold, I would want to make some money before diving into the passionate, “life’s labor” part and going artisan/boutique, but that is just me.
How would you respond?
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