Good Grape Wine Company

March 29 2006

From the Land of Blue Sky Waters

My grandfather served in WWII. He left behind his wife and served as a mapmaker in thePhillipines, just as thousands of other GI’s did in the early 1940s. While he passed a number of years ago in thelate winter of 1993 it was just recently that we went through old artifacts andremembrances of his life that had been set aside with the long-ago intent ofpassing them down to his grandchildren. Mostly everything was benign, but some things like the racy GI postcards made my grandfather seem more human and adult then the woodworking,fishing, wise, gentle, “occasionally have a beer” Grandfather of my memory.

In my minds eye, aside from the frequent gatherings he wouldhave with his war buddies, I never knew much about the time he spent in theservice. But, I do know that he enjoyeda glass of wine—not fine wine, really, but homemade fruit wine like aBlueberry, or a Concord grape wine that was more of cordial on a Saturday afternoonwith friends

A couple of years ago I came across a book called Wine andWar: The French, The Nazi’s and theBattle for France’s Greatest Treasure.

I didn’t read the book then, but I plan on doing sonow. Sometimes history is moreinteresting when you have personal context to the events.

And, in the vein of “If you don’t know your past, you won’tknow your future,” my grandfather drank Hamm’s beer. Never more then one or two to slack his thirst after fishing.

I was reminded that Pabst Blue Ribbon beer made an unlikelyforay into popular culture in the past couple of years.

In our instantly ironic and immediately analyzed culture,everything seems to be recycled and everything pop culture related seems tohave a shelf life of about 15 minutes.

Oddly, this phenomenon hasn’t happened in the wineworld. Wine trends and even fads seemto be semi-enduring, lasting through at least a vintage cycle or two.

But, can this pop culture affliction happen in the world ofwine?

If the statistics are correct and members of Generation Yare coming online as core wine drinkers almost immediately after turning 21,can it be too far away?

I am waiting for somebody to license the rights to ColdDuck, Blue Nun, Lancer’s, and some of the other great wine brands of the 1960sand 70s, put a sluggable, quality wine in the bottle and do a Red Bull guerillamarketing campaign with them to bring some truly subversive change to theindustry.

Can you imagine? Instead of getting the very latest animal permutation on the bottlearchivists will be mining the wayback machine to see what labels were on theshelf during the Age of Aquarius.

If this happens, instead of “NO F*CKING MERLOT” as madefamous in the move Sideways, we’ll see a groundswell of Internet-based support,web sites, etc exclaiming, “No Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.”

And, finally, speaking of Merlot. Swanson vineyards owns the domain, www.merlotfightsback.com. With an obviously vested interest in ensuringthat Merlot wine stops its free fall in public perception, they are conductingseminars in major wine cities across the country.

My suggestion to them, however, is that there is not asingle person on earth that doesn’t like to have fun. Their approach to countering the “Merlot as wine for theunsophisticated” appears to be decidedly wooden. Loosen up, guys and have some fun with it, you’ll get a ton moremileage out of it.

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