August 31 2006
Geography is a Flavor Redux
Iran across a Stormhoek winery post from last week that mentioned the Starbucks “Geographyis a Flavor” campaign. Or, if you’re in South Africa, it’s “Flavour.”
Theirpost is a good one—a portion is excerpted below.
Weall know that us wine guys are notoriously bad marketers. We take fairly simpleconcepts about the uniquenss that "place" gives to wine and spin itinto obtuse concepts like appellations and terroir.
Butthe folks at Starbucks know how to take complex concepts like Terroir and makethem understandable. While they describe terroir perfectly, I suspect that theywould never use the word.
Itouched on this myself a little while back, because it’s genius in itssimplicity. My original post can be found here.
But,before we give too much credit to the coffee guys for lapping the wine folks inmaking concepts easier to understand, I do need to point out that there is alsoa web site and company called “Terroir” Coffee Company.
Fromtheir web site:
Terroir™Select Coffee was created in early 2004 to forge a new kind of partnership withcoffee growers – one which recognizes their fundamental role and identity inthe production of high quality coffees. We believe that one should not blendtruly fine coffees, just like one does not blend fine wines, because they arealready complete statements. There has been very little incentive, in terms ofremuneration and acknowledgement, for producers to create really great coffees.
Formy money, I think Starbucks is doing a pretty good job wrapping value around acommodity product and I think folks like Appellation America that seem to bemoving to a wine vocabulary around “artisan” and “boutique” and “small-lot fromtheir five acre parcel in loamy soil on a hillside with a micro-climate 2 milessquare” are all better ways to educate your customer then the ill-defined and somewhatpeculiar connotation of “terroir” in this day and age (hey, I don’t assume peoplecan spell correctly).
Theword terroir is like trying to describe the color orange. How do you describe the color of an orange without providing somesort of frame of reference? And, well,if you’re going to have to provide a frame of reference and the word itself isn’tparticularly that important, then why not just go straight to the frame ofreference?
It confounds me how the American wine industry loves the Judgement of Paris story angle, yet we lift a lot of the intellectual property/concepts from the French and then don’t improve on them either.
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Posted in, Good Grape Daily: Pomace & Lees.
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