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July 5 2010

Instant Context:  Wine News from Around the Web Pt. I of II

Quick thoughts on wine news from the last week…

Displaced Leadership at WineAmerica

It is unfortunate that industry association WineAmerica is undergoing a Board of Directors led leadership change with its Executive Director position. 

However, what cannot be discounted in this renewal process is the fact that the organization is headquartered in Washington, D.C. and hangs its hat on a mission of, “Encourag(ing) the dynamic growth and development of American wineries and winegrowing through the advancement and advocacy of sound public policy.” With that as a mission, they were caught positively flat-footed on HR 5034 – a piece of potential legislation that, if nothing else, is entirely about “sound public policy,” or the lack thereof.

“ … Don’t get caught watchin’ the paint dry” is an oft-quoted sound bite from the basketball movie, Hoosiers.  Simply put, WineAmerica got caught not only watching the paint dry in regards to HR 5034, but also watching the grass grow.

In fact, WineAmerica was caught so flat-footed that other organizations showed themselves much more in tune with and proactive regarding the danger HR 5034 represented to its constituencies.  The Specialty Wine Retailers Association (SWRA), in particular, mobilized outbound mindshare building activity along with a consumer campaign with a great deal more efficacy than any response from WineAmerica.  Since April, everybody but WineAmerica continues to provide visible thought-leadership around the necessary reversal of HR 5034.  They have been significantly outworked in effort and influence.

HR 5034 reminds us that when crisis strikes, enemies come in two forms – the enemy we know and the enemy within.  The enemy within is the competing forces for the same good that expose ineffectual activity.

It may be true, as suggested in a Wines & Vines magazine article, that this personnel change with WineAmerica is about “cutting costs,” but it’s hard not to wonder if the change in leadership at WineAmerica isn’t related to its impotent advocacy when they needed to rise to the occasion.

Southern Wine & Spirits in Indiana

Here’s one clue that a press release from Southern Wine & Spirits trying to ingratiate itself into the state of Indiana was written by a public relations person who doesn’t have the wherewithal to Google, “Indiana state nickname.”

I’ve lived in the state for all of my 37 years.  Never have I heard the word “Indianans.”  Note reference above to Hoosiers.  And, the bonus is “Hoosiers” rolls off the tongue a bit easier.

As a sidebar, one insider at a large competing distributor in the state noted, “We’re not going to make it easy on them.”

Facebook and DTC for Wineries

With IBG (formerly Inertia Beverage Group) licensing use of the ecommerce software from Vin65, presumably replacing use of their homegrown product, The ReThink Engine, one wonders what business direction they are headed in. 

After acquiring the assets to the former New Vine Logistics last year, IBG used to be a “software as a service” ecommerce platform provider for wineries.  Now, they are looking like a next-generation, full-service logistics provider, which is probably a good idea given that the game for ecommerce software looks likes its over, having been fully commoditized.

Secondarily, with Facebook making radical advancements in providing capabilities for brands to engage with customers, you wonder how long a winery having its own website for ecommerce even makes sense.

The game isn’t about the actual transaction, the game is about engagement with a customer, or potential customer.

Facebook’s ability to cultivate, know and engage with fans of your business on a one-to-one basis is tailor made for wineries.

Throw in the ability to incorporate ecommerce and build inexpensive interactivity and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the first of several wineries go Facebook-only this year, with a more significant movement happening next year.

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March 15 2010

Wine Storage and the ‘I Drink Alone’ Dilemma

When I get an email from a friend saying, “You should check this out” it tends to pique my interest, especially when the subject is wine preservation.

First, I should say I’m an avowed Vacu Vin user.  With a wife that’s nearly a teetotaler, and a constant flux of six to eight bottles of opened wine in the fridge, a Vacu Vin and a wine crock started with a vinegar mother is de rigueur for any self-respecting wine taster, as important as having a corkscrew, and especially important if you’re a wine taster that likes to play the field across a number of different bottles, similar to fiddling with your iPod to match your mood.

Pouring a week old wine into crocks (before the bottle hits the recycling bin or gets upcycled into drinking glasses) that turn the bottle remnants into wine vinegar (red and white) definitely soothes any anxiety from watching a wine circle the drain, the Vacu Vin notwithstanding.

So, when the tip came for the Platypus “PlatyPreserve” wine preserver I took heed.

The Platypus, familiar to campers and outdoorsman, is a reputable water carrier noted for its durability, its malleability in your pack, and the fact that it doesn’t pick up or throw off scents—meaning that the container that carries orange juice today can carry water tomorrow without cross-flavor contamination.

For its part, the PlatyPreserve is a wine-centric brand extension from the Platypus water carrier and technology.  Made in the U.S. and just slightly bigger than a 750ml bottle of wine, the wine preserver has received rave consumer reviews on Amazon.com and other outlets.  And, at $9.95 for one, it pays for itself for the wine enthusiast who winces with reticence at willfully pouring leftover wine into a vinegar crock or down the drain.

Likewise, if you’re an outdoor enthusiast, the PlatyPreserve could make a willing companion for some vino at the end of the day, when a proper bottle may be cumbersome to carry in pack or, at the least, from hither and yon.

One user at Amazon.com said of the PlatyPreserve, “I have used every form of wine preserving system out there: vacuum pumps, nitrogen tanks/taps etc. etc. This one beats them all cheaply and simply, by doing better what they all attempt to do, that is, prevent contact between wine and oxygen as much as possible.”

I decided to take the test myself.

I picked up five bottles of an inexpensive red wine – the Beringer Stone Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon, found for $4.99 a bottle.  I suppose if I wanted to be thematically correct I could have chosen the Redwood Creek, positioned as an outdoorsman wine, but when $5 bottles are the game I don’t get choosy.

I placed one full bottle into a PlatyPreserve, a half bottle into a second PlatyPreserve, a half bottle under Vacu Vin, and a half bottle under regular cork and put it into the fridge for seven days to see what would happen.

I blind tasted each of the wines against a control bottle that was freshly opened.

The results of the blind tasting were somewhat of a surprise: a wine under Vacu Vin was the only bottle I guessed correctly, but the results also indicated optimism for the PlatyPreserve.

My notes said:

Control bottle (freshly opened):  Bright cherry, blackberry, candied nose – Dr. Pepper flavors, bubblegum cotton candy, vanilla Stoli vodka and brown sugar.  A fruit and oak wine, sweet, manipulated with an artificial finish.  Drinkable at the end of the night.

Wine #1 (Under Vacu Vin):  Nose is reductive with stewed flavors.  Wine is starting to unravel with fruit minimized and acid coming to the front.  Still drinkable and inoffensive.

Wine #2 (Full PlatyPreserve): Closest to control.  Nose minimized slightly.  Palate is still together and pleasant.

Wine #3 (Beringer under cork): Nose is gone, reductive and stewed.  Oxidized.

Wine #4 (1/2 full PlatyPreserve):  Nose is gone, alcohol and wood with faint blackberry.  Oxidized.

Lessons learned:  The wine under cork and the ½ full PlatyPreserve had virtually identical flavor profiles—both wines were shot.  The full PlatyPreserve was in good shape and the wine under a Vacu Vin was in reasonably good shape.  Given this, the natural comparison needs to be made with the Vacu Vin versus the ½ full PlatyPreserve and on that count the Vacu Vin wins handily.

And, of course, if you’re at home drinking, I can’t imagine why you would need to store a full bottle in a PlatyPreserve.

My overall recommendation: Use a Vacu Vin for home purposes while the PlatyPreserve makes a suitable airtight companion for day hikes, short overnight camping trips and when lugging a glass bottle is impractical.

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February 23 2010

What Comes Before and After Spoofulated?

Conditioned by a society hell bent on labels, and with more than a little bit of German heritage that is desirous of order mentally if not physically, I find myself wanting to put wines into a natural field classification system.

You know an “A is for Apple, B is for Boy” kind of thing.

Or, perhaps, this affliction in trying to makes sense of something that doesn’t naturally make sense is caused by attending one too many parties where the 1.5L of wine is barely potable, as it was this past weekend with a “Barefoot Wallaby,” or something like that.

Now, make no mistake, many people have talked about a winery-type classification system – something based on a craft sensibility, or case load, etc.  Something that denotes the type of winery one is and the type of wine produced – artisanal, corporate, that sort of thing.

This is well and good, but increasingly case load by itself isn’t an indicator for the care that goes into winemaking, nor is ownership type.  In fact, I’m most interested in the style of wine—something that tells me what is in the bottle from a profile perspective.

Call it a case of the “extracted” blues.  Or, the “Barefoot Wallaby” blues. 

And, other “taste” classifications like “soft” or “fruity” aren’t going to cut it.

Incidentally, Randall Grahm touches on this subject at his book web site in a transcript from a speech he gave at UC Davis earlier this month.

In his wide-ranging treatise that covers “brand” versus “terroir” and introduces words like “brand sickness” (which I’ll cover tomorrow in a different post), Grahm notes:

In the world of wine you can certainly dichotomize the universe rather neatly between the industrial, and the artisanal the standard and the truly singular.

But there is an even finer distinction to be made, a distinction between what the French call vins d’effort, or wines of effort and vins de terroir, or wines which express a sense of place. You can almost think of this maybe as less of a dichotomy but rather as some sort of continuum. A “wine of effort” is one that bears the strong stylistic imprint of the winemaker, and one where the winemaker has controlled virtually every aspect of the production, from the deficit drip-irrigation of the vines to the use of selected clones, selected “designer” yeasts, enzymes and malolactic bacteria; there is a strong overlay of “house style.”

Now, I’m not the smartest guy, I’m from Indiana and I went to mid-major college, a place where I was happier to be there then they were to have me, certainly.  Given that (or perhaps despite that), the above doesn’t make much sense to me.

First, Grahm notes that there is an easy dichotomy in the world of wine in between the industrial and the artisanal, but he goes on to talk about a CONTINUUM between a “wine of effort” and a wine of place.

Regardless, it’s the striations (or continuum) in between the “wine of effort” and the wine of place that interest me.

Simply, there’s a difference in between a Marquis Phillips Shiraz and a Barefoot Shiraz.  Likewise, there’s a difference in between a Sineann Pinot Noir and Kosta Browne.

It’s not as simple as Grahm might suggest – a wine of effort equals “New World” and a wine of place equals “Old World.”

Yet, it’s not that complex, either.

In a back of napkin exercise that took moments, I classified wines into the following categories:

Natural:  Wine from vines that collectively represent as little intervention as possible in the process of growing grapes and their fermentation

Terroir:  A wine that comes from cultivated vines and express the unique characteristics of the climate and soil of their geography

Style:  A wine that carries the signature of the winemaker who made it

Spoofulated: A type of wine (typically red) that is extracted (dense), high in alcohol and best served without food

Wine Beverage: A beverage made from grapes with additives that enhance flavor and color while promoting consistency from year to year.

My overall point is a simple one – one of the reasons the wine world continues to progress in inches rather than yards is a stunning lack of clarity and alignment on the simplest things.

With natural wines and imports making a broad assault on consumer awareness, and the debate of “Old World” versus “New World” continuing to rear its feral head, the wine world (at least domestically) must create some sense of order—both for the good of understanding who they are marketing to and for the good of the consumer who wants to understand what they are buying.

A classification system need not be formal, and need not be expansive, but it does need to be generally acknowledged and it needs to encompass a wider variability than the tired clichés of “old” versus “new” with a dash of “terroir.”

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January 29 2010

Field Notes from a Wine Life – Then and Now Edition

Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass …

Nipping it in the Bud

The over/under betting line on how soon an online wine writer will wax philosophic and draw an analogy in between the new Apple iPad and wine is set at three days.  This earnest soul, our online wine writer, his proverbial skirt still blown upward from Steve Jobs’ hyperbolic presentation on Wednesday, will say that the iPad has an opportunity to “change the game” for the wine-interested. 

This writer will urge us to ponder the possibilities:  How amazing it would be to deliver applications and wine books in an elegant, interactive way that is portable.

Or, perhaps, this intrepid writer will suggest that using an iPad to deliver multimedia wine content within the context of a gargantuan wine list at a restaurant is a smart solution to an age old problem.

All of these circumstances could be true.  Or, not.  Or, not right now.

I say: don’t believe the hype.

Almost three years ago, I wrote about a company called Vinio that had a similar solution in providing an interactive tablet for diners at restaurants – a virtual Sommelier of sorts that could provide region, varietal, food pairing matches and a host of other value-added types of contextual information. 

While pragmatic at the time, I also displayed a touch of the, “consider the possibilities” wide-eyed optimism.

Today, ahem, the Vinio site appears as if it hasn’t been updated in two years.

My point is – it’s been tried before.  Sometimes old wine in new bottles is still old wine.

Automated Tasting Notes

In 2006 there was a buzz rippling in the burgeoning online wine community about a piece of Japanese technology dubbed the Robo-Sommelier.

As reported by the BBC at the time, Japanese technology manufacturer NEC developed a two foot tall robot that could “taste” and identify types of wine using infrared light to identify different flavor components.  Eventually, this robot could be personalized to make wine recommendations for its owner based on their palate preferences.

Now, of course, this is well and good and a little bit like Popular Science magazine articles from the 70s that talked about flying cars in the new millennium. Yet, there is something interesting here, particularly when combined with another developing technology called Stats Monkey.

A developing technology from a research lab at Northwestern University, Stats Monkey can create computer-generated baseball stories.

From the web site:

Imagine that you could push a button, and magically create a story about a baseball game.  That’s what the Stats Monkey system does.  Given information commonly available online about many games—the box score and the play-by-play—the system automatically generates the text of a story about that game that captures the overall dynamic of the game and highlights the key plays and key players.  The story includes an appropriate headline and a photo of the most important player in the game.

Hmmm …

What’s interesting about this is not its use for writing little league baseball stories for a local audience, as reported by NPR.  Instead, the interesting thing is its ability to take information from a set of parameters and accurately construct a story—across a range of disciplines.

Also from the web site:

The applicability technology underlying the Stats Monkey system scopes across any sport or event in which the events produce significant quantitative data.  It also has applications in domains in which recurring story types that are primarily data-driven, including other kinds of sports stories and many kinds of business stories such as quarterly or annual earnings stories, market updates, and so on.  The Machine Generated Sports Stories system could be employed by news organizations or directly by organizations which wish to publish information about their activities, such as college sports teams or businesses.

Ultimately, the system can be extended to generate stories that include quotes from individuals or organizations involved in those stories (when those quotes are available online) as well as stories in different narrative styles for different audiences.

Hmmm …, again.  What niche relies on quantitative data (scores) that can be combined with quotes for different narrative styles?

Forget the “wisdom of the crowds” when it comes to tasting notes.  A far more interesting story to me is a robotic tasting element and an automated wine review story generator. 

We think major wine critics have their panties in a bunch now?  Sounds like we should just wait a couple of years …

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January 3 2010

What they Say, What they Mean

Time for another edition of “What they Say, What they Mean” an occasional look at foolishness in wine-related press releases.

This time, we’re reviewing “All Out Wine” the new, online wine ecommerce site from Joe Canal’s in Rio Grande, New Jersey.  To see the same press release distributed to dozens of PR outlets in the same, bad form please Google, “The Hottest New Online Wine Store Has Hit The Market.”

My comments are italicized and bolded in parentheses. Items notated with a (Huh?) or a (Really?) denote inexplicable assaults on English, logic, proofreading, and the American educational system.

The Hottest New Online Wine Store Has Hit The Market!! (One exclamation point will annoy a copy editor, two will undo him.  Two exclamation points indicate a palpable excitement level on par with 14 year old girls at the mall.  Avoid at all costs.)

RIO GRANDE, N.J.Dec 14, 2009 - Wine is a drink of characteristics that explode through the palette of many daily ($5 to anybody that can decode this sentence.  Also, “palate” is one of the most misspelled words in the wine lover’s dictionary and it should never be confused with palette, something you put paint on). Wine makers (winemakers, no spaces, is the common usage, though Microsoft Word will want to auto-correct into two words) are revolutionizing the world of wine with new wine making techniques that appeal to the masses (And this is a good thing?). More and more consumers are enjoying wine with food, for celebratory reasons, and special occasions. With the always evolving wine industry, the internet has made it easier for you to buy wine online and AllOutWine.com is becoming the hottest online store to satisfy all wine lovers needs (Because, of course, all wine lovers have the same needs.  Regardless, this is an unquantified claim). AllOutWine is a one stop (‘one-stop’ should be hyphenated) wine shop that offers wines throughout the world (I think they intend to say they offer wines from around the world, not the fact that they’ll ship worldwide). Everything from the great wines of Napa Valley (should have a comma in between Napa Valley and California) California to some of the most sought after wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. From collectors to consumers, you will surely fine (typo) wines of great value and great appeal.

Matt Belock, the enthusiasm behind AllOutWine has combined 2 (always spell out numbers one through nine) of his passions into 1 powerhouse of excitement (Presumably his passions are wine and marketing, though his background indicates dubious internet marketing which may mean his passion is making money off the unsuspecting based on faux-enthusiasm). “With AllOutWine our plan is to do more than just sell wine online. We want to bring you the customer a fun, enjoyable and rememberable(Rememberable is a dictionary word, but one that is more likely to come off the tongue of George W. Bush than be used in a press release) experience all day, everyday (See page 14 CrushIt! By Gary Vaynerchuk – re:  hustle also, ‘everyday’ should be two words).  I have many plans in the works (What this usually means is, ‘We rushed to publish the press release before the end of the year and I have no idea what we’re going to do after this, but I’m taking two weeks off at the end of the year and I’ll think about it’) that will allow everyone to interact with each other and share their wine experiences” (Thank goodness, because there is a strong, unmet need for this in the online wine space, cough … cough).