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March 12 2010
…Flotsam and jetsam that doesn’t fit into a regular blog post…
Wall Street Journal and Wine
A very interesting (and lengthy) profile on Wall Street Journal (WSJ) owner Rupert Murdoch in the March 8th issue of New York magazine (a far more interesting and diverse read than the New Yorker in my opinion, even if it doesn’t earn you faux intelligentsia status).
The article isn’t about wine, but it is about Ahab’s Murdoch’s pursuit of Moby Dick defeating the New York Times.
The article is worth the read. If nothing else it offers some circumstantial insight into the abrupt disappearance of former WSJ wine writers Dottie Gaither and John Brecher and their subsequent replacement by Jay McInerney.
When winning is your goal, money is no object and you have the temerity to battle Google even, jettisoning everyman wine writers for somebody that is a New York society scenester who can figuratively hold down the other end of the wine bar against Eric Asimov at the New York Times begins to make some sense.
Garagiste
If the definition of persuasive charm is getting somebody to agree to do something before thinking about it, then I give Jon Rimmerman my Claude C. Hopkins Lifetime Achievement Award for his incredible (sales copy) writing at Garagiste.
Secondarily, for the contrarians who have marked Parker for dethronement, the news of his untimely demise is still awaiting coincidence with market realities.
Finally, for wineries who say they don’t kneel at the altar of Parker, they are only talking about the wines that DON’T get reviewed.
Take, for example, a recent Garagiste offer for Chardonnay that had me pulling my wallet from my back pocket before consumer jurisprudence took hold (quoting Rimmerman in a Garagiste offer):
A few weeks ago, I was offered this wine for what now appears to be among the best price/value ratios in a number of years. At the time, the wine was floundering around without much market demand and the prospect of the 2008 vintage right around the corner. I found the wine to be quite agreeable, even very fine (for domestic Chardonnay) and was surprised that it was not in greater demand. While I would rather not be known as a domestic Chardonnay specialist, the wine was quite surprising and I knew a number of you would be happy to enjoy it. I secured the wine (at a great price) and had it scheduled for the first week of April. That was two weeks ago.
Last week, the new Wine Advocate was released and Parker gave this the highest score in the last 5-10 years for a domestic Chardonnay in this price range (maybe the highest score in the last 15 years). For arguably the most influential voice of California wine, that is a major statement indeed. Let the market frenzy ensue…
The offer was for the 2007 Chateau St. Jean Belle Terre Vineyard Chardonnay, a wine that was going into “deal” (read: priced to move) mode at $16.99 from Garagiste before Parker gave his review (a 93 score).
According to Rimmerman in his email newsletter, “…we can only have one shipment at the deal price – if we re-order, it’s at a “corrected” tariff that accommodates for the WA93.”
The “corrected tariff” means in winery parlance, “The bluebird of happiness of just shit on our desk and we’re no longer going to ‘fire sale’ this wine.”
These are interesting times we live in ... related to the wine world, I sometimes feel like it’s the ultimate game of bluff poker.
Personally speaking, I’d go to my local bottle shop and buy two bottles of the Snoqualmie Chardonnay (wooded or unleaded) and call it a day.
File in: Free content
Speaking of Claude C. Hopkins, he’s the forefather of advertising sales copy. He wrote a seminal book called “Scientific Advertising” that is as relevant today as when it was first published in 1923. The book is in the public domain and can be found at Scribd, a content sharing site.
Check out Scribd for a bunch of other interesting wine-related content, too. Recent wine books include:
• A History of Wine in America by Thomas Pinney
• Wine and Philosophy edited by Fritz Allhoff
• A Taste for Wine - 20 Key Tastings to Unlock Your Personal Wine Style by Vincent Gasnier
Winemaker Extraordinaire
In the fall, I highlighted a wine game called, “Wine Tycoon” that had an hour’s worth of notice in the wine world news cycle. And, I also just recently tripped across another game called, “Winemaker Extraordinaire” which is surprisingly well-reviewed and inexpensive ($6.99), compared to $19.99 for “Wine Tycoon.”
Released in the spring of last year, “Winemaker Extraordinaire” follows a Peter Mayle-like plotline:
When Maria Bellaventura finds out that she has inherited an Italian winery, she must leave her stress-filled life as a corporate lawyer to take over the family business.
I have downloaded the game and will do a head to head analysis between it and Wine Tycoon. If you’re the gaming sort, “Winemaker Extraordinaire” is worth a look.
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March 3 2010
… More flotsam and jetsam that doesn’t fit into a blog post by itself …
Required Reading
Please do me a favor and go to the sports blog Deadspin and read writer Will Leitch’s article on his relationship with movie critic Roger Ebert. Replace “Roger Ebert” with “Robert Parker” and you’ll have the same moral of the story.
Wine Cultural Voyeurism
With every bit of certainty I can muster, I’m pretty sure my unborn children will look at me with dramatic teenage disbelief because I am not bilingual and fluency wasn’t a requirement for my high school (or college) graduation.
The global village will have them doing internships in oui oui Paris.
The fact is, I would like to know a bit of French, some Italian and maybe even a bit of Spanglish. Though, I can still learn, and until I learn, I can skirt the edges using some tech savvy.
I’ve been having fun reading foreign language wine blogs lately—for the same reason that I like reading Savuer magazine and their food culture pieces. It feels like authentic armchair travel into a heretofore unknown culture.
Here’s my tip: Read – translated—foreign language wine blogs using a Firefox browser and download the Google Toolbar. Embedded into the toolbar is a pretty good translator for pretty much any language necessary. Or, use Google’s Chrome browser where it’s built in.
It’s a fun little trick.
One site I’ve been reading is a Russian wine blog. Or, go to wineblogger.info and check out their listing of foreign language wine blogs.
Wine and Air Travel
Speaking of international travel (armchair or otherwise), for all of the talk about how state fair wine competitions are a farce, by far the most worthless set of awards I’ve ever seen has to be “Cellars in the Sky Awards” that recognize, “The best business and first class wines served by airlines worldwide.” Sponsored by Business Traveller magazine, the winner is Quantas. American Airlines, US Air, and Delta were a part of the competition.
Methinks getting rid of baggage fees might be a good place to start for rewarding the customer.
Gallo
“Scumbag,” is what I thought. Gallo takes a lot of heat in the wine world for being a hulking behemoth of a company and the antithesis of what many wine lovers stand for in the world of wine.
Usually, I’m an Erin Brockovich sympathizer, but I can’t muster up any sympathy for the guy that filed a class action lawsuit against Gallo for the Red Bicyclette imbroglio. My skin crawls when I read quotes from class action lawyers in a truly victimless crime.
This isn’t melamine in the milk. It was Syrah instead of Pinot, and, apparently, an act of deception against Gallo. An argument can be made that Gallo should have tested composition of the wine based on the amount of production that was coming from a tertiary Pinot region, but, again, lawsuits should be reserved for truly injurious claims.
Said the lawyer, “It is important that when consumers enter a supermarket or a wine store they can be assured that they are getting bottles of wine from the region represented and that they are of the vintage represented. If not, winemakers will take advantage of an unsophisticated public especially in the $10 a bottle category where these bottles were priced.”
If Mark Keller of Los Angeles (the plaintiff) can produce a receipt for his purchase and prove that he was emotionally injured then I’ll be the first guy to buy him a case of wine. Otherwise, it’s a waste of taxpayer money in the court system.
Another Candidate for Worst Wine Press Release of the Year
$5 for anybody that can tell me what the point of this press release is.
It’s Safe to go back in the Water
I received a press release and subsequent research summary from Blackstone winery’s PR folks this week. Their outbound PR effort related to a commissioned study with Nielsen was first launched the second week of February. Contact with me (undoubtedly 4th tier outreach) represents a sustained effort at trying to get traction around their message of dispelling the “Sideways effect” of Merlot being generally insipid wine by proving that sales never wavered.
The research summary says, “Merlot never ‘died’ and remains immensely popular with U.S. red wine drinkers, registering solid sales growth every year for the past five years.”
The research summary goes on to show numerous facts, figures and graphs that dispel the myth that Merlot somehow was waylaid by the movie and lead character Miles’ disdainful exhortation, “No, if anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am NOT drinking any f*cking Merlot!”
This is really curious. First, the movie was released in time for the 2005 Oscars, in late 2004. Five full years ago. This smells like Blackstone, a value wine, is trying to woo favor – not from the consumer populace (who still apparently drink Merlot), but from the influencers in the wine media, Sommeliers, and wine retailers – the value-chain of influencers, who largely abandoned the varietal as a topic du jour.
I’ve talked about this in the past, I have a pet theory called the “derision decision” and that’s the point in time when the zeitgeist bites you back for being too popular. That’s exactly what happened with Merlot. The wines turned boring and uninteresting, the wine media lamented Merlot and then finally had a cultural touchstone (Sideways) to point to as broad validation for how much crap wine was being turned out.
The rest, as they say, is history. The influencer tide turned, even if sales didn’t.
Here’s the thing about Blackstone and Merlot – you only get one crack at cultural popularity and you either sustain it, or you don’t. Your next crack at it is with nostalgia, not facts and figures.
Blackstone would be better served by picking one segment of the population and doing stealth marketing – similar to what Pabst Blue Ribbon has done.
As I said, otherwise, they’ll have to wait their turn for nostalgia.
In other news, MC Hammer has 1.8 million followers on Twitter and The Who, fresh off their Super Bowl performance, may tour in the fall. Both bring fond memories of musical stages in my life … I have wine stages, too.
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March 1 2010
… Flotsam and jetsam that doesn’t fit in a blog post by itself …
Open that Bottle Night
It was a reasonably quiet edition of Open that Bottle Night (OTBN) this past Saturday. An occasion started by the Dottie Gaither and John Brecher, former wine columnists for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the event was started 11 years ago to celebrate drinking that special cellar bottle that needs an event that never seems to come.
If you want to read an interview ipso facto, head over to Palate Press for the 2010 exclusive with Dottie and John (who remain tight-lipped about their next move post WSJ –probably based on their severance agreement—look for their next move in 2011).
For my part, I opened a 2004 A. Rafanelli Zinfandel. It’s a huge wine, not quite off-putting Amazonian, but big nonetheless, with charm to spare, and it’s drinking beautifully right now.
Coming back from a work-related awards ceremony on Saturday night (the rubber chicken, kissing babies, slapping backs circuit), I couldn’t wait to get home, take off the sports coat and pour a glass. The A. Rafanelli did not disappoint.
To me, A. Rafanelli represents what is good about California wine – sublime vino, small, multi-generational and family-owned with enough down-to-earth cachet to keep it interesting. It’s expensive, yet fairly priced based on production. Plus, I was introduced to this by a good friend and completely cowed by Dave Rafanelli on a visit to the winery years ago. A. Rafanelli is quintessential.
On a side note, Open that Bottle Night is the first “wine holiday” of the year. In a humble effort to try and build momentum with a coalition of willing wine drinkers, I’d like to build some momentum around a calendar of wine events. Next up is “John James Dufour Day” on April 3, 2010 – intended to celebrate “bud break” and the man that many credit with starting the first successful winery in the U.S. in 1807.
Orange Wine
I’ve recently taken on a heavy interest in wine topics and story tracking. To me, it’s fascinating to watch topics emerge and stories break that build momentum over a period of time.
This is the sort of thing that helps wine writers develop their “bona fides” because there is so little hard news in the wine industry. Therefore, getting in front of an emerging trend helps build credibility as being witness to something that is now “esoteric,” but may shortly be “prevailing”—something that can be pointed to as a benchmark.
Undoubtedly, this is also the sort of thing that PR professionals do as they measure the success of their work.
I use Highbeam, Cruvee, Google alerts and good ol’ internet searching for research.
One of the topics I’ve been monitoring is “Orange” wine.
If you’re interested in getting caught up on a topic that has the wine writing cognoscenti aflutter, check out the following links:
Wikipedia – partial article aggregation for Eric Asimov and Jon Bonné
Eric Asimov (New York Times) II
Jon Bonne (San Francisco Chronicle) I
Jeremy Parzen from Do Bianchi I
Jeremy Parzen from Do Bianchi II
Alder Yarrow from Vinography I
Alder Yarrow from Vinography II
Feargus O’Sullivan (Financial Times)
What does this particular focus on “Orange” wine in the last eight or nine months mean? Likely that we’re going to see and hear more about it in throughout the year as thought-leadership trickles down.
Expect to see an article in a mainstream wine magazine (read: Wine Spectator) sometime this year.
Want to buy a Blog?
Speaking of Google Alerts … if you’re a wine information hound and you’re not subscribed to Google alerts around various wine subjects (red wine, white wine, wine blogs, winery press release) then you’re missing out on seeing some really weird and wacky stuff that may not always cross the radar otherwise.
In a two day span late last week, a Google alert flagged a mention of Good Grape at a site that valuates web sites – it pegged this site as being worth $230,501.
Elsewhere, I saw a web site auction listing for a blog called, “Grape in a Bottle.” The auction is now closed, but the site could have been yours for a mere $1500.
Ironically, the valuation web site said, “Grape in a Bottle” was worth $248,472.
For all of this talk about “monetization” it seems a bigger problem is something that is supposedly worth a lot of money can be had for .006% of the alleged value – that is, of course, if there any takers. If not, then it’s worth exactly what somebody is willing to pay—$0.
So, what does it all mean? Some people garden, some people refinish furniture, whatever the hobby is, the payment is in the process itself. The intrinsic value will always be higher than the monetary value for something you love.
At least that’s my $0.02 cents, which is probably worth less than that.
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November 9 2009
Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass …
Veterans Day
Both of my grandfathers served in WWII and my Dad served in Vietnam. Despite growing up in a family in which service to our country was a reality, it wasn’t talked about much. Instead, it was acknowledged by dated Technicolor pictures of handsome men in uniform, their tremulous smiles denoting the unknown, along with other artifacts like heavy wool blankets, decades old, a memento to go along with the VFW membership, used by the little people in the family to keep the winter chill at bay every December, an itchy training ground for the holiday sweaters foisted on us in the weeks to come.
While I broke rank (pun intended) and didn’t serve, as the men in my family before me, I always call my dad on Veterans Day and thank him for serving. And, I would certainly do the same with both of my Grandpas if I could.
In keeping with Veterans Day, David Honig, Founder of Palate Press, wrote a brilliant article that traces his grandfather’s steps while serving the U.S. in WWI France. Via letters home, today’s sacred heirlooms, David traces Archie Brick’s route through France while offering asides with contemporary beverage reviews analogous to the region in which his Grandfather was located. It’s simple, it’s brilliant and I strongly urge you to read it today in homage to all those that have served our country so nobly.
The only Thanksgiving Wine Recommendation I will make
It’s getting to be that time … time for Thanksgiving wine recommendations – an event that roughly coincides with the release of Beaujolais Nouveau – a duopoly of wine events that wine writers love like getting root canals and watching senior citizens eat corn on the cob.
The only Thanksgiving wine recommendation you’ll catch me making is one I’ve already made in a post from January 2008 – the 2006 Cellar Rat Pinot Noir crafted by Alan Baker at Crushpad from Wentzel Vineyard fruit.
From my one case allocation, I have three bottles remaining. Like most wine drinkers I’m a wonderfully polyamorous drinker so drinking nine bottles in the span of a 20 months indicates what I think of this beautiful wine; it was naturally inoculated, unfiltered and lightly oaked giving it a delicate balance in between Old and New World styles – rustic and earthy, yet fruit-forward, nicely structured with balanced acidity. It made a lovely companion to Thanksgiving last year and will do the same for my table this year, as well.
The Cellar Rat is hitting its peak and probably has two to three years left of optimum drinking. Alan, immersed in a new wine project called Cartograph, is selling the last 10 cases of his stash for a 20% discount from the list price of $42 per bottle if you buy a ½ case. Free shipping if you buy a case.
Two barrels or 50 cases of this wine were made. If you like the artisanal story factor, you like Pinot and you like excellent foot-friendly wine, you can’t do much better.
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November 8 2009
Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass …
The Wine Success Paradox
My wife and I get together with a few other couples once a month to drink wine. It’s good, clean fun with each of us taking monthly turns hosting and selecting the monthly theme for our “wine club.” Every month, inevitably, in the midst of our Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot, Riesling, or Cab, we end up talking about sensory evaluation – what the heck are we tasting in the glass?
This past Friday night, there were looks of dumbfounded incredulity when I said I thought the Road 31 Pinot Noir we were drinking had a nose showing “mushrooms soaked in cherry coke with some tar on the edges.” This observation led to a conversation with one of the members of our club who, again, revisited his difficulty with learning about wine, a monthly occurrence. Chris is a CPA who runs his own business and specializes in tax accounting with a special expertise in parsing the U.S. tax code for small businesses. I have to note, I find it mighty odd that a guy who intimately understands the tax code has a hard time understanding what he is tasting, yet I don’t blame him for this shortcoming.
I’m reminded what the wine world too often forgets or takes for granted – the number of “wine enthusiasts” pales in comparison to the “wine interested” and it’s the job of everybody who has made their way down the learning curve to ensure that the wine interested stay interested and turn into enthusiasts.
Marketers use the AIDA model – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – as a means to convey the cycle through which people traverse on their way to consummating action. To me, at least related to engaging in a new pursuit, it’s an incomplete analogy, because “success” isn’t accounted for.
When I first got into wine, I took up golf at the same time, making a very conscious decision to tease out the truths of both. Plain and simple, my interest in golf waned and got lost quicker than a 3-pack of balls caused by my physics-defying 7-Iron slice. I was bad at golf and my ability to get better didn’t look very good, at least relative to wine where I was really enjoying myself and learning, and growing. I gave up golf, putting my clubs in the corner of the garage.
In wine terms, I’m inclined to revise the AIDA model to be inclusive of the following:
Attention—Interest—Desire—Action—Understanding—Success = Passion
Just like my golf game, I think it’s easy to forget that virtually no one has made their way down the path to wine enthusiasm, beyond wine interest, if they haven’t had a measure of success. And, you can’t have success without understanding.
To me, the two biggest qualifiers to wine success are seeing the industry beyond the “lifestyle” that is perpetuated as marketing shtick and understanding what you are drinking. In doing so, consumers get a more holistic view of the wine world and they understand what they are putting in their mouth. It seems so simple, right?
There are a lot of folks who couldn’t care less about French wine classification, but everybody needs to understand industry environmental factors and what they taste in order to graduate down the path of wine success. It is core to wine appreciation to have context and to be able to stick your nose in the glass and smell some nuance.
Just a thought, but the unspoken paradox in the world of wine is the implication that knowledge, in and of itself, is most important. To me, all the wine 101 books in the world don’t mean a thing if somebody has an interest in, but cannot identify flavor components in wine and they don’t have the appropriate context to place the wine situationally.
I gave up on golf because it looked too hard to get to a level of competency. Fixing my slice was too daunting. How many “wine interested” people have given up on wine because they couldn’t get to a level of competency, sensory or otherwise?
… Speaking of Wine Enthusiasm
Two weeks ago I wrote two posts with suggestions for improvement for Wine Enthusiast magazine. Amongst many suggestions, I elaborated on what I perceive to be a need to ratchet down the “lifestyle” and provide more context for how the industry operates.
Over the course of the nearly four years of writing this blog, I’ve taken a fair number of shots at a fair number of targets, liberally sprinkling in constructive criticism. In doing so I’ve received my fair share of return criticism from people who didn’t appreciate or disagreed with what I had to say.
Of the numerous “nasty grams” I have received, one that I might have expected that never came would be from Adam Strum from Wine Enthusiast.
Instead, Strum, bar none, has been the one person who took the feedback with a spirit of professionalism and open-mindedness. Having shared several emails privately with Adam in the midst of and after writing the posts, I was dumbfounded that he was not only receptive to my suggestions, but he was going to review them for potential action.
To wit, last week Strum wrote a post at the Wine Enthusiast blog soliciting feedback on the appropriate mix of lifestyle content in Wine Enthusiast magazine, titling his post, “Wine as a Passion/Wine as a Business.”
In brief, I think our wine media fails most wine enthusiasts and I’m not alone in that thinking. If you’re interested in adding your opinion to the matter and giving it to somebody who is listening, mosey over to the Wine Enthusiast blog here.
Liquid Memory
Mike Steinberger, the wine columnist for Slate magazine, wrote a book this year called, Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France. Despite his book being good, presumably, he knows what it’s like to receive a crushingly bad book review. Because of this it makes his recent review of Liquid Memory by Jonathan Nossiter all the more credible (and interesting).
I’m an information hound and consume massive amounts of media. I cannot recall, ever, one author calling another authors work “execrable,” as Steinberger did in his October 30th column.
I’ve only made my way into about 20 pages of the stultifyingly boring book, “Liquid Memory,” but you can be sure I’ll read it through just to see if I find it as wretched and “deserving to be execrated,” as Steinberger and Merriam-Webster note.
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