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tokalon winery not-for-profit jess jackson massale selection wine & spirits magazines kenny shopsin next generation apple the psychology of wine the vintners art australian wine vinexpo jay mcinerney the gaslight anthem the pioneer woman james laube chimney rock elevage cornell enology wine tycoon game stavin kelly fleming national wine & spirits kurt andersen " "new world wine" poseurs macari vineyards sette 7 swanson vineyards sunbox eleven wine winery sponsorship champagne sales wine criticism cork'd 2008 vina mar reserva sauvignon blanc randy caparoso wine + music midwest wine culture hunningbird wine beaux freres jon bonne the wine case climber white agency nil charlie weis sugar free wine a very goode job 2007 sean minor four bears pinot noir trefethen generation y and wine 2009 auction napa valley sonoma county wine wipes san francisco wine competition clary ranch tim hanni discoveries pathfinder wine bar bets the winemakers tv australia wine fantesca judgment of paris women in 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August 4 2009
It’s appropriate that New Zealand was the site for the film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Set in an earthly, but fantastical and fictitious place called “Middle-earth,” the movie brought New Zealand to life as a stunning backdrop for Frodo Baggins. And, to my palate, that’s precisely where NZ Pinot Noir fits – another world entirely; a middle ground that exists somewhere between the Old World and New World, reflecting both, both mirroring neither.
While many (most?) pedigreed California Pinot’s mine that fruit-forward, full-bodied territory with omnipresent oak acting as a plush counterpoint to the sometimes thin Burgundian style, New Zealand seems to consistently strike a nice middle ground with a quixotic, well-knit whole – not entirely of the earth, nor too fruit-laden. Oak and brix level at harvest act as an equilibrating calibrator not a style definition.
Whereas Oregon and Michigan sometimes strive for a Burgundian character that too often and unwittingly pays homage to thin bodied wines with currant fruit notes and an herbaceousness that I don’t particularly care for, New Zealand brings a richer depth of fruit with cherry, berry and plum coupled with a striking “of the earth” quality.
It’s that fresh macerated fruit co-mingling with the “after the rain” dirt and mushroom balanced by a lingering acidity that I find particularly beguiling. And, to boot, New Zealand Pinot is mostly affordable, as well.
For an interesting exercise, try picking up a Hartley Ostini Hitching Post Pinot from the Central Coast, a Brooks Winery Pinot from Oregon, a Burgundy (whatever you can find—village level or better) and a New Zealand Pinot (from the Marlborough region where “value” is their middle name) to see the stylistic differences. All of them will be good, but that’s not the point. The New Zealand Pinot will likely stand out like the hot redhead at a cocktail party—different, interesting, confident; the kind of woman that drops science fiction movie bon mots with a disarming laugh that dazzles, but rarely dominates.
The tasting notes below (2006 Brancott Reserve Pinot Noir and the 2007 Stoneleigh Pinot Noir), are two good examples of the “Middle-earth” (and affordable) concept that I’m talking about.
August 3 2009
I remember the good old days for technology in the wine industry. Ah, it was a simpler time, the halcyon days, when sales were steady and distractions were kept to a minimum—it must have been 2006.
At the time, a wee bit over three years ago, there was just a simple focus on direct-to-consumer ecommerce. That focus quickly gave way to blogging mindshare before all hell broke loose with the birth of the Rosemary’s Baby of the wine Internet – social media—sometime mid-last year.
Flash forward (all of 12 months) to present day and it’s hard not to read a social media / wine article on a weekly (daily?) basis.
Generally speaking, I have misgivings about social media; not because I don’t think its effective – it is (for now at least—more on that in a moment). Mostly I have trepidation because social media engagement is a long, hard slog (years, not months) in order to see tangible benefits. And, effectiveness measurement is still developing. However, what I really fear is that before most wineries actually see results from an investment in social media (personnel, time or $$) there will be something new on the horizon that will distract, complicate and add additional complexity.
If Twitter and Facebook are the topics du jour, what’s going to be creating conversation and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) in the next 18 months to three years?
In my professional life I work for a digital design firm – we design high-end “experience” based applications with motion graphics for the Web and elsewhere, mostly for advertising agencies and their clients, but directly with corporations, too. We’ve done some good work – an online game for KFC, an application for Transition eyeglass lenses and a couple of very cool projects coming up this fall.
Because of this work we’re in tune with a number of emerging trends that impact the work that we do, and ultimately the solutions we deliver for clients.
Without getting too poetic about the changes that are happening with user-based technology, I’ll simply say that we are currently in the midst of a migration whereby online isn’t just a component in the traditional marketing mix. Instead, it’s migrating to be THE CORE of the marketing mix with offline activities to support it.
First, a quick table setting bit related to social media:
The real issue I have with social media is that in and of itself it’s not the end-all, be-all. So a winery has 3500 fans on Facebook. Big deal. What do you do with those people after they are there? The short and the long answer is that most wineries don’t do anything with them besides use it as a channel to complement their existing email blasts.
The real secret sauce is to use your presence online along with social media and take those people to an engagement hub for brand-building. Most wineries, unfortunately, are still coming around to this way of thinking. Most wineries (hell, most ALL companies) view their web site and their social media activities as two separate entities that are barely integrated together.
Based on 14 years of Internet experience and a daily monitoring of emerging trends here is what I think wineries and the wine industry needs to pay attention to in the next 18 to 36 months.
A micro site is an immersive, experience based web presence that can complement your traditional web site and act as a bridge destination for your social media engagement. Many times, for large consumer brands, a micro site will be focused on a promotion or multiple promotions and will have a lot of interactive content to engage users—videos, games, etc. A micro site is the proverbial straw that stirs the drink; it’s the glue that ties your online marketing efforts together. If you want your social efforts to lead somebody somewhere, typically it’s a micro site where they can spend time with your brand.
An example I like is the Double Stuf Racing League. Or, you can see the micro site we did for KFC along with a game we created.
Content
It won’t be long before most wineries will employ or have a contracted relationship with content developers – development companies and people that can create content that can be deployed in a multi-channel format – on your web site, on YouTube and sent off to content aggregators like TubeMogul.
It just makes sense – wine is all about the story and engaging with customers on a visceral level. Nothing does that better than video, and prices are coming down where production and quality don’t have to equal high cost. A couple of good guys that I know personally are Bob at Chilmark Media, Dan at Artisan Media and Bret at B Napa.
Video, in Internet terms, isn’t exclusively just a camera shooting footage, either. Flash technology is rapidly expanding in a number of different ways and affords animation, as well.
Of course, all of this content needs to be served up from somewhere and video content platforms let you manage and serve it up.
Mobile
iPhone gets all the love now and there are scads and scads of iPhone wine applications out there, but the market is still very young. Flash technology is converging to other mobile devices giving developers the ability to do touch screen and the motion sensitivity that affords game play.
I don’t think other phone manufacturers are going to roll over and give the iPhone the market. ’10 should see a momentum shift back to other phone device manufacturers who still hold the bulk of the market share anyway. This is a reasonable bet because Apple is going to shift their sights on Amazon’s Kindle in the near term.
Expect to see a fresh crop of wine applications for other phone platforms. Wine seems to be one of the subject matter areas behind porn and tech news that is quickly adopted by those entrepreneurial. And, expect to see wineries get into creating their own applications. iPhone wine applications right now are largely the province of companies outside of wineries proper.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality (AR) is essentially the ability to have a 3D information presentation using either your phone cam or a Web cam. It’s very slick and one of my pet fascinations these days. It can be used in two different ways. For a mobile device like an iPhone it can present real-time information based on real time intelligence. See this link, as well.
In other applications it’s a “gee whiz” marketing gimmick that people love to play with. See this link for Papa John’s (at a micro site, ahem)
Digital Signage
Digital signage and carbon accountants are the only two growth areas I know of in this economy. Digital signage, in particular, is growing significantly in retail applications. It’s useful as a marketing tool at retail and will be equally useful for wineries who want to re-purpose the content they have created at their micro site and with their content producers. To boot, you can also integrate mobile marketing programs with digital signage for end-to-end marketing.
Most digital signage companies are creating a wireless delivery mechanisms so you can manage the content from your computer and not have to go through the hassle of hardwiring flat panel displays (in a tasting room, for example).
Final Thoughts and Recommendations
Another area that bears watching is the ability for Flash content development and delivery on TV’s. At this point, I’m not sure how this, specifically, is going to play out, but I think it’s safe to say that the sophistication through which user-generated content will be developed is going to rapidly increase with Adobe Flash technology at the center of it touching the web, mobile, and TV delivery.
These are exciting times, indeed. But, progress doesn’t stop for anybody. Even as we’re feeling overwhelmed with the pace of technological adaption, we haven’t seen anything yet. In three years time, we’ll be playing yet another entirely different ballgame and we’ll look back at ’09 as quiet, halcyon days. I don’t think there is anything a winery can do to specifically plan for these developments. Most wineries will naturally evolve to a micro site and content development and be forced into looking at mobile, digital signage and augmented reality from a competitive standpoint. However, if I had to offer any one take-away it would for for every winery to go back and register all possible domain name extensions for their URL. Barring definitive progress, you at least want the enabling domains for when the time is right.
August 3 2009
Save for political campaigns, has there ever been a time when appealing to the common denominator was a good strategy?
I don’t think so. Yet, that’s what the wine world does, particularly those primarily responsible for wine education – columnists and writers. They go after the “Joe Average” baseline, for the most part.
If you were to start a new job, chances are your training would be slight, your learning curve would be long, and you may only have one-half of the skills you need to truly be successful.
You would experience periodic bouts of frustration as co-workers make adjustments to help you, but never quite go to the extent of bending over backwards.
Nope, the train doesn’t stop for anyone. Welcome to the deep end of the pool where you either sink or swim.
This Darwinism seems to be the case for most things in life, not just corporate warfare; either you get it done, or you don’t, but there isn’t much coddling in our dog-eat-dog ecosystem.
I have been thinking about this hard-line approach to managing learning curves and gaining a level of competency especially in contrast to wine.
Wine is soft and fuzzy. Wine content in most traditional print media outlets (and too many online outlets) caters to the common denominator. It’s safe. It’s boring. It’s all mostly the same.
If you head to the bookstore at least 75% of the books will be on the order of “Wine 101.”
Snoooooooooozzzzzzzzzzze.
I dread the 4th of July and Thanksgiving because, well, there are only so many times you can read the same BBQ / Zinfandel and Turkey / Pinot Noir article before induced somnambulism.
I recently took on a monthly assignment writing a wine column for a local lifestyle magazine. I live in a suburb of Indianapolis. The county I live in happens to be one of the more wealthy counties in the country – household income far exceeds the natural average, we were rated the best place to raise a family in the country by Forbes magazine last year, crime is low, housing is affordable and the schools are good. It’s a veritable Shangri-la if being landlocked in the Midwest doesn’t upset your constitution.
My point in bringing this up is that, by the numbers, the demographics of the area where I live is heavily predisposed to wine consumption.
Yet, the charter for this wine column, in the words of the Publisher, is to:
… write to the casual wine drinker. Someone similar to me. I drink wine semi-regularly. I know reds from whites, I can kinda, sorta differentiate varietals, but not too well. I know what “dry” means. But if you poured a glass from a $150 bottle and another from a good $30 bottle, I’m not sure I could tell them apart. So, assume your audience has some basic wine knowledge, but little else.
When I received the editorial positioning I wanted to scream from the rooftops – “There are a million and one pieces of this kind of content and it doesn’t contribute to the education of wine drinker!”
Why doesn’t it?
Simply, we are, in this day and age, the most educated population in the history of mankind. We are infinitely smarter than our generational predecessors by a country mile.
At our fingertips, we have information resources available to us that are truly astounding. Yet, within this mountain of information we lack two fundamental aspects:
1) Context
2) Motivation
So, instead of explaining why wine matters by placing it in a situational, societal, or historical context that resonates with somebody so they can manage their learning curve, the wine world mostly presents the same basic information over and over again hoping that somebody will be motivated to seek out more advanced forms of information.
Yet, without placing wine in context, you often don’t get to the motivation part, which is why you have Publishers who, “kinda, sorta” can differentiate varietals, “but not too well” yet recognize that having a wine column is a good idea.
You see, in my worldview, there are entirely too many people who “kinda, sorta” like wine, but know nothing about it. In surfing or skateboarding terms, these people would be “poseurs.” However, instead of us talking about the poseurs, we grapple with and try to overcome being categorized as “elitist” or “snobs.”
Ahem, they’re winning in this “turn the tables” trick.
The wine world, those entrusted with the care, feeding and development of our ecosystem enable this passive participation by presenting spoon fed information that does nothing to add to the rich tapestry of wine nor incents somebody to seek deeper information.
In my estimation, instead of talking slowly and broadly to people to be inclusive, the wine world needs to ratchet up the information presentation and assume a baseline of knowledge – an assumption that forces somebody to manage their learning curve.
Or, in other words, like most other areas of our life, it’s sink or swim time – like Darwinism said, “Survival of the fittest.”
August 1 2009
More flotsam and jetsam from a wine-fueled life …
Wine Spectator Annual Restaurant Awards
Janko’s Little Zagreb restaurant is the quintessential college town restaurant. Located in Bloomington, IN it’s an Indiana University tradition alongside the Irish Lion and Nick’s. Precious few students don’t make at least one pilgrimage to Zagreb’s over the course of four years of school to mark a special occasion or to soak up Dad’s ATM card on a parent’s weekend.
It’s a steakhouse throwback. Founded in 1979, it could have just as easily been started in 1959. It’s a homey spot with red checkered table clothes, baked potato’s wrapped in aluminum foil with enough whipped butter to close down an arterial passageway, iceberg lettuce salads and waitresses with enough mileage on them to have seen it all before most of the kids nowadays were a twinkle in their Dad’s eye. Oh, yeah, and the steaks are tasty, too.
Most college towns have these sorts of “joints.” Refreshingly, as is the case with Zagreb’s, most of these places are without irony, as well. It’s a joint for the sake of being what it is, not a facsimiled approximation with a wink.
I appreciate that.
I am a fan of “joints” having previously noted that we’ll know when widespread wine culture in America has arrived when joints start getting the wine gospel. I’ll take a local restaurant with some genuine history and wear on the edges over the Capital Grille any day of the week.
At first blush, you wouldn’t think that Little Zagreb would be a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence award winner either by dining experience or the wine list, as marked by the standards held by those who know too much about wine. However, there is something to be said for local spots that migrate to higher ground from the chock-a-block mindlessness of wine lists filled with supermarket Cabs, Merlots and Chardonnay’s.
Many decry the Wine Spectator Restaurant Awards as a capitalistic enterprise exchanging the Wine Spectator brand name and a plaque in exchange for a check; I won’t argue the fundamentals of that point. Nor will I argue the fact that I have been to Little Zagreb’s and nobody from Wine Spectator has likely ever flown into Indianapolis and made the hour and twenty minute drive south to Bloomington. However, I will point out that, by and large, the Wine Spectator Restaurant Awards highlight independent restaurants – and whether they are white table cloth or red checkered, there’s something to be said for continuing to isolate the mostly independent restaurants in the country who attempt to make wine a serious part of their line-up.
Here are three cheers to Little Zagreb’s and the other joints in America who do it on a daily basis and serve a nice bottle of wine along the way.
Updates and Notes
As noted previously, The Markham Mark of Distinction Program is currently running and has announced their 10 finalists. You can vote for the winner of one of two $25,000 grants to a non-for-profit that will use the money to make a mark in their local community. I won’t name my favorite, all are worthy, but check out the site and cast your vote.
What I wrote about a year ago
The Return of Wine Hieroglyphics
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