Good Grape Wine Company

November 25 2008

Aftermarket Wine Blends

When my mind wanders, I occasionally indulge in an onanistic parlor game of, “what would I do with a windfall of money?”

I usually think about what kind of business I would start, not necessarily what I would buy; and more often than not, I think about what I would do around the wine business.

I guess I channel my inner Andy Warhol –-especially when he said, “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

Mostly, my ideas are marketing-oriented and more of a point solution or along the lines of a product than anything truly revolutionary.  I chalk it up to the inured lack of innovation that seems endemic to wine and how it evidently has rubbed off on me.

Along those same lines, as the year winds down, I was thinking about my year of wine and the things that I experienced in ‘08 that I thought were truly interesting.

Bar none, one of the most under-noticed items in the pantheon of wine this year has to be the Fusebox Wine Blending kit from Crushpad wine (I wrote about it in late May).

And, within that Fusebox Wine Blending kit, the thing that absolutely fascinated me were the included recipe cards that allowed you to blend wines to an approximation of famous wines – a 2002 Joseph Phelps Insignia, a 1997 Opus One, a 2000 Chateau Margaux, etc.

It is genius, really. 

I do not know how they developed the recipe cards, but I am certain that Vinovation, who unofficially indicate to their winery customers that they can help develop a wine that will score 90 pts. surely have a good idea of how to both engineer a wine and reverse engineer a wine.

At the same time, earlier in the year I read about a French company called Wineside that was packaging wine in sample tubes – according to a blurb from this site:

… WineSide is taking a novel approach by offering wines packaged in sample-sized tubes.

WineSide offers both sweet and classic wines in patented, flat-base glass tubes with screw tops carefully engineered to protect the wines’ flavour.  WineSide’s collection represents a range of appellations and producers; tubes are available individually or by the box, which can be chosen to provide an introduction to a variety, year or region.

Interesting.  It makes you wonder why only plonk wine goes into the 187 ml bottles that are packaged in 4-packs.

As a side note, I have, in a peculiar way, always fetishized wine after visiting the tasting room at Teldeschi where he administered our tasting by pouring from chemistry lab beakers …

So, if you are following my circuitous path to this point and then you look at a company in another niche, Compass Box Whiskey, then maybe the picture turns from Monet to Rembrandt.

This article from Wired magazine sums up Compass Box well (excerpted):

The energetic (John) Glaser, a forty-something Minnesotan whose ready grin mitigates his piercing gaze, is the sole whisky maker of Compass Box, the boutique company he founded in 2000 after quitting his job as a marketing director for Johnnie Walker.

Although the brand sells only some 6,000 cases yearly, Compass Box’s independent ways have made an impression on the whisky world. I’m visiting Glaser here at Compass Box headquarters, but the apparatus of whisky making that surrounds us is limited to desks, computers and some glassware—Compass Box doesn’t do any distilling.
In a role that Glaser compares to that of a wine négociant, the company buys casks of whisky from some 15 Scotch distilleries, chosen for their wide range of characteristics, and assembles them into blends of Glaser’s own careful design. He takes, for instance, Caol Ila whisky, which has all the smoky savor of a barbecue, tempers it with an equal amount of Ardmore, whose likewise substantial peat is mellowed by delicate, complex fruity notes, and adds just a splash of uniquely peppery, briny Clynelish. (Among today’s treats for me is tasting these components separately, then together.)

Really, the idea is to be a dash of Cameron Hughes, a dash of Michael Brill from Crushpad with his Fusebox product with a dash of John Glaser, all delivered in a sampling format with recipe cards for how to assemble famous wines.

If I had a small windfall of money, I would have famous wines deconstructed both historical and contemporary, I would buy quality bulk wine and work the spot market, even buying bottled wine if I had to in order to make a faithful blend.  I would assemble kits of wine samples and recipe cards matched to premiere vintages.  I would sell that wine in a multiple bottle 187 ml sampling format that was packaged for high-end, velocity sales at boutique wine retail for subsequent in-home consumer blending. 

Do you think there is anybody interested in tasting an approximation of a ’47 Cheval Blanc?  Or, a ’97 Screaming Eagle or other scarcely available, uber-expensive wines?  What about the spectrum of Parker 100 pointers?

Does this resonate in a wine environment where the rarified air of the finest wines becomes exceedingly rarer as India and China takes to wine with new money?

I do - for the same reason that, inexplicably, we go to see celebrity impersonators in Vegas.  It is not the same, but it is still a vicarious thrill and we are entertained. 

The traditionalists in wine would hate the idea; the manufactured, cheapening of the art, but as Warhol noted, “business is the best art.”

Posted in, Wine: A Business Doing Pleasure. Permalink | Comments (7) |

Print

Comments