November 6 2009
Last week I wrote a post about Champagne – specifically the strident protection of the sanctity of place in regards to what is called, “Champagne.”
In good form, the comments from that post exceeded the length of the post by a measure of 3:1 with some interesting thoughts about why “Champagne” should only come from the Champagne region of France.
To be honest, it’s not a subject that I’ve spent a lot of time studying. I don’t drink much Champagne (or sparkling wine for that matter) and I’ve never had a sparkler (Champagne or otherwise) that I’ve found revelatory. Call me an ambivalent Champagne observer, like most of America, whose interest in the subject was piqued by a press release from The Champagne Bureau.
When I write an op-ed piece I approach it like a journalist would approach any subject – first understand concepts and then understand facts on both sides in order to get to the essential truth. This post was no different.
The essential truth for me was the fact that the Comite Interprofessionel du Vin de Champagne (CIVC) has their head in the sand about contemporary marketing practices and are stubbornly clinging to a sensibility that has them beating consumers over the head with negativity – “Only Champagne comes from Champagne. Don’t be fooled by marauders” (my words not theirs). To me, it’s a flawed way of going about communicating value.
So, it was with interest that I received two emails after I published my post – one was from a regular reader asking, with a sigh, why I opened this can of worms – the Champagne folks have protected their name for decades and it has been an issue that has been vetted ad nauseum over the years. The second email was from a PR representative of The Champagne Bureau who said that I misrepresented the point of the protectionist nature by the CIVC folks and The Champagne Bureau, the US arm.
In response to the first question, I have to ask rhetorically, have you ever purchased a used car and somebody says, “Hey did you get a new car?” To this, you reply, “It’s not a new car, but it’s new to me.” Well, this Champagne silliness is new to me after I made my way onto a PR distribution list. In response to the second inquiry, the misrepresentation issue, well, I’m not so dogmatic as to have an opinion and to hold onto that opinion without doing further investigation, especially when pushed to reconsider.
So, I started doing more digging. In particular, I happened across a fascinating and well-written 25-page paper from 2003 written for a Harvard law class that acts as a survey of the last 100 years of Champagne regulation.
In sum, the paper is about, “(the French are taking) great efforts to capitalize on the Champagne name throughout the world and aims to ensure that the French wine region receives these benefits exclusively.” It’s a nice piece of work and something I would recommend reading to anybody who wants a breezy overview report on one hundred years of Champagne history.
At the same time, I received another press release that indicated that The Champagne Bureau was awarding Schramsberg and Beringer with the First Annual Truth-in-Labeling Award of Excellence for leadership is accurate wine labeling.
I then followed up with The Champagne Bureau in an effort to have them elaborate on their position, and the suggestion the PR person had made to me privately that said, “The U.S. currently provides (consumers) with virtually no protection when it comes to sourcing the grapes used in the wine and accurately indicating its place of origin … let me know if you have any questions concerning the extent of this problem and its impact on U.S. consumers …”
In response to my inquiry I didn’t receive statistics about the alleged deceit that dupes the U.S. consumers. Instead, I got marketing one-pagers on protecting wine place names and Champagne as the only “true” Champagne.
Unfortunately, I’m still not getting it.
The crux of my original post was simple – if Champagne is used as the catch-all phrase for sparkling wine, like “Google” is for searching the Internet or “Jell-O” is for gelatin, then why not roll with the punches and tell a back-story about Champagne as a point of differentiation and let consumers divine the truth, while forsaking the “watchdog” aspect of their marketing which is, frankly, a bit of a turn-off.
The unfortunate reality in this examination of Champagne vs. sparkling wine is the fact that the majority (the vast majority) of U.S. consumers call all sparkling wine “Champagne.” In addition, I would posit, most U.S. consumers don’t give it a second thought because they associate Champagne and sparkling wine with special occasions – weddings, promotions, New Year’s Eve – it’s not a part of the wine stream of consciousness.
If the CIVC and The Champagne Bureau want to truly actuate a greater acceptance of true Champagne in the U.S., protecting their market share and stemming sliding sales, unfortunately, my position remains the same: spend your time actually marketing in new ways that create interest instead of playing campaign politics by focusing on attacking your opponents.
Perhaps my greatest takeaway, by analogy, is the fact that if an African-American with a name that harkens to Muslim origins (in the age of global terrorism) can win a presidential election by inspirationally leading with “Hope” and “Change” while not getting dragged down in attack mud-slinging, engendering respect on the world stage leading to a Nobel Peace Prize then that might be a page from the marketing playbook that would work for the Champagne folks.
A high-road approach engenders goodwill. And, perhaps in doing so, somebody will open a bottle of Champagne to celebrate more frequently instead of grabbing a sparkling wine like the new President enjoyed upon his win.
Posted in, Good Grape Daily: Pomace & Lees. Permalink | Comments (8) |
The Champagne industry seems it could definitely use some help on the marketing front. The saying that you catch more flies with honey rather than vinegar would seem to hold true here as well.
Also, the release a couple of weeks ago about the industry cutting back on production to keep prices higher smacks of producer protectionism, rather than letting the market forces interact. I was hoping to see some price reductions in champagne as I’ve seen in other sectors of the wine market, and hopefully be able to stock up. Sadly, this does not appear to be the case with champagne, and the reduction of production reiterates that.
Listen Frenchies, you’ve been experiencing unprecedented growth in demand for your product over the past several years, and prices went up to reflect it. Now that demand lags, you’re trying to protect yourselves. You better have a really big cave to store all those bubbles, or you’re going to be in a world of hurt, because demand isn’t going to return to pre-2008 levels for quite a while. Bordeaux tried to do the same thing in 2006 with their futures, right after the excellent 2005 vintage. 06 wasn’t as good, yet some producers tried to keep their futures price at the same level. Guess what happened? No one bought them. Fortunately, the rest of the wine industry seems to have gotten the message, and reasonableness has returned to some corners of the wine world. Most producers recognize that 0 sales of a $75 product nets $0 income.
It’s time to get off the high horse, and show some consideration to the consumer, because we all know you’ve made a lot of money in the past several years. If not, there’s going to be an awful lot of champagne that will be piling up, and it’s going to be hard to move. As Gunnery Sgt. Hartman would say, “Then, you will be in a world of s—t!”
The CIVC is a reactionary organization responding as it thinks it is expected to by it paying clients. Just like the RIAA did about the cassette, and the MPAA did about the VCR. Of course their fears weren’t justified, but they didn’t learn.
DVRs were the enemy recently until it was determined that viewers often don’t bother to fast forward through commercials. Now DVRs a A-OK. The CIVC sees dilution of the brand as the enemy. The problem is the brand is less clear to the worlds consumers than it is to the CIVC and the paying client powers that be in Champagne. They seem to feel that it is possible to preserve a higher price
perception for bubbly wine if the only pricy one is labeled “Champagne”. I guess they’re going to have to see for themselves the hard way.
“like “Google” is for searching the Internet” - you’ve argued against yourself there.
Do you really say you’ve googled something when you’ve used Yahoo or Wolfram Alpha? No, I didn’t think so.
If an Australian wine maker produced a wine labelled as Napa Cabernet I doubt it would be well received.
Only a wine making industry that cowers under some kind of cultural cringe or inferiority complex needs to refer to its product using names that are protected designations elsewhere. Australia ditched the use of Champagne ages ago - and Burgundy, Hermitage, Port, Sherry etc have all gone (or are going) the same way.
I think it’s a great thing - it gives wine makers flexibility and pride in a local product and gives consumers accurate labelling. It’s a win all round.
I dunno Jeff, I feel pretty strongly that the French have a right to do this, and I would feel more strangely about them if they didn’t aggressively pursue protection of their name. At the end of the day, calling your wine Champagne when it doesn’t hail from that region is theft - just as copying a Louis Vuitton or Fendi bag would be on the fashion front. But for whatever reason, it’s been allowed to happen so much over the years that people - it seems yourself included - are of the opinion that we ought to just let it slide. But that’s unfair to the growers and producers and - yes, the marketers - who work hard to produce a product of excellence in an extremely challenging climate and in a prohibitively expensive region, and deserve to be recognized and compensated for doing so. And yes, demand has flagged and prices are not likely to remain high, but leaving the Champenois to the effects of market correction is one thing (as I learned in b school, that’s life in business), while attacking them for protecting their rightful brand name is another. Would you feel so blase about the whole thing if the rest of the world started calling their wines “Napa Valley”?
Hi Courtney,
Thanks for commenting. I don’t argue with anything you say.
However, I touch on this in my previous post, Champagne is THE DE FACTO Standard reference point for people.
Everybody calls it Champagne, so why not roll with it.
Not everybody, however, calls Cabernet “Napa.”
At the end of the day, my message is for the champagne people to ease up on their PR approach because it’s scare politics
Jeff
If I have a device from Flint Michigan, with a gasoline engine, four wheels, two doors and a steering column, can I call it a Maserati?
In Europe, long before the US wine industry came into being, wine were named for where they come from. Not a hard concept to understand, is it? So, if you make a white wine in California, is it a Puligny-Montrachet?
Are all computers called IBM? Are all mouses and trackballs called Logitechs? Are all TVs called RCA or Zenith or Sony? Is your cell phone a blackberry or is it an iphone? Don’t be so lazy that you can’t pronounce “spark-ling wine” instead of “sham-pain”. It is like a foreigner thinking that all Americans wear six-shooters and talk like John Wayne.
Donn,
No mistaking your viewpoint. Thanks for commenting!
I’m going to get into my “Cadillac” of mid-size sedans and head back to the office from lunch.
Jeff
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License
Design by The Blog Studio
Print
Should I ready myself for the third posting on this topic? I feel the emails being typed already.