Good Grape Wine Company

June 5 2007

One Man’s Micronation and His Wine Stash

I’d love for this to be a Paul Harvey-esque, “Now you know the rest of the story” kind of post, but the reality is, I’m not sure where the inspiration for the California Association of Winegrape Grower’s (CAWG) newly announced public relations campaign came from and thus have no magic insight into the backstory. 

I do know it’s clever and a man can speculate on its origins; great minds think alike, but more on that in a second. 

The premise of the campaign is that the CAWG declared the state of California an “independent country where life is grape, citizens have the right to bear vines and Arnold Schwarzenegger can be President.  The nation, whose credo is “One Nation Under Vines,” takes its rightful place alongside France, Italy and Spain as a leading wine-producing country.  And its Declaration of Independence invites wine-lovers to visit onenationundrevines.com to explore wine country.”

Winebusiness.com noted in their article, found here:

Karen Ross, CAWG President, and a group of winegrape growers from throughout California unveiled the new “nation’s” Declaration of Independence, which says, in part “We, California’s winegrape growers, hold these truths to be self-evident: that California produces some of the best-tasting and highest quality winegrapes in the world; that California boasts an unrivaled diversity of climates and soils; that California is a leader in sustainable winegrape growing practices and innovation; and that life, liberty and the pursuit of great wine is the cornerstone of our society.”

It’s a fun idea.  But, this post would be more impactful if I had already stolen some of their thunder, in a micro- blogging sense, by doing a post that I’ve had in my ‘rainy day, I’m not feeling creative, I don’t know what I want to write about and my wife is bugging me to get off the computer’ file for about two months.  I recently bought a book called, “The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations.” My intention was to do an absurdist post about creating a sovereign micronation in my wine cellar, or something like that.  It would have been funny and creative and …a clever idea … that is, until somebody, you know, like professional and all actually created a whole damn PR campaign around the same idea.  Now, if I do it its derivative AND trite.

I applaud the CAWG for doing something daring, light-hearted AND FUN.  There’s not much balance in the wine industry between serious and fun—usually you’re on one side of the fence or the other, and the fun side of the fence gets lumped in with the “critter” labels.  This manages to do both, effectively.

If only I would have done it first …

If I had written a post first, I might have actually tied it into a recent article from The Globe and Mail, Canada’s more newsy equivalent to the USA Today.  The article, found here, is titled, “It’s in the Vault, Your Man’s Secret Wine Stash.”

The premise of the article is guys that um, well, kind of keep how much wine they’re buying, like, you know, secret from their wife.

From the article:

James, a Toronto tax lawyer, has a very happy marriage. He shares everything with his wife - everything, that is, except how much wine he’s buying.

The need for subterfuge came about, he says, after his wife looked at a credit-card statement several years ago and told him, “No more wine for six months.”

Guilty.  Guilty.  Guilty.  Though, admittedly, my buying is on a much smaller scale and definitely limited to a hundred bucks here and there. 

But, I have had to answer questions about the wine that is multiplying exponentially in the basement despite my wife never actually seeing me bring wine into the house. 

Try and explain that one. 

My wife says, “Honey, why does it seem like there is twice as much wine in the basement then there was at the start of the year, but I never see you bring it in the house from the store.  Where does it come from and what money is being used to buy it because it doesn’t seem to be coming out of the checkbook?”

This line of inquiry brings me back full circle to my desire to establish a micronation around my cellar—a micronation in which I am supreme dictator, suffering no fools and answering only to the inner voice in my head that says, “yes, you need another $20 Syrah that should be drunk in the next 3-5 years.”

The problem is, my wife, being the strong woman that she is, would stage a bloody coup and overthrow the gov’t of my micronation, deposing my benevolent dictatorship.

Working ahead of Paul Harvey, that would be “The rest of the story …“

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