The Endless Harvest

March 14 2007

Suffice to say, without any hyperbole, this is an incredibly interesting period of time for the wine industry. I don’t have the benefit of perspective, but I think you would be hard pressed to find any other period of time since prohibition that combined so many dynamic factors in the world of wine—increasing consumption across all demographic segments, relaxation of laws, growth on the Internet, growth in bricks and mortar, and globalization, to name just a few.

And, globalization may be the most interesting aspect of this wine tsunami.

Many domestic wine brands are emerging that use a global sourcing model—Sebastiani & Sons, Cameron Hughes, and Betts & Scholl (recently featured on Wine Library TV) all come to mind. There are many others.

I am not the only one that has been paying attention to the market research that has emerged that confirms what many have thought—it’s not critter labels that are enamoring wine consumers in their twenties, it’s more sophisticated international brands.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Young adults in the United States, coming of age at a time of galloping globalization, are more apt to buy imports than California and other U.S. wines, market research shows, an ominous development for domestic producers in an already hypercompetitive industry.

The trend has been visible for four or five years. But recent data produced for the Wine Market Council, a St. Helena trade group, show that U.S. wine consumers ages 21 to 30, called the millennial generation, are more loyal to imports, while older wine-drinkers prefer domestic labels.

“Young people are all about exploration, new discovery,’’ said Patrick Merrill, the San Mateo market researcher who produced the data for the council. “They’re learning about the quality of wine from New Zealand and Chile, South Africa and Argentina, for example—wines that we as Baby Boomers were not aware of.’’

I had a couple of interesting conversations with a global producer of micro brands who is keenly aware of this trend and says, “It’s not a distribution game, it’s a communication game.”

He went on to comment, “The market is niches. It’s all about what segment you are going to service.”

What he’s saying, essentially, is that the product will find the market when the market finds the product. And, between the lines he’s also saying that at some point quality has a point of diminishing return. Soon, wine will be like cotton t-shirts from Old Navy, the Gap, Banana Republic or American Apparel.

Quality will be high everywhere, but, ultimately, what brand do you want to be associated with? “Terroir” and the winery back story will cease to be as important as the brand targeted at a micro niche.

If you pause to look at it, not whether you agree or disagree, but at the inherent truth, you will see that there’s a gaping opportunity big enough to drive a truck through. Here’s what I’d like to see:

In 1966 the documentary “The Endless Summer” came out that followed two fun loving California surfers as they pursued the dream; an endless summer of surf from the West Coast of Africa to South Africa, to Australia. It was a seminal movie that kicked off an explosion of adventure travel and is influential to this day as the embodiment of youthful wanderlust.

With the explosion of video on the Internet, I want to see “The Endless Harvest.” I want to see an upstart global wine company with micro-brands (that also has the ability to sell direct to consumers and the trade with a large national consumer foot print in the states) begin to develop video content online centered around intrepid travel with a couple of young, likeable folks doing harvests’ at the various locations in which the grapes and/or juice is sourced.

The first global micro brand that can leverage the Internet to deliver Web 2.0 reports on harvest from Argentina, Spain, Italy, NZ, S. Africa, the U.S. and France as a part of their global micro-niche brand development wins.

If the content was good, can you imagine the insane following that this would create amongst passionate consumers of content that view global, melting pot culture as a part of their lifestyle AND are passionate wine consumers?

Who is up for this challenge? Or, maybe a better question is, “who wants to sell some wine?”