Good Grape Wine Company

March 27 2008

What I Learned about the Wine Industry

Last Friday I wrote a post about my transition from working for a technology company in the wine industry back to my roots in regular business-to-business technology.  The post came about quite by accident as I had intended to write a simple review about the 2003 Hourglass Cabernet Sauvignon, but other things tumbled out onto the page in a jumble of fingers pounding on the keyboard as I recounted how I came across the Hourglass and what it meant symbolically to me.

I posted the blog and then headed to bed. 

The following morning, I had mis-givings.  It was too personal, too wrought with the foibles of my humanity.  Understanding that as an RSS feed the post had already made its way out to the Internet at large, I moved the post to the archives—not trying to be disingenuous, but just simply acting as a person that wears clothes in public.  However, I have had nightmares to the contrary, go figure on that one.

I thought the post was, perhaps, sweetly melancholic, like the Charlie Brown Christmas special, but it could be interpreted differently, maybe more than a touch blue, masked by words.

Despite my judgment in moving the post, I received no less than six emails from people that I’m friendly with via my blog and they all commented one way or another about the touch of sadness that was inflected.  One friend asked if I was related to Sylvia Plath, which I got a chuckle out of.

If you want to read the post, you can search for it in the March archives.  I am probably making more of it than what it was.

However, this entire prelude is really getting me to my point, which is this:  While I am not classically trained in wine, and I worked in the wine industry for a brief respite before moving on, here is what I learned while in the business, all of it positive and none of it in any specific order.

1)  The wine industry walks a tightrope in managing the “Neil Armstrong” complex—wine folk want to be first, but they do not want to do the failing that is a part of experimentation

2) The wine industry is very collegial and rife with folks that lean on an abundance of mentors

3)  Levi’s jeans, no doubt based on the wine industry’s agricultural roots, has a lock on the industry as the jean of choice

4)  The normal six degrees of separation is about .5 in the wine industry and industry lawyer John Hinman is the maven that connects everybody

5)  Tom Wark from Fermentation is a genuinely nice guy who is well-respected by anybody and everybody that gets the Web

6)  Tasting rooms are for tourists.  Despite the high costs for living there, no wine country native goes to a tasting room on Saturdays.

7) Professional courtesy in the wine industry is observed more so than any other industry in America.  If you make a call to a stranger asking to talk 8 out of 10 times they will call you back.  In corporate America, it is .25 out of 10 times.

8)  Trade discounts are a fantastic perk.  You mean I have a business card from a company in the wine industry and I get 20% off?

9)  There is virtually a zero barrier to entry for somebody wishing to launch a successful e-commerce company in the wine industry.  Start-up costs are low, ability to penetrate high and ability to gain market share is favorable to the entrepreneur

10)  Robert Mondavi casts a larger shadow and has no peer relative to influence in any other industry, compared to his influence in the world of wine

11) The wine industry is big on the recitation of a persons curriculum vitae with corresponding name-dropping

12)  Only fools fly into SFO when you can fly into Oakland

13)  There is a tremendous California, West Coast-centric attitude that looks down their nose at people from anywhere other than New York

14)  Most of the problems in wine marketing are because of the “forest and tree” syndrome

15)  The greatest opportunity in wine today, bar none, is to open up a retailer, a distributor or a wine shipping logistics company, in that order

16)  The best hotel value in all of Napa Valley is the Gaia, on the border of Napa and American Canyon.

17) Grocery store prices are approximately 30% higher than in Indianapolis

18) The wine industry is still an easy three to five years away from really understanding and embracing technology, particularly the Internet

19)  People care less about what kind of car they drive than in Southern California

20) If our illegal friends from Mexico were not here, the wine industry would be up the creek

21)  The tension between wineries and distributors is palpable

22) There is no rhyme or reason to how wineries price their wine

23) Napa has the reputation, but Sonoma and the Central Coast have the mojo

24) The best hidden gem wines I discovered are Pinots by Green Truck Cellars and Cabs by Highlands Winery

25)  Hitting the lottery is easier than creating a wine brand that jumps the rocket ship to national growth

Of course, I learned much more, but these are a few of the lessons.  Never before have I encountered such genuine goodness in people than in the wine biz., and I’ll always be fond of those memories, but I’m making a hasty retreat back to a normal life and keeping my wine passion as a hobby, as it should be, not mixing business with pleasure. 

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