The Missing Culture in Wine isn’t Yeast or Lifestyle

The domestic wine world has yeast culture in spades, and certainly a different kind of cultivated culture in wine lifestyle.  However, the most basic and, perhaps, the most important “culture” seems to be missing from the wine business.

How does a winery create a “culture” of excellence that transcends product, hospitality and marketing to build something that imbues itself as a core value, a “walk the walk” sensibility that empowers and instills the sense of being a part of something powerful and meaningful?

It’s this “culture” that is missing, lost somewhere in between a focus on the land and the marketing.

Worse yet, it’s also this “culture” that has the greatest opportunity to fix what ails the wine industry, despite a misplaced focus on developing “terroir” by one of the wine industry’s great provocateurs.

Noted vintner, thinker and marketer Randall Grahm gave a speech at UC Davis earlier this month.  From the transcript of his UC Davis speech, I’ve excerpted notable passages from the 2700 word essay that weaves two main narratives – brand and terroir, the conflict between the two and how the California wine industry can resolve the tug in between commerce and creating something that is meaningful. 

In excerpting very heavily, I’ve remained true to the narrative.  I’ll expand on my point after the excerpts …

Grahm says:

• What I’m really thinking about these days … is how one might find meaning in the wine business … I believe that we in the California wine industry have to take a serious look at how we think about wines, as our business as usual practices are no longer working so well.  I think it is time for us to take seriously the idea of terroir.

Not excerpted, but notable, Grahm goes on to review how he’s reading articles from an author who critiques the ubiquity of brands in the U.S., citing Nike and Starbucks for representing an idea, a proxy for an experience or an association, more so than the product itself.

• Our products are no longer esteemed for what they actually are, where they are made, who actually made them, but for what they abstractly represent.  There is now, as it is said, no more “there” there, as this is nowhere more acutely visible than in the wine business.

• … I believe that there is also something akin to a spiritual malaise, a sort of “brand sickness” developing in our industry … the rather vertiginous feeling that it is rather difficult to find the real value of anything any more … every label … is seemingly shrieking at top volume, trying to tell its story … it’s become very hard to get beyond these surfaces, to penetrate to the heart of the matter.

• … What I really think we are experiencing in the wine business is a something like a “meaning deficit” – do scores really matter?  Does scarcity matter?  What do we truly mean by wine quality in the New World, in the absence of history, demonstrable track record?  Who can I really trust to give me the skinny on what I should be drinking?

• I, at least, have the notion that “Napa” has ceased being a real place and has become nothing so much as an ideational construct, much like “wine country,” … So, I think that in this era of deep thirst for meaning, in a time where there appears to be no “there” there we can learn quite a lot from the French idea of terroir … terroir is in fact the precise opposite of nowhereness; it is truly “somewhereness,” and therefore deeply imbued with meaning, the very antidote to what is poisoning our industry right now.

Not excerpted, but also notable is Grahm goes on a long metaphorical guitar solo after the above passage and shifts his focus to two different styles of French wine – a vins d’effort (a wine of effort) and a vins de terroir (a wine that expresses a sense of place).

We return to the action …

• So, it is clear to me that my personal path must be the pursuit of terroir, and as supremely worthy as this quixotic vision might be, it may certainly (be) far more aspirational than realistically attainably, at least in one lifetime; I don’t know if I advocate this path for everyone, and wonder sometimes if I am not myself chasing after moonbeams.  For one thing, there are just so many damn variable to consider – have you planted on your site the right rootstock, with the right spacing, the right exposure, and of course, do you have a felicitous match between your grape variety, the soil, and the climate and the microclimate?  Is the site itself unique and distinctive, with a unique geology, exposure?

• Most importantly, you have to ask yourself, “Might I actually achieve something of true originality?”

• …In conclusion, my thought is that the great value aspiring (in) aspiring to produce vin de terroir is not so much in its practicality – I’ve alluded to the fact that it may well be impossible to find terroir in a single generation – but rather, it is the gift that terroir gives us in how we choose to think about what we do.  An esteem for terroir makes us look at our land and its custodianship in a different way, engendering a deep love and respect, a great gift to ourselves and to everyone with whom we share this planet.

The skepticism I have with Randall’s premise and his line of thought is he defines the business of the business of wine down lines of demarcation far too simply.  It would seem that in his worldview you have how the wine is made and how the wine is marketed, but nothing in between.

In elaborating on his philosophy that “business as usual practices are no longer working so well,” and that there is “no more ‘there’ there” and a “spiritual malaise” in the wine business he fails to acknowledge anything related to the CULTURE of his business.

Perhaps he’s sensing a spiritual malaise because there’s no meat in between his two slices of bread – meat in the form of a set of values, and deeds that represent what his business stands for and how he leads others as a businessperson.

A business is the sum of its parts and the product and the marketing make up mere components of a greater whole.

Wine and “terroir” aside, I wonder if Grahm has ever considered:

• What do you stand for as a business?
• How do you treat and empower your employees on a daily basis in a way that shapes how they represent the winery and themselves?
• What would your employees say confidentially about the environment and the core values you represent every day as a business entity?
• Do you treat your value-chain as stakeholders?

And, perhaps, most importantly, the question related to values for Grahm to ask himself is a sort of brain teaser: if faced with the task of taking people, culture and business assets and working in an entirely different industry, why would you be successful?  Or, better yet, could you be successful?

Taking “terroir” out of the equation, business “culture” is tradition, it’s the glue that binds, creates professional tradition, and fosters business norms, customs, virtues and values.

In fact, using his examples of Nike and Starbucks, where Grahm laments the aspirational notion of brand-building, I would suggest that immediately, any attuned customer knows not only the brand Nike and Starbucks, but also the business of Nike and Starbucks – and what they stand for.  Starbucks = employee healthcare.  Nike = innovation.

I have long observed, but never been able to completely quantify what that je ne sais quoi was that was missing from the wineries I’ve interacted with professionally.  The challenge is, Randall is not alone in seeing business life so simply – making wine and selling wine—and yearning for something authentic to hold on to.

When the wine business looks like a crafted backstory, marketing elements and wine, you’ve created something that skews far too heavily to trading against a façade of something that isn’t entirely authentic.

Ultimately, and unwittingly, Grahm answers his own question – yes, it is near impossible to “find terroir in a single generation” yet the impact he can make, “look(ing) at our land and its custodianship in a different way, engendering a deep love and respect, a great gift to ourselves and to everyone with whom we share this planet” is an ideal that is accomplishable outside the bounds of the actual wine, it’s just going to require a different culture than what he (and the wine industry at large) is used to cultivating.  And, to Grahm’s chagrin, it will be an act of “d’effort.”