Archive for the ‘Wine industry stuff’ Category

If you’re a member of the professional Advertising/PR/Corporate Communications community, you need to read this. There’s a new concept out there that could put you out of a job…

But if you’re not a card-carrying member of that community, you may think the following is pretty cool.

I recently got a message from the folks at La Crema (you know, that winery that’s part of the Kendall-Jackson family of properties and makes some best-selling Chardonnay and Pinot Noir). La Crema wants to create a new video campaign to promote their wines, and they’re doing it with an organization called Tongal.com that “uses crowdsourcing to help brands concept and produce fresh, compelling video content.”

You say, “What the heck does that mean?” The way I read the Tongal website, it means that Tongal solicits submissions from…anyone…for videos to promote selected products. If they choose your submission over all the other entrants, you win $money$!

The way they explain it, “Anyone can submit their ideas and videos on Tongal for a chance to earn real cash for their creative work.”

This could signal the democratization of the advertising/PR business. And in case you’re skeptical, check out the list of clients who are using Tongal’s services. They include Allstate Insurance, Benjamin Moore Paints and Barbie.

Barbie??? Yes, that’s the anatomically impossible doll.

But anyhow… You may want to explore this project. La Crema is looking for videos to promote “The World’d Most InCremable Party.” A total of $10,000 in prize money is being offered for three distinct phases – an idea, video and exhibition phase.  You can submit an entry for any of those phases, so you don’t have to be a budding Francis Ford Coppola in order to apply.

Go to Tongal.com and then click the Projects tab. Scroll down until you get to La Crema and you’ll see the details.

But note that the deadline for submissions for the first phase, “Ideas,” is August 15. So don’t wait too long.

And let me know your thoughts if you participate. This could be the next new Big New Thing! Cheers.

 

Here’s a cute story reported by Wine Spectator’s blog, “Unfiltered.” It concerns a wine that’s surely the world’s most expensive Merlot.

• A young lady in France was caught last month trying to get a discount on a few bottles of Château Pétrus, switching the barcodes on the $3,300 bottles with ones on bottles priced $3.50. This occurred at a Dordogne outlet of the supermarket Leclerc; the company’s wine buyer said such occurrences are common.

Really? In France, they have lots of $3,300 bottles of wine sitting on grocery store shelves? I guess it ain’t the Piggly Wiggly…

Cheers!

If you’re like a lot of wine drinkers, you’ve been casually tossing every cork you extract into a big glass jar/vase/urn. By now (if you’re as old as me or drink as much as me), you’ve got about a million more corks than you know what to do with. You can’t quite bring yourself to just throw them out, after investing all this time into collecting them, but there’s only so much room for these things. Some of the jars/vases/urns have been decanted into garbage bags and tossed in the basement beside your old luggage set, but your cork collection is still threatening to take over your space…

So here’s an idea — join this cork recycling drive and put all those bags of tree bark to good use. Read this press release:

The California Wine Club is conducting a nationwide cork drive in partnership with ReCORK.org. The program gives consumers an easy way to return their corks with postage covered by The Club so they can be turned into something else (shoes, flooring, etc.). Natural cork is a renewable material that can be up-cycled, repurposed and put to good use rather than thrown into landfills.

The goal is to help ReCORK reach 20 million corks collected by September 30, 2011, at which point ReCORK will plant 1,000 trees in the Mediterranean oak forests to celebrate the milestone….These forests provide a vital source of income for thousands of families of the region (primarily in Portugal) and support one of the world’s highest levels of forest biodiversity (second only to the Amazon rainforest). The trees are not cut down; rather their bark is harvested every nine years. Not only that, but a harvested tree absorbs more carbon and each tree can live up to 200 years.

Sounds like a cool idea. If you want to participate, and liberate your corks from their glass/plastic confinement, send an e-mail to this address: corkdrive@cawineclub.com or read their entire press release yourself. If you want more information about cork and its recyclability, go to ReCork’s website: www.reCORK.org. There’s lots of very interesting stuff about their recycling campaign (like they’ve already replanted 6,237 trees).  Cheers!

 

God knows there’s no lack of big, ballsy Australian Shiraz. It seems like it’s the birthright of every Barossa winemaker to make a jammy, full-bodied Shiraz that routinely gets 90+ points from the big-deal wine reviewers.

Problem is, many of them seem too big and too jammy. Oh, they’re spectacularly delicious for the first several sips, but then about halfway through your second glass you start feeling like there’s a small furry animal sitting on your tongue. They’re just too much — they tire out your palate.

So I look for more balanced, more restrained Aussie reds (of course, restrained is a relative term, right? “Restrained” from Barossa is nothing like restrained from, say, Bordeaux) .

So anyhow, last night we had a grill full of ridiculously large dry-rubbed steaks. I wanted to see if Small Gully Winery’s Robert’s Shiraz 2006 could stand up to Rib-Eye.

I read that the grapes for The Formula Shiraz are sourced from vineyards in the Adelaide Plain, which is just west of the Barossa Valley. It has the distinction of being the most arid (i.e. having the least rainfall) of any Australian wine region. It’s also pretty damn hot, and that doesn’t sound like a prescription for quality wine grapes. What saves it, though, are the cool sea breezes that sweep across the vineyards, cooling down the grapes and slowing the ripening time. Another plus is that most of the vineyards are mature (40 years old for Robert’s), and that helps create more complexity and flavor. Finally, controlled irrigation and limited yields produce intense and concentrated flavors.

So good, let’s get back to the wine. When I read that the alcohol content was skating close to 16%, and that it had been aged for 36 months (that’s a lot!) in American oak, I feared the worst.  But when Robert’s Shiraz hit my glass, I immediately loved the deep garnet color and the aromas that just about jumped out of the glass and hit me in the face. The first was intense, rich berry pie, with all the sweet/tartness that a good berry pie has. The berries reminded me of elderberries or mulberries, and then some spice drifted in. It was cedar or sandalwood — delicate but intriguing. Then the vanilla and chocolate crept in at the end. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I’ll try not to sound like an old geezer when I say this — I’m really tired of pandering to “Millennials.” It seems like every ambitious marketer and academic is studying or reporting on the habits and preferences of this category, which is supposed to be the focus of our sales and marketing efforts for everything from cars to computers to wine.

Here’s the latest overblown academic treatise that set me cursing:

Dr. Liz Thach MW, Korbel Professor of Wine Business & Management at Sonoma State University, released a study on the wine drinking habits of Millennials. Now before I go any further, let me specify that Millennials are defined as people born between 1980 and 2000 (give or take), and are also known Gen Y. They followed the previously famous Gen X, and they’re basically the children of the Post WWII Baby Boomers.

Have you got that? I know I’ve got two — Millennials, I mean. I (a self-confessed Baby Boomer) produced two children in the 1980′s, so I’ve had a chance to examine the care and feeding of this group in a very “up close and personal” way. I don’t feel I need an academic study to analyze their behavior, but I’ll go along with it. Hey, it may tell me something useful for my wine business.

This study, which was commissioned by the Wine Business Institute at Sonoma State University, was designed to determine the most common occasions during which young people drink wine. Here are the results.

The two wine-drinking occasions listed most often are Special Occasions and  Drinking Wine with Meals at a Formal Restaurant. Nothing revolutionary there, and in fact the study says these were the most common occasions listed by previous generations (including mine).

Next most popular: Family Get Togethers, Special Events (graduation, weddings, etc.), Friend’s Night, Parties, Theme Nights (movies, games, etc.) Date Nights/Romance, On Vacation.

OK, I’m waiting for something I don’t know already. Aren’t these the exact same occasions during which we Baby Boomers consume wine now? And that were popular when we were the 20-Something Generation (they didn’t give us initials like X and Y back then)? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s exciting to watch an industry being born, even if it’s an industry as unlikely as — Chinese fine wine.

Huh? They’re making “fine wine” in China?

Maybe not yet, or at least not a lot. But one of the Most Classic of the Most Classic wineries just entered the Chinese wine market. Chateau Lafite has purchased land, and is planting vineyards in China.

Wow…

We know that demand for fine wine in China has been growing dramatically, as an affluent middle class emerges that wants to have all the things that the rest of the world’s affluent middle class wants to have. Wine is one of those things, and until recently, importers have tried to satisfy growing demand with Bordeaux and other wines.

But it shouldn’t take long (like more than a nano-second) for an enterprising Chinese entrepreneur to decide to create fine wine from Chinese soil. After all, there’s so much of it! Surely they can find good wine-grape-growing conditions somewhere on that huge landmass. Read the rest of this entry »

You literally can’t talk about California Chardonnay without talking about Wente Vineyards. Ever heard of the Wente Clone? It was created from cuttings that a Wente brought back from France in 1912, and can be linked to 85% of the Chardonnay planted in California.

The family’s (and winery’s) history doesn’t stop there. Wente Vineyards has the distinction of being the oldest continuously-operated, family-owned winery in California. (The current winemaker, Karl D., is the fifth generation.) And did I mention that Wente Vineyards produced California’s first varietally-labelled wine? It was a Sauvignon Blanc from the 1935 vintage. And only a year later Wente produced the first varietally-labeled Chardonnay.

I’ve tasted and enjoyed Wente Vineyards wines, so I was glad to get an invitation to join their second “Twitter Tasting.” I explained this in a post a few months ago, when I did my first Twitter event, but I’ll run it by you again. The way it works is that Wente Vineyard’s very helpful PR folks, Charles Communications, sent me and other bloggers (or “members of the on-line wine community,” the much more reputable-sounding name that I prefer) some bottles of wine. At the appointed time, we all log onto a special Twitter page called TasteLive and watch as winemaker Karl Wente tastes and talks about the wines. The medium is interactive, of course, so those of us in the blogosphere are tasting and tweeting questions and comments. Karl responds to them, live.

It’s really a blast — cheers to CC or whoever came up with the idea.

So let’s get to the good stuff — the wines. We were focused this time on four Chardonnays produced by Wente Vineyards. They represent just about every style of American Chard, and it was great to taste them side by side.

Wente Vineyards Morning Fog Chardonnay 2009 is their entry level bottling, made from fruit grown in their Livermore Valley vineyards. Although the area doesn’t have the name recognition of, say, the Napa Valley, it’s one of the best places in California to grow wine grapes. The valley runs east to west from the San Francisco Bay, sucking in the cool morning fog off the Bay. Gee, maybe that’s how this Chardonnay got its name… Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that the restaurant biz — particularly the high-end restaurant biz — was hit hard by the Great Recession. If you’ve been living under a rock and weren’t aware how much they’ve been struggling, you can read my post about the misfortunes that have befallen fine dining establishments (“Ode to Overpriced Restaurant Wines”).

So it was thrilling to read that one billionaire is doing his best to single-handedly jump-start the luxury night-club biz and enrich at least one club and its staff. Here’s the story I just spied in WineEnthusiast.com:

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban spent a whopping $110,000 while celebrating at the trendy nightclub Liv at Miami’s Fontainebleau after winning the NBA Championship against the Heat on Sunday night. Cuban spent $90,000 on an oversized bottle of Armand de Brignac Champagne for teammates Dirk Nowitzki, Brian Cardinal, Jason Terry and Shawn Marion in celebration of their victory, which they finished in a mere four hours. But that’s not all. When the bill arrived, Cuban left an additional $20,000 tip for the wait staff. According to Forbes, he’s ranked 459th on the “World’s Richest People” list and has a net worth of $2.5 billion.

Wow. God bless the guy for being willing to part with that much cash for a single bar item. But here’s what I’m trying to figure out:

The “Armand de Brignac” the big guys were enjoying must be the famous “Ace of Spades,” made infamous by rappers like Jay-Z who’re seen quaffing it in rap videos. Ace of Spades has become the Must-Have Drink du Jour of celebrities and celebrity-wannabe’s.

On the internet (and in my shop) a regular size bottle of Ace of Spades goes for $250. In a luxury club or restaurant in a place like Vegas or New York, I’m guessing that 750ml bottle could go for $1000 — or I’ll go nuts and say it’s on the list for $2000.

So how big does the bottle have to be to be listed for $90,000?? That’s 45 times more money than the regular bottle!

You know, I should stop belaboring that point. Who cares how big it was, or how astronomically over-priced it seems. If Liv nightclub wants to charge $90,00 for a bottle of wine, and if Mr. Cuban is willing to pay it, then good for them. I thank them all for doing their bit to enliven the U.S. entertainment scene.

And oh yeah — thanks for beating the Heat, too.

When I’m not blogging, I’m selling wine. And one of the wines we’ve sold for years is Seghesio. Their labels have been on our shelves since the price tag on the Sonoma Zin was about $9, and we’ve never hesitated to recommend them, or to drink them (that’s been the best part!).

We’ve also visited the winery countless times, and every time, they welcome us like long-lost family (and not just because we also have an Italian surname). We’ve toured (happily), we’ve tasted (even happier), and we’ve been absolutely orgasmic over Seghesio’s Family Table, a lovely event where guests taste several wines along with amazing family recipes prepared by the winery’s on-site chef.

Everything we’ve experienced with Seghesio has been classy and elegant, and also warm and friendly. That’s one reason why I always send wine country visitors to Seghesio’s door, bypassing the big “corporate winery” tasting rooms.

So I was taken aback when I read in the Wine Spectator that Seghesio has been acquired by an outfit called The Crimson Wine Group. Yee gads! — the dreaded corporate owner!

Then I read farther. Crimson is not exactly Bronco Wine Company. They own just a few other blue chip winieries, such as Pine Ridge in Napa and Archery Summit in Oregon.. And the terms of the agreement state that the Seghesio family will continue to be involved in the day-to-day operations of the winery.

At least for now.

The Spectator article says “the purchase includes the Healdsburg winery, 300 acres of vineyards, the Seghesio brand and current wine inventory. Most of the family members involved with the winery will stay on board.” But read on — “Pete retains ownership of San Lorenzo Vineyard, while Ed and Ray Seghesio keep Cortina Vineyard.”

That little sentence opens a world of possibility. Like, what will Pete, Ed and Ray do after the expiration of their non-compete clause (which we all assume is included in the contract)? Will we see a new winery producing the great single-vineyard Zins that put Seghesio on the map?

I hope so. And I wish the family all the best in their new future.

But here’s what I know for sure: I’ve always trusted the Seghesio family — to make great wine, to treat people right, to be great people. And I’ll continue to trust them to do the right thing, whatever that is for them, their customers and their wines.

Here’s to you, Seghesio. Best of luck, and congratulations on creating a new future. Cheers!

 

 

I wanted to hate these people. I wanted to slam them for being hacks and opportunists.

Unfortunately, they’re doing a way better job than I thought.

Costco‘s warehouse stores are one of the biggest of the Big Enemies for independent wine retailers like me. Their prices are almost guaranteed to be the lowest in the area, so they usually undercut the smaller independent retailer, and duke it out with the big chains (Total Wine & More, Bev Mo) for market supremacy.

On the down side, Costco doesn’t have nearly the selection of the big chains, or even of a good-sized independent. Even with 145,000 square feet in most of their warehouse stores, only 5,000 or so are devoted to wine, beer and spirits.  The trade-ff, though, is that consumers gain the convenience of picking up the wine for tonight’s meal while they’re shopping for the meat and cereal.

So I just read an interview that makes Costco look pretty darn good. It was published in Shanken News Daily, an online publication that features news and research on the wine, spirits and beer business. SND was talking to Annette Alvarez Peters, who heads the wine/beer/spirits buying team for Costco. I assumed that their sales would be impressive — yes, they did $2.345 billion (yes, with a “b”) in global beverage alcohol sales in 2010, and are projecting a healthy increase for this fiscal year. I also assumed they weathered the recession well, because in down times buyers seek out bargains (real or perceived).

But I didn’t expect this: Costco’s wine buying team (and it is a team) is manned by Alvarez-Peters and 10 buyers. Each has the know-how to research and select inventory items, which requires indepth knowledge of wine regions, varietals, consumers’ shifting preferences, etc. These 11 folks have a combined 254 years of wine/alcohol experience — thats sounds impressive to me! And they have an impressive amount of wine education: Level 2, 3 and even 4 certification from the Wine and Spirit Educational Trust. Read the rest of this entry »