Archive for the ‘Wine Marketing’ Category
Monday, April 1st, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
 As we try to open our winery and tasting room, I think (maybe) we are heading into the home stretch, at least as far as getting the necessary applications in is concerned.
I spend a decent amount of time dealing with real estate investment, and I’m always blown away how for every transaction you seem to end up with something between Moby Dick and War and Peace once you have added up all the documents that you need to sign to buy or sell a property.
But the real estate business can’t hold a candle to the wine business. If buying a property means having to deal with a Moby Dick of paperwork, trying to start a winery seems like something equivalent to the entire corpus of 19th-century American literature. I used to consider myself a winemaker. Now I think of myself as a professional paper pusher.
But maybe it’s coming to an end. Then again, maybe I’m just fantasizing that because if I truly believe that this paper pushing frenzy was going to go on and on, I think I might shoot myself.
I am not, by nature, anti regulation. I think there are lots of things that you can’t just allow people to do willy-nilly without any supervision.
But as I’ve worked my way through this process, I can’t help but feel that things have gotten out of hand. Each requirement makes sense when you look at it narrowly; however, when you add them all together, it becomes an overwhelming challenge to comply with every one of them. So the exercise becomes one of dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
What increases the problem exponentially is the fact that you’re dealing with a number of jurisdictions. There’s no one place you can go, fulfill their requirements, and walk out with the right to open winery. Have you complied with the federal requirements? That’s good, but don’t forget the state. Covered that too? Well, don’t forget the county. But it’s not just the “County”. It’s planning, it’s building and safety, it’s health.
The latest form I had to fill out required that I designate the location and size of the various functions of the winery. Where are we going to crush? Press? Store barrels? Store finished wine? For each of those, how large is the area going to be.
I have a ready answer to each of those: how the hell should I know? When we get in, we’ll try putting the tanks one place, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll put them someplace else. I think I know where we’ll put the crusher, but maybe it’ll turn out that that’s too far from the electrical outlet, or something.
Of course, putting: “how the hell should I know?” on the form doesn’t cut the mustard. So I made my best stab at it, and hopefully I’ll end up not being too wrong.
I guess the saving grace to all this is that while they are big on requirements, enforcement is virtually nonexistent. I am quite sure that if enforcement were even half assed, the wine business, as we know it, would cease to exist.
At any rate, it looks like we will be ready to submit to the Feds, the state of California, and Solano County all within the next week. I have to admit I’m keeping my fingers crossed on that, though.
After that, I am sure everything will just sale through, and we’ll be up and running shortly. Maybe that’s a fantasy, but it keeps me going.
Posted in Wine Marketing, Wine Sales and Pricing | No Comments »
Monday, March 11th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
The Wine Curmudgeon posted a blog last week, “Five things the wine business can do to help consumers figure out wine” (which can be found at http://www.winecurmudgeon.com/my_weblog/2013/03/five-things-the-wine-business-can-do-to-help-consumers-figure-out-wine.html) that I found of interest, both for those points I agree with, and those I don’t.
The point of the post was to offer five suggestions on how the wine industry should deal with the consumer. The five are listed below, in italics. My comments follow each.
• Stop worrying about vintage. One of the few things that every wine drinker knows is that vintage matters, even though that’s becoming less and less true. Vintage – the year the grapes were harvested – matters for an increasingly small percentage of wine; most of the stuff we drink every day is made to taste the same regardless of the vintage. In fact, Barefoot, one of the most popular wine brands in the U.S., is non-vintage (its grapes come from different harvests). It’s actually possible to make better quality wine this way, mixing and matching the best quality grapes from various vintages. One example: the $10 Little James Basket Press wines.
I both agree and disagree with this one. Vintages do make a big difference, particularly in Northern Europe. They may matter less in California, but the last few vintages have definitely shown that they matter here as well. But the idea that wines can be made non-vintage (i.e. blending different vintages together) is one that has never really taken off, despite the fact that it is definitely the better way to make wine. The more material the winemaker has available to him, the better the chances are that he’ll produce something that’s really good. This is recognized pretty much throughout all winemaking in all kinds of different ways (different varieties, different clothes, etc.), Yet when it comes to vintages this idea receives short shrift. That may be crazy, but it’s so ingrained into the wine market that it’s not going to change, at least anytime soon. At least not for what are considered to be premium wines.
• Use less expensive bottles: It’s one thing to use a heavy, costly, imposing bottle for a $150 cult Napa cabernet sauvignon. But producers who don’t use the best made and least expensive bottle for a $10 wine are raising the price of the product without adding quality or value. For example, why do most wine bottles still have punts – the dimple on the bottom of the bottle – when it’s cheaper and just as effective to make a bottle without one?
Well, I can answer this question. The simple reason is that heavier bottles are perceived as being higher-end, and therefore people will pay more for them. Does that make any sense? Probably not. But then pretty much everything having to do with packaging of a wine, or any other product for that matter, doesn’t make any sense either. You can rail against the inequities of life and stupidities of the consumer, but that doesn’t get your wines sold. If you want to sell wine, you have to do this stuff.
• Stop obsessing over oak. High-end wines that need thousands and thousands of dollars worth of oak to pull their various parts into a coherent whole should spend time and effort describing the oak process and how it works. But the rest of the wine we drink – 90 percent? – either doesn’t need oak or uses a substitute, like staves or chips. And these wines are often perfectly fine. Sometimes, they even make the $10 Hall of Fame.
Personally, I would not only stop obsessing over oak, I would stop using it, either altogether or at least in the high quantities that it’s used throughout much of the wine world. For some wines, I wouldn’t argue that some oak is helpful. But I would like to feel like I’m drinking a grape product not a tree product. With lots of wine, it’s hard to tell. I like pepper with my salad, but a few turns of the peppermill is enough. I certainly wouldn’t want to dump the whole container of pepper on the salad. But that’s what many winemakers do with oak.
• Appellation isn’t the be all and end all. Appellation – where the grapes were grown – matters almost not at all for most of the wine we drink, and consumers (especially younger ones) are paying less and less attention to it. They want malbec or moscato, and they don’t really care where it’s from. And, truthfully, given modern winemaking techniques, the goal is (as with vintage) to make the malbec taste like malbec, not like it came from California or Argentina. This is another opportunity to make less expensive, quality wine by mixing grapes from different appellations, and not worrying whether the bottle says California or Argentina.
This one I could hardly agree with more. If anyone could, with consistency, identify which appellation a wine came from tasting them blind against other similar wines, I might feel differently. But to a large extent this is just a marketing ruse. As far as the idea of blending wines from different appellations is concerned, see my comments above concerning blending of different vintages (great idea, will never happen).
• Write back labels in English: One wine that costs around $10 promises things that are all but impossible for a wine at that price: “chocolate and hints of licorice.” Or, to go to the other extreme, the wine drinker who buys another wine “prizes the simple things in life: spending good times with close friends.” Both do the consumer a disservice. They’ll assume they’re wine idiots because they couldn’t taste chocolate and licorice, and be totally confused by what the second wine is supposed to be. One solution, as advocated by W. Blake Gray: simple terms that we all understand, like rich, robust and fruit.
I have always been a big believer that there are only a few things that people can agree on with any consistency when it comes to a wine. Flavor is not one of them. Acidity, tannin, sweetness, oak level, maybe, even probably. Yet most wine is described primarily by its flavor profile. So what that nobody can agree on it. A simple description like “rich, robust, and fruit” beats the usual drivel that we see on the back of a wine label, even if it’s generality means it really doesn’t say that much about the wine. Perhaps this situation would be a little better if there were a little bit more honesty in the comments on wine back-labels. But I don’t think we’re going to see a description such as “lean, fruit challenged” any time soon. I think it’s fair to say that back label prose is going to continue to be one of the worst examples of writing in the English language.
Posted in Viticulture, Wine Marketing, Wine Tasting, Winemaking | No Comments »
Monday, February 4th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
Last week’s post generated a few comments of interest pertaining to why most restaurants serve pretty uninteresting, if not downright piss-poor, wines. One from Beth caught my attention:
Jeff,
It’s true, many restaurants serve sucky wine, but it’s not because they aren’t interested in serving better wine. It’s because they believe their customers aren’t interested in spending the money to buy better wine. They say their customers are more concerned with price point than with quality.
I’m a wine industry member who represents a fantastic portfolio with great values. The biggest challenge I have in selling to casual style restaurants is the buyers are looking for wines in the $3-$4 acquisition range for which they charge $5-$6 a glass. Between the profit margin they make and the inexperienced wine drinkers frequenting these establishments, they have no motivation to serve better wines - even at a 2nd tier price point.
It’s easy to blame the restaurant, which is what I guess I did, but in many ways it does make more sense to blame the consumer. I think Beth is right—the restaurants are simply responding to what the consumer demands. And for many (not all) restaurants, the demand is for something cheap, and quality comes in second. And if you can sell a bottle you buy for 3-4 dollars for 5-6 dollars a glass, then maybe there’s not a whole lot of motivation to try to put something a little more interesting out there.
No small winery can make a wine that can be sold by a distributor for $3-4. So that market goes by default to the megawineries that can churn out plonk by the tankersfull.
But I do have to admit that I truly wish restaurateurs which would at least make the effort to push something a little bit better. Even in the $6-9 wholesale price category, you can find interesting wines. Maybe no one is getting rich at those price points, but the wines are there to be had.
Anyone who has been reading this blog knows I’m not a believer that you need to pay a lot of money to get a truly good wine. But you do have to pay something, and few if any $3-4 bottles of wine pass muster. I’m not even sure why that is, because I do believe it’s possible to make a decent wine at that price point, though again it will take a large winery to do it. But while I believe it’s possible to do, no one seems to be doing it.
Which gets me back to my original point—if you want a decent glass of wine, you have to pay a little more for it. In my experience, at most moderately priced restaurants, you can get a pretty decent wine in the 8-10 glass range, but not in the 5-6 dollar range. At least that’s my experience.
To my mind, those extra few dollars are well worth the expense. Personally, as much as I like wine in theory, in actuality I really don’t enjoy drinking a insipid glass of plonk at all. I’d just as soon drink a decent beer (in fact would prefer one), or even a glass of water. Bad wine just doesn’t give me any pleasure. So if I can pay a little more and get something I truly want to drink, why wouldn’t I do that?
Obviously, there are many more people who feel differently, so I think we’re in for more of the same—second rate wines dominating the restaurant scene.
Posted in Wine Marketing, Wine Sales and Pricing, Wine Tasting | No Comments »
Monday, January 28th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
Went out to dinner and a comedy club a couple of nights ago, and my wife wanted a glass of white wine. So I went up to the bar and inquired about their white wine selection.
As is all too often the case, I was informed it was Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, and Sauvignon Blanc. No winery names, no vintages. Just Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, and Sauvignon Blanc. Upon further inquiry, the wines were pretty much what you usually get at most restaurants, megawinery productions.
I decided that of the four wines on offer, the Coppola sounded like it was the most promising of the unexciting selection. My wife’s critique: marginally ok, but soft and uninteresting. A fairly common critique of wines when you think about it. I have little doubt that had I picked any of the other wines, it would have been just as lackluster.
Without doubt, there are many restaurants that serve an interesting and eclectic variety of wines. But there are many more like the one we were at that make do with a stable of wines that lack interest. Why is that?
I think that the main reason for this is that most restaurants don’t have a compelling interest in wine. And if you don’t have that interest, chances are you’re going to delegate your wine selections to some distributor rep. And most distributor reps work for large distributors, which sell the major brands. And the major brands usually turn out uninteresting, inoffensive wines.
Have you been to a mall lately? If you have, I can pretty much guess the stores you found there. The regional mall has become a cookie-cutter host of stores—the mall in Los Angeles looks indistinguishable in most respects from a mall in Maine or Pennsylvania. If you want a special store that sells special products, it can still be found. But they must the searched out.
Wine is pretty much the same. While there are plenty of places that do offer wines of interest and variety, they must be searched out. You can’t just walk into a restaurant and expect it as a matter of course.
While I lay greatest blame on the way most restaurants buy wine, honorable mention must also go the consumer, who tolerates this situation. Many consumers are somewhat unknowledgeable when it comes to wine, but lack of knowledge doesn‘t require that you acquiesce in being served a wine that is, at best, bland. But obviously they do, or else restaurants couldn’t get away with serving these wines.
I commented several weeks ago about the concentration in the US wine industry. Unfortunately, this is a fact of life that isn’t going to change any time soon, if ever. It’s discomforting to think that the bulk of the wine business has more in common with Coca-Cola and Pepsi than it does with what I think of as fine winemaking. But I think we need to start thinking of truly fine wine as being a niche product that constitutes only a small percentage of overall wine production. The rest is plonk.
Posted in Wine Marketing, Wine Tasting | 5 Comments »
Monday, January 7th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
I would highly recommend reading this article, “Concentration in the U.S. Wine Industry”, that can be found at https://www.msu.edu/~howardp/wine.html.
Just a few of the interesting tidbits of information contained in the article: Bronco Wine Company, maker of Two Buck Chuck, has 3.5% of the US market. I’ve always thought of Bronco of being a pretty large wine company, and I guess it is. But it’s puny compared with Gallo, which has the largest single share of the wine market at 22.8%. Think of it—almost a quarter of the wine sold in America is sold by Gallo. That’s mind-boggling.
The Wine Group isn’t that terribly far behind at 15.9% of the market, followed by Constellation at 12.8%. Such large companies as Trinchero and Treasury are less than 5% each.
The interesting thing about these companies is that they each have a stable of brands that, on the surface, doesn’t betray their ownership. Turning Leaf is a Gallo brand, for instance, Corbett Canyon a Wine Group brand. So it’s very easy for a consumer to pick up bottle of wine at his local store and not have a clue he’s really buying a Gallo product. That bottle of wine doesn’t come from some relatively small winery at all. In fact, the name on the label isn’t even a winery, it’s just a name that Gallo or one of the other megawineries has fashioned as a vehicle for their millions of gallons of wine. As the authors note: “Although choices remain abundant, particularly for those with access to non-chain retailers, it is increasingly difficult for consumers to recognize which companies they are supporting with their purchases.”
When it comes of variety, there’s nothing like that—you pretty much know what variety you’re getting. But once again, there’s a great deal of concentration when it comes to variety. Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot are the biggest sellers. Zinfandel, which seems like a pretty common variety, is far down the list. So Americans seem to like a few varieties of wine, and by and large ignore the rest.
But for most other consumer products, the degree of concentration is much greater. As dominated as the wine business is by a few large firms, it’s even worse in the beer and soft drink businesses. So, as hard as it is it start up a small winery and find distribution, microbreweries and small soda manufacturers have an even tougher time of it.
I find this all a bit depressing. What may, at first glance, look like a wide range of choice, is really pseudo-choice. Basically the same product by the same producer is peddled under a variety of brands, creating the illusion that there’s a plethora of different products, when that’s simply not the case. And the illusion is even worse when someone who thinks he’s buying a wine from a small producer is really buying a Gallo or Wine Group product. It’s as if Budweiser produced its beer but bottled it under any number of names to hide the fact that it was just Bud. I’m not sure if that would be tolerated in the beer marketplace, but it certainly is when it comes to wine.
Posted in Wine Marketing, Wine Sales and Pricing | 2 Comments »
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