The Wine Curmudgeon

Winebits 279: Wine telemarketing, tasting notes, booze laws

• Wine over the phone: Never thought you would see the words wine and telemarketing in the same sentence, did you? But several California companies are making the concept work, reports the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa. VinoPRO handles phone sales for 50 wineries, including Jackson Family Wines, Constellation Brands and Treasury Wine Estates, and totaled in $8 million in sales in 2012. Growth over the past three years? 1,800 percent. An official from another wine telemarketer reports that he's always surprised that customers will stop what they're doing to talk to someone from a winery. Was never like that when they called at dinner to sell long distance, was it?

• Academics take on tasting notes: Spanish researchers are collecting a data – some 12 000 tasting notes from places like the Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast and Decanter. The words used will be compiled in a database so we can tell how they’re used, reports Jamie Goode of the Wine Anorak blog (whose notes will also be included. It’s not so much that this isn’t a good idea, but that I’m not sure what it will accomplish. Do we really need to know how many times leathery is used for a red wine? Or toasty and oaky for white? The answer, without a need for research, is too many.

• British booze taxes: The man who runs one of Britain’s biggest retailers says the government, in its curb to cut binge drinking through taxes and sales restrictions, will destroy the country’s wine business. Wine, he says, will become a luxury available only to the rich: “Having established this culture of food and wine, you know, which is a sea change from where we were 30 years ago, why would we want to stop that?” I have been following this debate for the past several years for a couple of reasons, one of which is that the English always seemed so sensible about drinking compared to us. The other is that just when I think the three-tier system is bad, I see another example that is almost makes it seem sensible.

Winebits 278: Wine thefts, Aussie harvest, sweet wine

• Back up the truck: I spent a considerable amount of time as a young newspaper reporter writing about crime, and one learned certain truths. One of which was that thieves like simple – simple to carry off, simple to fence. So how to explain this wine theft, the second in the last six months? This report says hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wine were taken from a San Francisco area warehouse; the difference between this and the previous heist (love those crime writing terms!) was volume – this was only seven cases of wine, as opposed to most of a warehouse. Still, how does one fence wine? It’s not like many pawn shops will take it.

• Tons and tons and tons of grapes: Think California had a bountiful harvest in 2012? Then get ready for the harvest in Australia’s Riverina, where much of the country’s cheap wine, including YellowTail, comes from. The harvest was near record, not a good thing when the Aussies are trying to cut production. One local official said that despite the near-record year, one-half of growers had not met the basic costs of production for 2013.

• Who tells you what to drink? Robert Joseph at the Joseph Report offers a spot-on analysis of the sweet wine trend, noting the differences between the way sweet red and moscato are marketed in the U.S. and Europe. “In the U.S., the wine industry takes the view that making money out of giving consumers what they like is an entirely legitimate thing to do. It's only fair to point out that the wider acceptance of this attitude goes a long way to explaining the success of supersized burgers and some pretty dreadful movies, not to mention a fairly widespread market for firearms. On the other hand, would it really be such a bad thing if the people who are currently drinking flavourless Pinot Grigio and Merlot had the chance to buy the kinds of grapey Moscato and ‘velvety’ red that are giving such satisfaction on the other side of the Atlantic?”

Diet wine, and why we're stuck with it

One of the Wine Curmudgeon’s regular rants is how old-fashioned, unsophisticated, and wrong-headed most wine marketing is. This is the industry, after all, that still sees wine drinking as the province of middle-aged white men.

Innovation? Nope. Education? Nope? Mostly, just cute labels and names, the same thing that has been going on for the past 20 years. The “Let’s appeal to women with a wine called Little Black Dress” approach is what passes for genius around here.

That’s one of the many reasons why diet wine – wine made not to taste good, but to have fewer calories – is so depressing. It’s a 40-year-old concept that wine is embracing because it doesn’t have any better ideas More, after the jump:

Winebits 277: Direct shipping edition

• New York decision: There is a lot of legalese in this blog post from the California firm of Dickenson, Peatman & Fogarty, but the gist is that New York state – based on a recent liquor authority ruling – will apparently make it harder for third parties, like Amazon, to participate in Internet wine sales. Specifically, says the post, the New York decision (which we’ve discussed here) and a 2011 California liquor board ruling aren’t consistent in several important areas. This is crucial, since Amazon is basing its business model on the California ruling. I’ve been told by my liquor law sources that what happened in New York is not surprising and that there are still many unknowns as Amazon tries to expand into the two-thirds of the country where it doesn’t do business.

• Welcome to Texas: Amazon, on the other hand, scored a victory here when it announced five Texas wineries will participate in its wine marketplace. The Texas liquor board decision to allow Amazon into the state was a close run thing, I was told, but the result is that consumers in the 15 other states (plus the District of Columbia) that Amazon serves will be able to buy some very nice wine. If you need any recommendations, click on the blog’s Texas wine category link. Also worth noting: I talked to several Texas winemakers, and they said Amazon sent employees to the state to taste wines before launching the program. Now there’s a job – wine scout for Amazon.

• Who needs Amazon? Not the British, where two entrepreneurs have a plan to let retailers sell excess inventory on the Internet. GrapePip.com, reports the Harpers trade magazine, was set up by Caspar and Victoria Bowes, who run fine wine merchant Bowes Wine. Their goal is to sell almost $400,000 worth of wine in their first year, using an eBay-style auction system.

Winebits 276: Packaging, climate change, Paul Draper

• Fetzer goes small: Ever wanted a glass of wine at a baseball game, but weren’t able to buy one? That changed this month when Fetzer introduced what it’s calling Zipz packs – 100 percent recyclable 187ml PET containers (a form of plastic) of wine at several big league baseball stadiums. The Zipz will be available in stores later this year. “Alternative venues” are one of the hot topics in the wine business these days, as producers look for ways to sell wine in places where it hasn’t been sold. I’m skeptical, though, of wine at ball games, and I’m as big a baseball fan as I am a wine drinker. It just doesn’t seem like a good match.

• Weather and wine: This piece, from The Raw Story web site, doesn’t mince words: “Can any region continue to grow the exact same varieties and make the exact same style of wines? If what we know today is correct, that is highly unlikely.” The reason is climate change, and it goes into great detail explaining what’s going to happen and why. Grapes, say the experts, are important in understanding how climate change will affect other crops, since the wines are more sensitive to climate than rice, corn and soybeans, which could help researchers figure out how to better adapt these crops to warmer weather.

• Well-earned award: Paul Draper, the man behind California’s Ridge Vineyards, has been named the 2013 Winemakers’ Winemaker by the Institute of Masters of Wine and the drinks business trade magazine. Ridge has long been one of the world’s great wineries, and has continued to make honest wine when so many others were chasing scores and critical acclaim. Which, not surprisingly, is why he was honored: “an approach that has been characterised by an emphasis on traditional winemaking practices, sustainable agriculture and a sense of place.”

Winebits 275: James Tidwell, Amazon, national chains

• Appreciating wine: James Tidwell, who works for the Four Seasons in suburban Dallas, is not only one of the most knowledgeable people in the wine business, but one of the nicest. So I'm particularly happy to note this interview with James, where he talks about what it's like to taste some of the world's great wines: "I knew food and wine went well together, but this transcended all conceptions of how they can be paired. It really has influenced my understanding of what can be done with food and wine."

• Making the Amazon model work: A rare look at how and what Amazon is doing with its wine marketplace, courtesy of Wines & Vines magazine. Peter Faricy, the executive in charge of the wine marketplace, wouldn't discuss sales or how many wineries are participating, but did note that the Internet giant is "super pleased with the reception so far.” More importantly, he said, Amazon is working as fast as possible to add other states to the current lineup -- 15 plus the District of Columbia, while ensuring complete compliance with the various local liquor regulations. It charges wineries 15 percent of the sales price to be part of the marketplace, but is waiving some fees.

• Want to be a national chain? Then offer better service, says the man in charge of Total Wine & More, whiich is agressively expanding across the U.S. “If we can have the best people, we win. You’re not going to find those people in Walmart or anywhere else,” said president and co-owner David Trone. This is, of course, easier said than done, and I've heard it about a zillion times in the two-plus decades I've written about business. I once spent 40 minutes in a Dallas Total Wine without an employee even looking at me, and the one employee I watched wait on another customer didn't seem all that interested. But maybe that's a small sample size.

 

 

Winebits 274: Tasting rooms, grape harvest, George Taber

• How tasting rooms work: Ever wonder why wineries have tasting rooms? Or if they make a lot of money? Or why a wine in the tasting room is often more expensive than in a store? Rob McMillan at the SVB blog goes a long way towards answering those questions, and asks one of his own: Do too many wineries use the tasting room to make money at the expense of the tasting room’s ability to market the winery? This is the sort of analysis the wine business needs more of, and something that consumers need to know, too. It’s one more advantage to know how the business works when it comes to buying wine.

• Breaking records: Remember that California grape shortage? Long gone, and probably not to be seen for a while. The official numbers are in, and the 2012 harvest set records. The crush totaled 4.4 million tons, up 13 percent from 2011 and 1 percent more than the previous high in 2005. Also significant: Red grapes accounted for more than half of that total, part of what may be a long-term trend toward red wine among consumers. Prices were also up quite a bit, in the double digits for many varieties, as producers were making up losses from the less bountiful 2010 and 2011 harvests.

• He was there: I’ve never asked George Taber about the 1976 Judgment of Paris, probably the most important moment in the history of modern California wine. George, who worked for Time, was the only journalist present, and saw California wines best French wines in a blind tasting. You’d think, as nosy as I am, I would have annoyed him about it over and over. Now I don’t have to, thanks to this interview, which covers the event thoroughly: “The story about the Paris tasting in Time magazine was only four paragraphs long. It was a secondary story in the Modern Living section, the filler. Nobody in the world except me will remember what was the first and more important story: It was about a new theme park in Atlanta….”