Me, too! Hey, me, too!

A wine buyer at an upscale grocery store once told me his biggest pet peeve was the "Me, too" wine sales rep. The buyer would put up a successful display of, say, a $14.99 Chianti Classico Riserva, and the competing sales reps would all pitch their own Chianti Classico Riservas for display.

"My kingdom for an original idea."

The "Me, too" yahoo is in many ways responsible for that "dizzying array of wines available today" I mentioned in my first post. When Pinot Grigio sales took off in this country, so too did the number of wineries making it. Me, too, try ours.

The phenomenal success of Yellow Tail led many major wine companies to create their own critter-label brands. Me, too, ours is cuter.

Syrah? Me, too. Pinot Noir? Hey, me, too. Riesling? Ah, ah. . .yeah, me, too.

These are called "line extensions" which marketers like to say take advantage of the "halo effect" of a well-regarded brand name. But they dilute and weaken the reputations of wineries. Jack of all trades, master of none.

Starting with Robert Mondavi back in the 1980's, many Napa Valley-based wineries loaned their names to wines grown from, well, somewhere in CA. Beaulieu (BV), Beringer, Mondavi, Sterling, and others unhinged their names from Napa Valley. Yes, they all still produce Napa-grown wines, but that's just for the halo effect, a cynic might say. Me, too.

Thanks,

Jim

Nielsen Schmielsen

I was asked recently by someone, who didn't know my tendency to overexplain everything, what's been the most significant change in the wine business in the last 25 years. And, while it would be easy to signal out the phenomenal growth in the number of wineries and the amount of wine consumed, that's not it.

No, for me, it's the UPC, the Universal Product Code, that ubiquitous bar code that now adorns every product and will probably be genetically engineered onto our foreheads soon.

I predate the UPC on wine bottles. This is the wine business equivalent of saying "I predate electricity."

Before bar codes, every bottle was hand-marked with a price sticker. Most grocery stores had a wine key on their cash registers, so had a reasonable idea how much wine was sold, but only a vague idea about what wine sold. The UPC changed all that.

Enter Nielsen.

That's the A.C. Nielsen Company, famous for its TV rankings, but which also collects wine sales data from all major chain grocery stores, thanks to the UPC. So, now wineries and wine companies can see where, when, and how much their wines sold. Most large wineries and wine companies now employ armies of sales analysts (ever notice the first four letters of that last word?). They dissect the minutest of detail hoping to ferret out significant trends.

Meanwhile, most wine distributors, at the insistence of their supplier wine companies, report back all of their sales, so the analysts can also see what restaurants and shops buy their wine.

So, what does all this rear-view mirror gazing mean to you and me?

It means that the status quo is reinforced, time and again. It's why chain grocery stores display the same wines year in and year out. It's why a few large companies with data in hand hold enormous sway over retail buyers. It's why that large wine section seems to be all about Chardonnay, Cabernet, Merlot, and a little bit "Other." Breadth they got, depth they don't.

It's why a beauty such as the Cotes de Brouilly I mentioned in my last post won't be found in most stores and why the real treasures in wine take some digging.

Thanks,
Jim

It's only a bottle of wine

"It's only a bottle of wine, for Christ's sake." A colleague of mine back in the 1980's said that upon hearing the price of 1983 Chateau Mouton Rothschild would exceed $100. Supply and demand, I suppose, with the 1st Growths of Bordeaux, then and now. But isn't it amazing how many wines top the $100 mark now? For that matter, $50 or even $30--and often for wines with no track record or first releases from new wineries.

So much of what passes for supply and demand these days in the wine business is manipulation by marketing. "Limited Release" often isn't; "Reserve" with all its adjectives--Private (really?), Winemaker's, Cellarmaster's, Vintner's, Grand, and Everyman's--is rarely. And, that's just a start.

The dizzying array of wines available today makes it tough for anyone to navigate through a wine department or wine shop without feeling overwhelmed and undereducated. Me included.

So what I'd like to do here with this blog is strip away some of the pretentiousness of wine, and by that, I don't mean reducing wine to four or five varietals from California that are just easy to understand. No, let's look at the world's wine and have some fun with it.

I'll explain some of the mystifying terms on labels, and we'll write some quick notes on favorite finds. For example, I had a great little 2006 Cotes de Brouilly from Ferraud & Fils (imported by Vinum Wine Importing, Seattle, WA) last night at 10 Mercer, one of my favorite Seattle restaurants. Cotes de Brouilly is one of the Grand Cru villages of Beaujolais. The red wines from that region of France are made from the Gamay grape, rarely planted in this country. Such a pity. This wine had a fruity nose with some earthiness, very much like its more expensive Pinot Noir cousins to the north in the Burgundy region. Soft, supple and a terrific match for a variety of foods.

Yet, Beaujolais is a rarity on the shelves and wine lists these days. Why? Hard to pronounce or understand labels? Let's look into this more next time.

Thanks,
Jim