Category Archives: popular culture

Curse of the Blue Nun

February 21, 2010 By in brands, popular culture, Supply and Demand, wine brands, wine markets 7 Comments

Writing about Riesling got me to thinking about great  German Rieslings and, because I am a Dismal Scientist after all,  I also started thinking about the not-so-great German wines that define that country for wine drinkers of a certain age.  And so, inevitably, my thoughts strayed to memories of Blue Nun.

I haven’t thought of Blue Nun wine in years. I remember it from the 1970s as an unsophisticated Liebfraumilch wine in a tall thin blue bottle with a blue and white-clad nun on the label. She reminded me a bit of the “Flying Nun” television show (starring Sally Fields) that ran from 1967 to 1970. The wine was about as serious as the TV series, but apparently it sold hundreds of thousands of cases to aspiring wine drinkers like me.

I didn’t know that it was still around until I spotted it on a BBC television show about wine. It was a miniseries featuring Oz Clarke, notable British wine guru, and James May, co-host of the popular automobile series “Top Gear.” Oz and James were touring California with wine expert Oz trying to teach neophyte James a bit about wine. James resisted, put off by wine’s snobbish elitist ways.

Terrible. Disgusting. Must be European.

Blue Nun appeared in a sequence where James bet Oz $100 that he couldn’t identify an ordinary everyday wine in a blind tasting (from a plastic beer cup, as it turned out). Oz sniffed and swirled and made a bad face. Terrible, he said. Disgusting. So bad that it couldn’t be from America – market-savvy Americans would never make a wine this bad. This could only come from the Old World.

“Blue Nun!” he shouted, winning the bet, although I suspect that colored bottle gave him an unfair clue. Here is a taste of the show. The Blue Nun episode is not available online, but this will give you a good sense of what the show is like.

I’m not sure that Blue Nun is really that bad, but Oz Clarke’s revolting reaction is telling.  Blue Nun and brands like it established Germany’s place on the lower tier of the World Wine Wall in the 1970s. The wines may not have been as cheap and nasty as memory suggests, but they were not expensive and sophisticated, either. They were the face of German wine abroad and that face, like the Blue Nun herself, was more or less a colorful cartoon version of the great wines of Germany.

The First Global Wine Brand

Blue Nun was by some accounts the first truly global mass market wine brand, an unexpected distinction for a German wine. Its story therefore has some bearing on the globalization of wine. Blue Nun’s roots go back to 1857 when Hermann Sichel started a wine business in Mainz. I know little about the early days of Sichel’s firm except that it managed to survive the political and economic chaos of the ensuing years, which in retrospect seems like a considerable achievement.

The real story begins with the 1921 vintage, said to be one of the best. Sichel sought to export these wines, especially to Great Britain, and the Blue Nun label was invented to facilitate sales abroad. One source holds that the nun on the label was originally clad in standard issue brown robes, but a printer’s error turned them blue and thus a brand was born.

The brand and the famous vintage it represented found a market in England, selling more than 1000 cases a year in the 1930s (quite a lot for a single brand of wine at that time) according to the official company history.  The volumes increased after World War II, rising to 3.5 million bottles a year in the UK in the 1970s before sales collapse back to 800,000 in the 1980s.  The quantity quality trade-off finally came back to haunt Blue Nun, it seems, and the fashion for red wine started by the famous French Paradox discovery did not help either.

Blue Nun, it seems was the original victim of the Curse of the Blue Nun: the simple, sweetish wines that make you will also break you. As tastes changed and wine drinkers sought to move up-market, Blue Nun wine petered out (although 800,000 bottles is hardly a trickle). Passé to some, a joke (as with Oz and James) to others, that was and to some extent is Blue Nun.

It is an over generalization to say that the whole of German wine suffered the Curse of the Blue Nun, but there is some truth in it. Great wines continued to be produced, of course, and snatched up by the educated wine elites (although not at the high prices they once earned), but Brand Germany was Blue Nun, Black Tower and their Liebfraumilch shelfmates. German wine hit its lowest point.

Blue Nun and the New Globalization

I am an optimist about globalization and wine (that’s why next book is called Grape Expectations) and this attitude extends to German wine. The bad news of the crisis of quality is matched by the good news that German wines have changed, even the big brands. Black Tower has moved upmarket into affordable quality wines, not just Liebfraumilch and not just white wines, either. It is the top German brand today.

Sichel sold the Blue Nun brand to Langguth, another German maker, who also upgraded the wines. Blue Nun is once again a major brand, selling 5 million bottles in Britain alone in 2005. It is a German brand but, significantly, reflecting the current wave of globalization, not just a German wine.

Popular wines from around the world are imported to Germany where they are bottled under the Blue Nun label. There are Languedoc Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, California Zinfandel, Australian Shiraz, Chardonnay from Chile, and a Rosé from Spain, for example. There’s even a Pinot Grigio from Germany, although its unlikely origin is not easy to learn from the front label.[i]

Blue Nun Light is low alcohol (0,5%), low calorie (27 calories per 100 ml glass). Tastes great, less filling.

My personal favorite (perhaps because I’ve never tried it) is Blue Nun Sparkling Gold Edition shown here. It’s a light fizzy wine infused with flakes of 22 carat gold leaf that glitter in the glass.

Young women seem to be Blue Nun’s target market according to both published sources and the look of the advertising copy. Women buy more wine than men, so this is not a crazy strategy, and young women are the market of the future, although the assumption that they are especially attracted to shiny floaty things like these gold flakes is sad if true. The idea that the attractive female image of the Blue Nun might particularly appeal to women never occurred to me … until now.

German wine is back, but it has changed. Quality has improved – even the mass market brands offer some good wines – but the reputation lingers, the legacy of the Curse of the Blue Nun.

[i] The ad copy says it is from the “sunny Palantine region,” which sounds Italian but isn’t. The geographical designation is Pfalz, Germany. I’m sure it is quite good as Pinot Grigio goes.

Awaken, Bacchus!

January 16, 2010 By in popular culture 5 Comments

I’ve spent the last two weeks watching a nine-part Japanese television miniseries that is based upon a 20+ volume Japanese manga (graphic novel) called Kami no Shizuku (Drops of God).

Have you heard of it? No? Then read on because Kami no Shizuku seems to be changing how millions of people are thinking about wine. Maybe it will change how you think about wine, too.

The Sideways Effect

Wine enthusiasts like to think of wine as a very serious subject, all vintages and terroir and malolactic fermentation and so on. It is hard for us to accept that something as sacred as wine could be influenced by popular culture.

But we know that it happens. The 2004 film Sideways, for example, is said to have set off the Pinot Noir boom in the United States and brought to an end a previous Merlot bubble. It also romanticized wine in a way that cannot have hurt wine sales overall.

No wonder wine tourists come to the Santa Barbara area to drink the same wines, eat the same foods and visit the same wineries as the film characters Miles and Jack (played by actors Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church).

Tokyo Wine-Quake

Sideways had a big effect on the wine world. The Kami no Shizuku effect seems to be several orders of magnitude larger. The reason you may not have heard about it is that this wine-quake is centered in Tokyo, not New York, Los Angeles or London.

The on-going comic book series, written by Shin and Yuko Kibayashi, first appeared in 2004 and has sold more than half a million copies in Japan alone. The Nippon television series that I’ve been watching on DVD premiered in January 2009 and reached millions more.

The Kiyabashis were ranked number 50 in Decanter magazine’s July 2009 “Power List” of the wine industry’s individuals of influence. Kami no Shizuku is “arguably the most influential wine publication for the past 20 years,” according to Decanter.

Most influential in 20 years! Wow. You can get a feel for the phenomenon by reading this English translation of some of the graphic novel volumes.  (Note: click on the images to move to the next page. Don’t worry if it appears to be in Japanese — the English shows up once the story begins. Read the story panels from right to left on each page the way the Japanese do.)

Kami no Shizuku has set off a wine boom in Asia, where, much as with Sideways, enthusiasts rush to taste the fine wines (mainly from France, mostly Burgundies and Bordeaux) that are featured in each storyline. The rising sales of these iconic wines has been good for these particular  producers, but I think the bigger effect has been to draw millions of Asian consumers into the market and help them to develop a personal sense of wine.

The Da Vino Code

I’ve been trying to decide how to explain Kami no Shizuku and why I think it has had such a profound effect on wine is Asia and soon, perhaps, around the world. One reason is that it is a good story and that it always important. The Nippon TV series is pretty much a soap opera and you know how addictive those are!

But I think the real factor is that Kami no Shizuku presents a different idea of wine.  Wine is presented as a sort of mysterious but not impenetrable secret  society (think Da Vinci Code), with its own history, geography, rituals language and traditions. It is a mystery waiting to be solved.

The reward for mastering its intricacies is a sort of divine communication (hence “Drops of God”).  Wine can communicate a time and place, an emotion or experience.  Tasting wine even allows the living to talk with the dead, in a way that the story makes clear but I won’t reveal here.

A Hundred Flowers

You can get a small sense of this communication by watching the music video with scenes from the television series I have embedded into this post. Our young protagonist is upset with his wine-obsessed father for never leaving flowers on his mother’s grave. He always leaves wine — Domaine de la Romanée Conti Richebourg 1990, if you are interested — not flowers as a proper grieving husband/father should.

Later, as he begins to learn the language of wine and unlock its secrets, he discovers that this Burgundy is the truest expression of the love the flowers are meant to represent — not a dozen flowers, but a field of them.  Watch the video — you’ll get this point and more. And so the journey and the complex exchange of ideas, feelings and emotions begins.

Awaken, Bacchus

“Awaken, Bacchus,” he says, when he wants to move beyond the physical senses to taste the memories and emotions that lie hidden in the wine glass. Who wouldn’t want to have such a transformative experience? Who wouldn’t want to see what mysteries wine can be revealed?

Kami no Shizuku seems to have unleashed two forces in Japan and perhaps eventually around the world. One is the competition for status and self-esteem through the conspicuous consumption of the trophy wines featured in the comics and television series. This materialistic competition is even part of the plot! It is nothing new, although I’ll bet the French producers are thankful for it during this economic crisis.

The other is a different sort of quest — this one for meaning and fulfillment — with unruly Bacchus an unlikely guide. The competition here is more subtle and inward-looking, but the rewards are much greater (another lesson of the story).

Both quests are important from an economic standpoint, but it is only the second one that has the potential to awaken a new kind of audience for the pleasures of wine by waking up the Bacchus inside us all.

http://drama.watchanimeon.com/kami-no-shizuku/

What [Wine] Women Want

January 10, 2010 By in health, popular culture, wine brands, wine research 1 Comment

I’m always interested in the questions my students ask about wine and so I look forward to their final papers, where they have pretty much free rein to pick the questions and search for answers. My Fall 2008 class seemed to be particularly concerned about what I think of as ethical questions – wine and the environment, for example, and fair trade wine. I wrote about their papers here.

My Fall 2009 group was very different in terms of their interests and “wine personalities” — and they were disproportionately female — and their choice of paper topics reflected these facts.

All in the Family

Three questions attracted more than one student’s interest and so are worth noting here. Marc and Isabelle both wrote on the future of family wineries. They are both business majors and interested in the fact that an unusual number of wineries, including very large ones like Gallo, Boisset and Yellow Tail, are family firms not private partnerships (The Wine Group) or public corporations (Constellation Brands).

Their papers examined the problems and limitations of family-owned businesses and what industry-specific advantages might account for the success of family wineries.

Wine, Women and their Health

Two students, Kelly and Libbie, decided to use their backgrounds in science to probe questions about wine and health in more detail than is typically seen. Kelly wrote on the chemistry of the “red wine paradox” while Libbie examined the question of whether pregnant women should drink wine. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that moderate wine consumption (2-3 glasses per day, especially red wine and especially with meals) provides positive health benefits except for pregnant women, who are specifically told to avoid any alcohol on government-mandated warning labels.

The research papers showed that the health issue is more complex than is generally appreciated and provided a surprising answer to the question, should expectant mothers drink wine? Although there are obvious problems with excessive alcohol consumption, research studies indicate that very modest wine consumption (in the range of one glass a couple of times a week, as I recall) can provide health benefits to both mother and baby.

It is obviously a delicate balance, however, and the fact of rising alcohol levels in wine (which I wrote about here) makes getting the balance right increasingly problematic.

What Do [Young] Women Really Want?

Two of my favorite papers were written by young women who wanted to know more about how wine companies tailor their marketing to their particular demographic. Elyse examined marketing to the so-called Millennial generation and Anna focused on wine brands designed to appeal to young women like herself. Women purchase more wine than men and young women are the key wine buyers of the future, so it makes sense that wine companies would try to target and develop this market.

Anna identified the wine brand pictured above as an example of marketing to young women. She noted that brand name, the choice of colors and several other factors made Bitch wine particularly attractive to young women wine buyers, especially those who are new to wine. Take a close look at the label and I think you’ll see what Anna is talking about. Pink label, sewing (female stereotype) imagery, Bitch rhymes with stitch, even the little hearts and crosses that suggest needlepoint.

Bitch Bitch Bitch

She called particular attention to the back label. Some wines use the back label to provide production details or tasting notes. Bitch wine, however, just says “Bitch bitch bitch bitch …” and so on.

Would Anna buy Bitch wine? Probably not. She found the packaging appealing, but the lack of more detailed information about the wine itself was a real negative. She might have tried it a few months ago, she said, but after taking our class she knew too much about wine (and asked too many questions) to respond positively to this marketing scheme even though the imagery attracted her.

Bitch seems to be wine for women who are beginners in wine, she said,  and Anna isn’t a beginner any more.

Olive Garden and the Future of American Wine

September 13, 2009 By in brands, Costco, economic crisis, Italian wine, Olive Garden, popular culture, Trader Joe's, wine distibution, wine markets, wine price 5 Comments

How an investigation into trends in restaurant wine sales leads to an unexpected discovery.

Reading Down the Wine List

Everyone knows that restaurant wine sales are down as the recession has reduced both the number of diners and their willingness to spend a lot of money on wine. One of the best sources of news on restaurant wine sales is the Wine & Spirits magazine annual restaurant issue, which surveys selected wine-friendly restaurants and reports sales trends.

The W&S data give only part of the picture, however, since they tend to survey restaurants with more sophisticated wine-enthusiast customers. What’s happen to wine sales a bit further down the food chain?

Two studies by Ronn Wiegand (publisher and Master of Wine) in the current issue of Restaurant Wine report that US restaurant wine sales were off by 5.5 percent by volume  in 2008 while sales of the Top 100 wines fell by just 3.5 percent. This suggests some consolidation in this sector, which will make sense once I tell you what the best selling wines are.

The drop in restaurant wine sales overall is less than the numbers I’ve seen for upscale restaurants. One reason for this discrepancy as I understand it  is that Wiegand’s figures come from distributors, who report sales to all restaurants and on-premises establishments, not just purchases by select restaurants. So this gives us a picture of the broader market.

America’s Best Selling Restaurant Wines

Upscale restaurants of the sort that receive Wine Spectator awards get the most attention in the press, but casual dining restaurants are where the volume of wine sales is greatest. The top ten individual wines (by volume not value of sales) in 2008 were (drum roll) …

  1. Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay
  2. Cavit Pinot Grigio
  3. Beringer White Zinfandel
  4. Sutter Home White Zin
  5. Inglenook Chablis
  6. Ecco Domani Pinot Grigio
  7. Mezzacorona Pinot Grigio
  8. Copper Ridge Chardonnay
  9. Yellow Tail Chardonnay
  10. Franzia White Zin

None of these is an expensive wine and the #1 K-J is probably the costliest of the lot. The best selling restaurant (“on-premises”) wines are high-volume, widely-distributed inexpensive wines – just the sort that recession-ravaged consumers who want to trade down (in terms of price) and switch over (to a more relaxed view of wine) might find appealing.

Using the rule of thumb that a glass of restaurant wine sells for about the wholesale price of the bottle, these wines would sell from about $5 (for the Sutter Home) to maybe $8 (for the K-J Chard) per glass — and I suspect that a lot of this wine is sold by the glass. An affordable luxury, as they say.

Who Sells the Most Restaurant Wine (and How)?

If you are someone who dines mainly at three star restaurants where the wine list is really a leather-bound book that is handled with biblical reverence (and White Zinfandel must be a typographical error), the facts I’ve just stated about what America drinks when it dines out are probably pretty discouraging. But don’t give up hope just yet.

If you want to see the state of the art in American restaurant wine programs, follow your nose in the direction of the local shopping mall and get in line for a table at Olive Garden. Olive Garden’s 691 restaurants sell more wine than any other restaurant chain in the United States and its sales and education programs are a positive part of the transformation of American wine culture. Olive Garden is the optimistic future of American restaurant wine.

How does Olive Garden, a chain best known for its bottomless salad bowl and endless supply of tasty bread-sticks, sell so much wine (half a million cases in 2006, according to one source, probably much more than that today)? The short answer is education. Americans like wine and enjoy having it with food, but they are intimidated by everything about wine and need education before they are comfortable embracing wine. You’ve gotta learn ‘em before you can turn ‘em (into mainstream wine consumers).

The educational process at Olive Garden starts with staff, the people who are best placed to influence customer choice. Early on, Olive Garden established a relationship with the family that owns Rocca delle Macie winery in Tuscany. Specially selected staff travel to Italy each year to live, shop, eat, drink, cook and in general soak up knowledge and experience that can be used and shared back home — a  nice employee incentive that pays off in higher wine sales.

Back home, in partnership with several California wineries, Olive Garden has established a similar institute in Napa Valley.  Many restaurants expect that their wait-staff will pick up wine knowledge – Olive Garden really works at it by providing literally hundreds of thousands of hours of training. Of course, it has the chain-wide scale to make this investment pay off.

Selling Wine By Giving It Away

So Olive Garden staff are likely to know their wine list (37 wines from Italy, California, Washington and Australia, 35 of which are available by the glass) and which wines match well with different dishes, but how to you get patrons to try them – and especially to move out of their comfort zone and try something new?

The answer is … wait for it … to give away free samples! Patrons at many Olive Garden restaurants (this is America — local regulations vary) are offered small samples of different wines along with advice on menu pairing. The Italian house wines are the Pincipato brand made by Cavit that sells for $5.35 a glass and $32 for a 1.5 liter bottle meant to be shared family-style. Bottle prices of other wines range from $21 for the Sutter Home White Zin on up to $110 for Bertani Amarone. Most choices are in the $24-$34 range.

Olive Garden takes the free sample idea seriously, giving away 30,000 cases of wine in 2006 and presumably more today. That’s about 3-4 million tastes, according to my back-of-the envelope calculation. And it’s worth it, both in terms of wine sales and customer satisfaction. Customers like the wine, once they’d had a chance to try it, Olive Garden says, and it helps them enjoy the whole family dining experience more. No argument here — I can see how having one of those 1.5 liter bottles on the table would help a family relax and enjoy their meals.

The Olive Garden website continues the education process for customers who develop an interest, with basic Wine 101 information along with an interactive guide to pairing specific wines with particular menu items.

Confidence Game: Olive Garden, Costco and Trader Joe’s

The Olive Garden system sells wine, obviously, and it sells the idea of wine in a very healthy way. Olive Garden customers are more likely to try new wines and have fun with wine, I think, because they trust the Olive Garden brand.

Olive Garden has obviously invested a lot in its wine program and in research about what will appeal to its customers. There is less perceived risk in trying something new at Olive Garden. This is perhaps especially  important in selling some of the Italian wines, where both the producer (Mandra Rossa, for example, or Arancio) and wine name (Fiano or Nero d”Avola) would be unfamiliar to most diners.

In a way, Olive Garden has the same advantage when it comes to selling wine as Trader Joe’s and Costco. The seller’s trusted brand gives buyers confidence in making an otherwise uncertain purchase.

Olive Garden is big enough and smart enough to make the investment required to pursue this wine strategy. It’s a good thing in terms of the development of a healthy American wine culture, but it does contribute to the consolidation of the industry noted at the start of this post. Olive Garden needs large, reliable supplies of each wines to make its system work (minimum quantity 7500 cases, I think), which rules out smaller producers.

But Olive Garden doesn’t have to be everything to everyone and there is plenty of room in the marketplace for other types of restaurants and wine programs. If Olive Garden helps introduce middle America to a healthy idea of wine, it will have done a great service.  And I think that’s exactly what’s happening.

Will Wine Jump the Shark?

November 11, 2008 By in popular culture Leave a comment

To jump the shark means to go ridiculously over the top in a desperate attempt to stay relevant.  The term derives from a famously terrible episode of Happy Days where a character called The Fonz jumped over a dangerous shark on water skis (Fonzie wore the skis, not the shark, in case that wasn’t very clear).  The stunt was supposed to keep viewers glued to their screens, but it ultimately failed to delay the perhaps inevitable demise of this long-running classic TV series.

Wine Comes to Reality TV

Fonzie jumps the shark

Fonzie jumps the shark

I wonder if the recent wine boom has reached the point where it “jumps the shark” — turns from a positive long term trend to a self-destructive short term craze.  You never know when this could happen.  The rising interest in wine, the growing number of wineries, and the fantastic popularity of wine lifestyle products continues with no end in sight.  Maybe it’s more than a rising trend — maybe it’s become a bubble.

I was worried for a while about the celebrity wine phenomenon.  Maybe this was the start of the sort of silliness that culminates in a shark-jumping, bubble-popping tragedy (to mix metaphors rather extravagantly).  But, having thought about it a while, I’m not so concerned (see next blog entry).  I am not entirely comfortable with celebrity wine, but I don’t think it does any particular harm.  But now there’s this: wine is about to enter a  more terrifying terrain of popular culture, one that lies beyond simple celebrity:  reality TV.  This has me worried about the future of wine.   Very worried.

You Can Almost Blame the French

A press release arrived yesterday from the Côtes du Rhône winemakers industry association.  They are pleased to announce that they are the sponsors of The Wine Makers, a reality competition television show that will be aired in early January 2009 on — get this — PBS, America’s national public television network.

As near as I can tell from the website and YouTube.com videos, The Wine Makers will be a lot like those other television reality shows such as Top Chef and Project Runway.  A dozen aspiring winemakers from all walks of life are selected (from a pool of over 500 applicants) to gather in Paso Robles, California for a set of competitions. Someone will be ejected from the contest each week until there is only one winemaker left.  The winner’s prize includes the opportunity to launch a wine label and a trip to France.  Celebrity judges from the world of wine appear each week to vote contestants off of the vineyard or out of the cellar.  You know how it works.

The downside of this project is easy to see:  making wine is reduced to a silly competition among amateurs and semi-amateurs.  We are encouraged to root for and against these contestants and cheer or moan when their inevitable errors force them off the show.  Reality shows generally highlight personalities and play up conflict.  They sometimes focus more on the harsh realities of life than the happy ones. Needless to say I wasn’t too thrilled to imagine wine trivialized in this way when I read the press release.  And I wasn’t very happy with the French, either, for sponsoring the show.

It is interesting to speculate about the  motives of the Rhone Valley winemakers in sponsoring this project.  The contestants won’t be making Rhone wines, of course — the show is set in California and Rhone wines can only be made in France — but it sounds like they will be making what are sometimes called Rhone Ranger wines — New World wines made from Rhone valley varietals like Syrah and Viognier.  Perhaps, in a rather unexpected turnabout, the French producers hope to raise their profile in the U.S. through sponsored association with New World Rhone wine wannabes.  Hmmm.  I guess I’ll have to wait and see how that plays out!

No Wine Before Its Time

And maybe I should withhold judgment about the whole reality show idea, too.  On one hand, I am put off by the idea of a reality winemaking competition.  On the other hand, the show’s producers promise that the competition will lead us through all of the stages of making wine.  So maybe there will be a significant educational component and instead of trivializing wine it will make us better informed about it.  I am all in favor of wine education and if it comes packaged in a reality TV format, well that might be OK.

I guess I will have to watch the show to find out.  Will I come away feeling like I’ve closed my wine knowledge gap with Master of Wine Jancis Robinson just a little?  Or will I feel more like The Fonz, speeding recklessly across the lake toward a ski jump and shark pool dressed only in a pair of Speedos and a motorcycle jacket?  I guess only time will tell.

Check you local PBS listings for The Wine Makers in January 2009. Are you interesting in being a contestant in the planned second season of the show?  If so, visit the website to learn how to apply.

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