License to Steal 2024: Forging Best Practices in Wine Marketing

March 5, 2024 By Mike Veseth in wine, wine education, wine markets 1 Comment

I will be in Syracuse, New York, next week to speak at License to Steal, a national wine marketing conference that is being held in conjunction with the Eastern Winery Exposition.

License to Steal? Well, it is all about wine industry people gathering to talk about their marketing experiences, encouraging each other to “steal” strategies that have worked as a way to grow the total market pie. This would be called “sharing best practices” in consultant-speak. It is a great idea whatever you call it and very important today when the wine industry faces many headwinds.

License to Steal is nearly 20 years old. It started when seven state association directors (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) got together. It is a national conference today, providing an important grassroots forum for wine marketing information.

Donniella Winchell, Executive Director of the Ohio Wine Producers Association and Conference Chair, describes License to Steal as “a place where wineries, growers, and ancillary entities willingly share, collaborate, and contribute to the future strength of the grape and wine communities across the nation. Sessions are lively, interactive, and led by some of the most exciting marketing minds in the business.”

I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Syracuse, learning as much as I can, and contributing a few ideas of my own, Here is the program agenda. Lots to talk about, think about, and plenty to steal, too.

Wednesday, March 13
8:15 – 9:15
Mike Veseth, The Wine Economist
Secrets of the World’s Most Respected Wine Regions
Wine economist Mike Veseth probes the world’s most respected wine regions to uncover the
secrets of their success and reveals how these secrets can be applied to wine regions around the
world.

9:25 – 9:55
Karen Thornton, AVA Program Manager
Avoiding AVA Petition Pitfalls
This presentation will help applicants move through their application with a minimum of
mistakes and resulting subsequent delays in the approval process.

9:55 – 10:10
Jim Trezize, President, WineAmerica
How WineAmerica represents your interests in Washington
Learn how this dynamic organization serves as a sounding board, represents your interests and
helps to protect the industry’s future as we deal with the coming pressures from the neo
prohibitionists, shipping issues, including the coming Farm Bill as is crafted in Congress.

10:10 – 10:25
Michael Kaiser, Vice President, Wine America
Legislative and Regulatory updates from Washington
An update from Washington on issues of concern to the American Wine industry including
Ingredient and Nutrition Labeling, Interstate shipping issues, and music licensing.

10:25 – 10:40 Coffee break

10:45 – 11:25
Ankita Okate, Chief Growth Officer, Beverage Trade Network | USATT
Using AI to take your winery into the techno future PRE-RECORDED
This topic encompasses the current impact of AI on the business, future AI trends, and
opportunities, preparing for the AI revolution, personalized recommendations, predicting market
demand and consumer preferences, quality control, compliance with regulations, enhancing the
sensory experience, sustainability, inventory management, and the future of the industry.

11:25- noon
Steal Session – Identifying New “on-ramps” For Our Industry
As boomers age and the Z generation’s affinity for RTDs and bourbon is ever-growing, we need
to find new ways to build new ‘on ramps’ to maintain the vitality of our industry

Lunch and visit the trade show

2:30 – 3:15
Maureen Ballatori, 29 Design Studio
Algorithms Reward Accounts That Share Videos
As social media moves more and more toward entertainment, algorithms reward accounts that
share videos. Video content tends to receive more impressions and a wider reach. In this session,
we’ll go beyond the basics to look at what truly moves the needle on social media.

3:15 – 3:30
Roger Brooks – Destination International – video PRE-RECORDED
Words that work
As marketing programs are designed, using the ‘correct’ words will provide the foundation for
success.

3:40 – 4:20
Clint Bradley, the Bradley group
New Customer Experiences & Inter-Generational Connections
What’s Old is New will focus on opportunities for the wine industry to capitalize on current
societal and demographic trends. Hint: it’s about creating new customer experiences and
building intergenerational connections by introducing young people to wine in ways that touch all
the 5 senses.

4:20 – 4:40
Steal Session
Refreshing Events: Festivals, Trails, Dinners, Wine & Food Pairings
As wine festivals and events are experiencing diminishing attendance numbers, we will explore
new ideas and approaches to rebuild and re-imagine these marketing tools.

Thursday, March 14
8:20 – 9:20
Chris Puppione, Regional Account Manager for Coravin
Part 1 of a 2-part workshop
What I Talk About When I Talk About Tasting Rooms
Welcome to the modern world of hospitality, where customer loyalty is not good enough; we
must dedicate ourselves to transforming those we serve into passionate advocates. In an era when
the bar for hospitality in tasting rooms is set painfully low and satisfaction will not suffice, we
must redefine the game. We will discuss the power of listening, creating unforgettable moments that elevate experiences, and how to make it effortless for your customers to love your brand

9:30 – 10:30 –
Chris Puppione
Part 2 of a workshop
By mastering the art of influence, rapport-building, and storytelling, learn how to fulfill your
guests’ core needs while fostering a sense of belonging, status, and self-fulfillment. We will
discuss impactful ideas that help keep things fresh in developing exclusive experiences and will
make everyone want to be a part of your tribe. In this session, we will explore our current
hospitality economy and discuss how you can be the answer to building lasting cultures where
teams and customers stay for years, making it stunningly simple to get it right.

10:30 – 10:40 Coffee break

10:45 – 11:45 Bennett Caplan, FIVS and FIVAS Adbridge
What Does “No Safe Level” Or “NSL” View Of Alcohol Mean For The Wine Sector
There are those who are effectively reconceptualizing alcohol in terms of a view that any level of
alcohol consumption is associated with preventable diseases, such as cancer and heart disease.
What does this “no safe level” or “NSL” view of alcohol mean for the wine sector?

Lunch and visit the trade show

2:30 – 2:45
Steal Session: The WHO’s Wine as “Carcinogen” & the Neo-Prohibition Movement
Sharing ideas about the pressures from the re-emerging Neos: tactics, and potential action plans
to counter their efforts

2:45 – 3:30
Kathy Kelley, Penn State University, professor of Horticultural Marketing and Business
Management
Using Emotion to Engage and Build a Connection with Your Customers
Learn how to use emotion to enhance your customer relationship and improve your brand
commitment. Attendees will discover ways that positive feelings about a brand can significantly
impact consumer loyalty.

3:40 – 4:40
Roger Brooks
“Sell the Experience, not the Amenities” – video PRE-RECORDED
Research indicates that stories sharing engaging, interactive experiences will sell an attraction to
every generation while pretty, but mundane pictures of wine and tasting rooms will not sell them
effectively.

Book Review: What Can Wine and Coffee Learn from Each Other?

March 3, 2020 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, coffee, globalization, wine 4 Comments

51wdqn2bcpyl._sx324_bo1204203200_ Morten Scholer, Coffee and Wine: Two Worlds Compared. Matador/Troubador, 2018.

What can the coffee industry learn from wine (and vice versa)? That’s the question that Morten Scholer wanted to examine when he set out to write Coffee and Wine: Two Worlds Compared. It is the kind of question that gets attention here at The Wine Economist, where we search for lessons about the future of wine by looking at all sorts of other products ranging from craft beer to almond milk and beyond.

Coffee and wine are an interesting pairing. Both are global consumer goods, traded around the world for centuries. But, as Scholer points out, they differ in a hundred ways. Coffee, for example, is relatively young as an international commodity — 800 years compared to maybe 8000 years for wine.

North-North versus North-South

The most important markets for both coffee and wine are in the advanced industrialized world, as you might guess, but while a lot of wine is also produced there (Italy, France, Spain, Germany, the U.S.), coffee comes mainly from the developing world. Wine trade is thus mainly north-north (with important exceptions such as Argentina and South Africa), while coffee trade tends to be north-south.

So what can wine and coffee learn from each other? Scholer probably knows, but he wants his readers to find their own answers, which is both frustrating and engaging. It is frustrating because it is natural to seek out an over-arching narrative to help organize and guide the reader through the dozens and dozens of topics covered. You won’t find that here.

Serious Fun

Some of the comparisons are just plain fun, as in the chapter on quality and quality control when the wine aroma wheel is set alongside a coffee tasters flavor wheel. Who knew that flavors and aromas could be so complicated and that coffee and wine could have so many sensory qualities in common?

Other comparisons are seriously revealing. I found the comparative analysis of the development of sustainability movements in coffee and wine very interesting. Sustainability in coffee began as a top-down movement initially focused on assuring that growers received a fair return on their efforts, although a wider range of concerns are now addressed. Sustainability in wine, on the other hand, was a bottom-up movement based on grower concerns about environmental issues that has also broadened.

There are three main global sustainability programs for coffee, Scholer tells us, and almost half of world production meets these standards, although only about a third is marketed that way. In wine there are many different sustainability standards and programs reflecting the localized bottom-up origins of the movement. It is a complicated situation, Scholer argues, and he believes that sustainability standards for coffee are more complex than for wine in part because coffee has a long and complex value chain and meaningful sustainability must extend across the entire chain. Market structure really matters.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know?

Scholer’s eleven chapters take pretty much every aspect of wine and coffee and then breaks them down into comparative elements. Thus the reader moves from history to botany and agronomy, processing and quality control, patterns of trade, packaging and logistics, consumption patterns, sustainability issues, organizations and competitiions, cultural values, and finally a country-by-country side-by-side snapshort. An appendix briefly expands the book’s domain, adding cocoa, tea, and beer to the comparative mix.

Each section is peppered by boxes, charts and tables and illuminated with maps. If you are just looking for interesting tidbits, they are there on every page. Hard to put the book down.

Back to the Big Picture

But if you are looking for the answer to that big question about what wine and coffee have to say to each other, more effort is required. Scholer’s method is a bit like pointilist painting, where the image only becomes clear when you stand back a ways. What’s the big picture? Honestly, I am still working on it. Maybe one big macro answer doesn’t exist and that the insights are best appreciated at the micro level.

But I think it’s worth the effort to think about coffee and wine seriously. I tried to do that in a pair of Wine Economist columns back in 2009. My focus then was on the question of why the price difference between the cheapest and most expensive wines was so much greater than for the cheapest and costliest coffees. Wine does better than coffee in spanning the space from everyday commodity to luxury product. But, I wrote then, coffee will try to catch up and I think that’s happening today.

Scholer’s Coffee and Wine is an intriguing book. You can try to solve its riddle or just enjoy learning all about these two global industries. Either way, there’s food (and drink) for thought.

Wine Book Review: History on a Plate (and in a Glass?)

January 17, 2023 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Italian wine, wine, wine history 1 Comment

Andreas Viestad, Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal. Reaktion Books, 2022.

All roads lead to Rome, they say, so the idea of a history of the world centered in Rome is not ridiculous. And, for food writer and activist Andreas Viestad, all pathways in Rome lead to his favorite restaurant, La Carbonara, so it is the only logical place to begin.

When in Rome …

Viestad (a favorite in the Wine Economist household for his television series New Scandinavian Cooking), takes us through a meal at La Carbonara, reflecting upon the experience as the courses follow their traditional sequence.

Viestad’s stories are not as intentionally global as the “history of the world in one meal” subtitle might lead you to expect (note that this is “a” history, not “the” history). Instead he talks mainly about Rome and Romans, and then Italy and Italians, leaving it mainly to the reader to connect dots to the world-wide implications and insights. It’s fun! You learn a lot reading this book. And you get hungry, too.

The chapters are organized around the familiar elements of the Italy meal. Bread, antipasto, oil, and salt. Pasta, pepper, meat, fire, and lemon. And wine, of course, because this is dinner and this is Italy, so of course there is wine.

The best thing I can imagine would be to share a table at La Carbonara with Viestad and work through the phases of the meal with him, listening to the stories he tells. (There would be room for a guest — in the book he dines alone!) And then, stuffed with pleasure, we would take the stroll around Rome he describes in the final chapter, ending with a soothing/shocking scoop of intense lemon sorbetto (lemons being the last topic discussed).

Since this first-person experience is unlikely to take place, I guess the second best thing is to take up the opportunity to read this creative and interesting book.

The Problem with Wine

But there’s a problem. Taken as a food book or a history book or a cultural guide for anyone who loves Italy or Rome, it is hard to deny Dinner in Rome‘s charm. But from a wine perspective it is hard not to be disappointed.

This may be because, as I read other parts of the book, I was mentally writing the chapter I hoped Viestad would write about wine. That chapter, I thought, might mirror in some ways the chapter on pasta, which invokes the Italian idea of “the civilization of the table” that Viestad suggests might easily be confused with the idea of civilization itself.

Is there a civilization of the glass that we might raise up along with the civilization of the table? Some think so, I believe, and there is even an Italian journal devoted to the idea. It is called Civilta del Bere (the civilization of drinking). So, you see, I was thinking about a chapter that might stress the ways that wine brings people together and both shapes and reflects relationships, both at the table and in other ways.

While the chapter that Viestad writes addresses many aspects of wine, his main point is that wine is alcohol and the point of alcohol is inebriation much of the time. The idea that wine is just the local alcohol makes me sad, since I think wine has much more to offer than that, but it is a problem since there are many who have this view. My latest book Wine Wars II finishes with a section on “Wine’s Triple Crisis,” which examines the wine = alcohol syndrome and concludes that it is a threat to the future of wine as we know it. If wine is just alcohol, who needs it? There are cheaper ways to get numb!

Civilization of the Glass

Would it be possible to write a history of the world that framed wine and the civilization of the glass in a different way? Yes, I know it is possible because it has already been done. Economist editor Tom Standage’s 2005 book A History of the World in 6 Glasses uses beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola to trace an outline of global history.

It is interesting that Standage and Viestad focus on the same places and periods when it comes to wine: ancient Greece and Rome. But Standage tells very different stories. The Greek symposium, which in Viestad is all about getting drunk, is for Standage all about philosophy and, if the alcoholic temptation of drink is there (and it is), it is a passion to be resisted and controlled — a process that we might call civilization.

As Greek trade took wine throughout the Mediterranean, Greek culture and civilization tagged along. The civilization of wine and civilization — hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Wine in Rome, in Standage’s telling, has many layers. Taste, class, power, and empire all appear. If wine were just its alcoholic component it would not have been so important. I guess I stand with Standage in my thinking about the civilization of the glass and I feel a little bit sorry for Viestad that he doesn’t find more interesting stories in his half-full glass.

Highly Recommended

I wonder — would it be possible to write a book that tried to tell a history of the world in one wineglass the way that Viestad has done with one meal? Yes, I think it might work, although you’d need to break things down a bit so that the grapes, glass, bottle, cork, and the forces that spread them around the world and then brought them all back together wineglass could tell their stories.

But deconstructing your glass of wine wouldn’t be enough, as Viestad demonstrates with his Roman dinner. You also have to consider the whole and its significance. The civilizations of the table … and the glass.

Dinner in Rome by Andreas Viestad is highly recommended. A fine addition to your food and wine bookshelf.

Finding Growth in a Stagnant Market: What Can Wine Learn from Beer?

September 14, 2021 By Mike Veseth in Rabobank, wine, wine markets 3 Comments

Although it is hard to pick out trends with confidence in the current topsy-turvy wine market environment, it is fair to say that there is growing concern that global wine consumption has reached a plateau. This is not a new phenomenon, as I wrote back in January 2019, when I pointed out “global wine’s lost decade.”

Where do you find growth in a stagnant market? One strategy, which I pointed out in a March 2019 column about Precept Brands success, is to take advantage of the fact that there are always some growing market segments. Flexible producers will follow the money, investing where the growth is. Trying to take market share from other beverage alcohol categories in another strategy, of course, but wine suffers a cost disadvantage here. Wine’s per-serving cost is higher in general that either beer or spirits.

So what is to be done? A recent Rabobank report about global beer provides food for thought about what’s ahead for global wine. Beer? What can wine learn from beer? Well, beer hit a global sales plateau first and so has had more time to develop strategies.

Rabobank’s Beer Quarterly Q3 2021: The Beer Wars analyzes the beer industry’s response to stagnant demand in terms of the different strategies adopted in Japan, the US, and Europe.

Japanese Beer’s Diversification Strategy

The Japanese beer industry faced a crisis earlier than brewers in the US and Europe according to the Rabobank report, and so have had more time to find new growth strategies. Starting in the 1980s the beer market was disrupted by a combination of generational transitions (younger drinkers turned off by what they saw as grandfather’s beer), shifts in path to market (the rise of convenience stores and vending machine sales), and the advent of new competition in the form of chul-hai, an easy-drinking RTD cocktail.

Japanese brewers responded in many ways, including the innovation success of Asahi Super Dry, but the main strategy that the Rabobank report identifies is diversification into other product lines. Japanese brewers compensated for stagnant or falling per-capita beer sales by expanding into other markets from production technology to pharmaceuticals to nutritional supplements where existing strengths could be exploited. The process was slow, the report suggests, and required considerable investment.

It is easy to see wine industry parallels in the problems that Japanese beer faced. Generational transition? Shifting market pathways? Easy-drinking alternatives (think hard seltzer today). Constellation Brands has diversified within the beverage alcohol space through its Mexican beer business and made initial moves into cannabis, too. LVMH has long pursued a diversification strategy — its wine business is part of a diversified portfolio of luxury brands.

US Beer Follows the Money

A second strategy, which the Rabobank report associates with the US beer market, is diversification into other beverage categories such as ready-to-drink coffee and tea, energy drinks, sports drinks, hard seltzer, and so forth. Part of the logic, I think, is to exploit scale economies in beverage distribution and the name recognition derived from established brands and part is simply following market growth wherever it takes you. MolsonCoors changed its name to MolsonCoors Beverage to signal that it isn’t just a beer company any more.

I admit that I was stunned to see Pabst Blue Ribbon hard coffee on beer aisle of the local Safeway, but it fits with this strategy and reminds me of the time a few years ago when Coca Cola decided that it could leverage its distribution network comparative advantage to enter the wine business by purchasing Taylors wine company (transforming it into Taylors California Cellars) as well as Napa Valley’s Sterling Vineyards. Coca Cola lost interest in their wine diversification strategy after a few years, however, as the margins on wine couldn’t match its soft drink profits and sold the brans to Seagrams.

It is easy to see some wine producers adopting this strategy in the US, too, especially in the canned segment where wine, various wine spritz drinks, and hard seltzer products fill the shelves.

European Beer M&A and Internationalization

Finally, the Rabobank report identifies an M&A and internationalization strategy that it associated with European beer producers. This is the “go big” part of “go big or go home.” European brewers such as Heineken and Carlsberg have evolved into firms with both multinational markets and multinational production networks, too.

Heineken is currently negotiating purchase of control of South Africa’s Distell, the world’s second largest (after Heineken itself) cider maker as well as an important spirits and wine producer. This transaction would further expand Heineken’s footprint in Africa, a market with substantial potential for growth.

Consolidation has been an important recent theme in the wine business, too. Gallo’s scale after the Constellation Brands deal is quite incredible. And I think this trend will continue both in wine production and distribution. But the global wine is still quite fragmented compared with global beer.

What Can Wine Learn?

Beer has had to face a stagnant global market for longer than wine and has developed a number of strategies to expand volume or grow margins. Very large wine companies have learned the lessons of their beer industry colleagues and pursued similar approaches, but it is still early days for wine compared to beer.

Can beer provide insights for medium sized wine producers, of which there are many around the world? This is less clear simply because consolidation in the beer industry has hollowed out this market segment

Wine and Inflation: Will the Rising Tide Lift Wine’s Boat?

May 10, 2022 By Mike Veseth in economic crisis, Economic impact, wine, wine markets, wine price 1 Comment

The U.S. is experiencing the highest inflation rates since the 1980s and cost-of-living increases are on everyone’s mind here and around the world. The Federal Reserve has signaled that it will speed up monetary tightening to try to reverse rising inflationary expectations — too little and too late, according to the Economist newspaper (The Federal Reserve Has Made a Historic Mistake on Inflation).

I am very concerned about how higher inflation will impact the wine industry, especially when combined with a stagnant overall economy (GDP actually fell in the US in Q1/2022).

The Big Squeeze

Costs are increasing, some dramatically, throughout the wine and grape commodity chains and rising interest rate expenses will add to cost woes. The list of cost factors is long and includes energy, fertilizer, transportation, glass and other inputs, and especially labor, which remains in short supply.

Will growers and wineries be able to hold on to their margins by passing higher costs along to consumers in the form of higher prices? A lot of people I talk to think so. Surveys suggest that many wineries plan to raise prices in 2022 and there is an attitude that consumers might not push back too much, given that the price of everything else is rising, too.

So I am a little bit surprised that some of the data suggests that wine prices have not risen along with the prices of other goods — at least not yet. Wine Business Monthly, for example, cites NielsenIQ data on average bottle prices. The May 2022 issue reported an average price of $8.52 for the most recent 4 week survey period, up from $8.18 reported in the May 2021 issue — an increase of 4.1 percent. Average domestic bottle price rose from $8.12 to $8.46 and average import bottle prices rose from $8.35 to $8.69.

The Booze Bust

Prices are rising, according to these figures, but at about half the current rate of overall inflation. NielsenIQ doesn’t measure all sales channels, of course, and there is a lag in the data, so maybe prices are really rising faster than these numbers suggest and wine industry margins will hold.

But the IRI data shown above, taken from a recent Rabobank report about inflation and the beer market suggest that wine in particular and beverage alcohol in general is struggling to increase prices in line with rising costs. Take a close look at the top half of this table, which shows that some non-alcohol beverage categories have been able to boost price much faster than the roughly 8% general inflation rate for the U.S. economy — topped by sports drinks with an incredible 17%+ annual rate price increase. Wow!

Beer, wine, and spirits have all increased average prices, but much less than, say, coffee, and substantially below the overall inflation rates. In other words, the real price of wine, on average, has actually fallen in the last year and the relative price of wine with respect to some other beverage categories has fallen, too. Averages hide a lot, of course, and some strong brands have successfully pushed prices higher while others have not. But beverage alcohol generally, according to the Rabobank figures, has fallen behind in terms of price.

Why haven’t wine prices increases faster.? Here are a few of the many possible explanations.

Radar’s Rule. Wine prices will increase — “wait for it,” as Radar used to say on M.A.S.H. — it just takes time for price changes to work their way through the system. It is hard to refute this because it is impossible to know the future. Maybe there is something about wine’s annual production cycle that causes price changes to come more slowly. But then why do beer and spirits, which are in continuous production, also lag behind the inflation rankings?
The Wall. Consumer pushback is too strong in the wine category for large price increases to take hold. Yes, I agree that wine buyers are very price sensitive, but prices do rise when they are driven by short supply. And of course there is the whole premiumization phenomenon, where consumers pay more for what they see as better products while resisting price rises on products they already buy.
The Hidden Price Increase Trick. Candy bar makers sometimes try to disguise price increases by simply shrinking the size of the product. Wine makers can do something a bit like that by shifting grape sources from coastal to inland vineyards and in some cases by blending in wines from earlier vintages. Consumers may not notice (just as they might not immediately realize their candy snack has shrunk a little). Wineries can also increase their average revenue by reducing production of lower-tier wines, shifting the grapes up the ladder.
Three-tier Blues. It’s the three-tier system, where producers sell to distributors who sell to retailers who sell to consumers. On one hand this system means that there are three margins at stake and to each tier has an interest in raising the price at which it sells wine. But each tier also has an incentive to resist increases in its cost of goods. So distributors push back on producers who want to raise price, retailers push back on distributors, and consumers push back on retailers. The three-tier effect may explain why the lowest average price increases in the Rabobank table above are for beer, wine, and spirits.

More Questions Than Answers

There are other theories and explanations about inflation and the wine category, but perhaps the most important thing to say is that, with the most recently experience of significant U.S. inflation so far back int he rearview mirror, we are left with more questions than answers.

All the basics — the who, what, when, where, how, and why of the wine market have changed very dramatically since the 1970s and 1980s.

Will wine prices rise in line with inflation? If so, when? And how will consumers react? Come back next week for more analysis.

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Thanks to Steve Fredricks at Turrentine Brokerage for stimulating my thinking on this topic.

We Are All Terroirists Now

April 27, 2021 By Mike Veseth in Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, Wine Wars 3 Comments

The third section of my book Wine Wars, which is celebrating its 10th birthday this year, is called “the Revenge of the Terroirists.” As I explained in last week’s Wine Economist column, Wine Wars argues that globalization pushes the wine market forward, which is great, but one market reaction to this “creative destruction” is rationalization, which can be both good and bad.

What’s to keep wine from going off the rails and becoming just another branded consumer good? Well, it could easily happen and has happened in some cases, but I’m an optimist and, in Wine Wars, I argued that people who understand wine and appreciate what makes it different from commodity products would be a force strong enough to keep wine safe.

It’s a Wine World After All

I wasn’t the only person to see the wine market as this sort of conflict. Jonathan Nossiter’s 2004 film Mondovino took a decidedly less optimistic view of this battlefield. The forces of globalization and commodification (symbolized by the Mondavi family brand in this poster for the film), are determined and powerful. Can the first terroirist we meet in the film, Giovanni Battista Columbu, guardian of Malvasia di Bosa in Sardinia (shown here below the Mondavis) possibly stand in the way of the global market juggernaut?

If that’s the war — big vs little, money vs traditional values — then it would seem like the wine wars have already been lost. But that’s not necessarily how things have to work out.

Large wine businesses are not all the same. For one thing, only a surprisingly small proportion of wine business are public corporations with professional managements than have to answer to investors with constantly rising quarterly profits and share prices. As I have pointed out before, a great many wine businesses, even the largest of them (think Gallo!) are family firms that think in generational terms. This long term thinking doesn’t guarantee a terroirist attitude, but it at least sometimes points in that direction.

B Corps, Slow Wine

Indeed, a number of important wine businesses are benefit corporations (B-Corps for short). Oregon’s A to Z Wineworks was the first in this growing group and Portugal’s Symington Family Estates one of the most internationally recognized. Fetzer, the California winery long known for its environmental focus, was the world’s largest B Corp wine company … until last Friday! That’s when its parent company, Viña Concha y Toro, announced that all of its global operations had received B Corp certification. Amazing!

B Corps make no specific commitment to terroir, of course, which is natural since they can be found in all sorts of industries (the little coffee shop on the corner hereabouts is part of a B Corp operation). But the values that B Corps commit themselves to supporting are different from those of the stereotypical corporate behemoth.

I’m also encouraged by my study of the Slow Food movement. Founded in Italy but now spanning the globe, Slow Food is a grassroots counterpoint to industrial food and agriculture. It doesn’t confront global corporations directly by, for example, bombing McDonalds restaurants the way French anti-globalization protestors used to do. Slow Food instead works to identify products and practices of tradition and terroir and then seeks to promote and preserve them using the very tools of media and markets that we usually associate with industry. Slow Food uses the weapons of global capitalism against itself, an elegant irony, don’t you think?

Slow Wine is a thing, too, and the guide to Slow Wine USA 2021 has just been released. You should check it out.

We Are All Terroirists Now

To paraphrase a comment attributed to both Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon (see note below), we are all terroirists now. Well, almost all or at least a lot more of us. The reason: climate change. Climate change is real and it is a crisis, even if we don’t treat it like a crisis (compare the reaction to the Covid global pandemic to climate change and you can see that climate isn’t given the same priority). Last year’s wildfires and this spring’s killer European frosts are reminders of the climate’s destructive volatility.

The wine business needs to take account of changing environmental conditions and, while this isn’t the same vision of terroirism that you see in Mondovino, it is a step in that direction. More steps are needed, both to address the environmental risks and to secure the future of wine.

I’m trying to figure out where the natural wine movement fits into the revenge of the terroirists. Natural wine producers often fit the terroirist stereotype that Jonathan Nossiter established in Mondovino. In fact, Nossiter has written a book about them called Cultural Insurrection: A Manifesto for Arts, Agriculture, and Natural Wine.. Natural wine advocates in Nossiter’s telling of the story tend to define wine more narrowly than I do (something that I pointed out in reaction to Nossiter’s book), but they still contribute to the “revenge” I hope to see.

Not Exactly a Manifesto

Nossiter’s vision of wine sees a world of industrial wine versus natural wine and industrial wine needs to disappear because, well, it isn’t really wine at all. It’s just a toxic chemical concoction. A lot of people see wine in terms of a dichotomy — wine of the market versus wine of place, commercial wine versus fine wine, you get the idea. Generally they make this distinction in order to favor one type of wine — almost always the terroirist side of the equation.

My realist perspective is that there many types of wine, including high volume commercial wines. They are all wine and each category fills a consumer niche. What is important to me is that the big doesn’t crowd out the small, that terroir wines and the terroir that produces them endures. And that consumers understand the choices they make and their implications.

It’s a complicated situation, a fact easily illustrated by the case of Canadian billionaire Anthony von Mandl. Terroirist or not? You be the judge!

On one hand, von Mandl is the head of the company that makes Mike’s Hard Lemonade and White Claw hard seltzer. These terroir-free alco-pop beverages are insanely popular and my market research friends tell me that they are partly responsible for declining sales of inexpensive (and, it must be said, also relatively terroir-free) commodity wine.

On the other hand, however, von Mandl is the Robert Mondavi of the Okanagan Valley in Canada. He’s the founder of iconic Mission Hill Winery and, according to a recently VinePair report, is a driving force in British Columbia’s organic wine movement. Six wineries in von Mandl’s Mark Anthony Group are leading the charge, converting about 1300 acres to organic viticulture: Mission Hill Family Estate, CedarCreek Estate Winery, Road 13 Vineyards, Liquidity Wines, Martin’s Lane and Checkmate Artisanal Winery.

Do you appreciate irony here? White Claw money funding a terroirist revenge in the beautiful Okanagan Valley.

Whether you think of terroirism as a broad phenomenon or a narrow reaction movement, I hope you can see its importance in the wine wars of today and the battles of tomorrow. Are we all really terroirists now? No, not really. But the I think the wine world has come a long way from the David versus Goliath world of Mondovino.

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“We are all Keynesians now” is the comment commonly attributed to Friedman and Nixon and if they were still alive they would probably repeat the saying again. I cannot think of any time in the past 40 years when fiscal policy has been more important.

Wine Wars: Curses, Miracles, and Revenge

April 13, 2021 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, Wine Wars Leave a comment

Wine Wars 2011: the first books arrive.

As I explained in last week’s Wine Economist column, this is the tenth anniversary of the publication of my first book on the wine business, Wine Wars. Although the catchy title (suggested by the smart marketing people at Rowman & Littlefield) gets your attention, it is the long subtitle that outlines the book’s argument. This is a story of “the Curse of the Blue Nun, the Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists.”

Here is a quick sketch of the book’s argument. I’ll return next week with thoughts about how things have changed (and how the argument has held up) in the decade since publication.

Curse of the Blue Nun

Blue Nun was arguably the world’s first global wine brand, so it represents the argument that globalization has been a powerful force in the wine world. What’s the curse? Well Blue Nun began as a very high quality German wine but, as it and other wines like it became more successful, eventually quality suffered. Blue Nun continued to sell, but it wasn’t the same. The curse of globalization is therefore that success on the global market can be double-edged, both creating and destroying.

Globalization has brought a world of wines to our door, which is also good and bad. This is the paradox of choice. No choice is bad. It is like the old Soviet joke where everything is either mandatory or forbidden. But too much choice is bad, too, and can be a particular problem for wine. It is not unusual for upscale supermarkets to have more than 1000 different wines on the shelf at prices ranging from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars. Wow! Not always easy to make sense of such an over-whelming selection.

Miracle of Two Buck Chuck

One way that many consumers react to this, the most confusing aisle in the store, is to confuse price with quality. Cheap wines must be bad. Expensive ones must be good. Clever marketers take advantage of this misconception in all sorts of ways that I discussed in the book. Hence the miracle of Two Buck Chuck. For many years Trader Joe’s stories in the U.S. sold a wine called Charles Shaw for $1.99 (do you see the two buck Chuck in that)? And millions of people who might otherwise have drifted away from the wine wall bought it and enjoyed it. TBC is an important element of the democratization of wine in America.

People think the miracle of Two Buck Chuck is its price, but let me assure you that you can make and sell a wine for $2 if you want to. In Europe I saw a wine that was one euro for a liter in tetra-pack carton. That’s equivalent to one buck Chuck! No the miracle is that consumers would buy it despite its bottom shelf price. They bought TBC because they trusted Trader Joe’s to sell good value products and then, having tried it, they trusted Two Buck Chuck to deliver consistently. Trader Joe’s and the Bronco Wine Company that makes TBC created a powerful brand that has sold millions and millions of bottles.

Commercial brands are one way to help consumers break out of the paradox of choice by economizing on trust. You don’t have to trust the grape variety or the appellation or the vintage year. You only have to trust the brand. That simplifies things for sure. But there’s a risk. Albert Einstein said that everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. And that’s true of wine, too. If branding and commoditization simply wine too much and undermine its quality, then the miracle can quickly become a curse!

Revenge of the Terroirists

What is there to keep wine from becoming just another branded commodity? I am an optimist, so I proposed a counter-force that I called the revenge of the terroirists. This term, taken from the French terroir, has caused a little confusion over the years. I am sure that Wine Economist readers know what I mean, but auto-spell programs always try to correct it and there was even one case where a gentleman came to one of my talks thinking that I was speaking about terrorists and wine. Terroir. Terror. Hmmmm. Easy to see how that could happen.

In fact, some terroirists back then were terrorists, or at least they used terrorist tactics to oppose the incursion of industrial wine into the south of France. But I wasn’t counting on violence to hold back the commodification tide. No, I put my money on the dedicated few who opposed industrial wines the same way that the Slow Food movement (which I wrote about in my Globaloney books) opposes industrial food — by fostering an alternative rooted in and celebrating tradition but using the best appropriate modern practices.

Would the terroirist resistance endure? It wasn’t a sure thing then (or now either, I suppose) but I was cautiously optimistic. As the last line of the book says, I still have grape expectations.

A Trip to Napa Valley

Each of Wine Wars’s three sections ends with an invitation to taste some wines that illustrate the relevant part of the argument. The final tasting re-creates a trip that Sue and I took just as work on the book was coming to an end. We were in California for a meeting of academic wine economists at the University of California at Davis. We skipped the sessions one afternoon and drove to Napa Valley. We made three stops: a small family winery, a larger and more famous firm — Frog’s Leap — whose winemaker John Williams is world-famous for his terroirist work. We ended the day at the Robert Mondavi Winery where our academic colleagues had gathered for the conference closing banquet.

Frog’s Leap is still going strong, principles in-tact, with the next generation hard at work. That small family winery no longer exists. The wine business is hard and every year new wineries spring up while old wineries quietly fade away. Robert Mondavi is still there, of course, but it is no longer owned by the Mondavi family. They incorporated their winery in order to get resources for new projects and then lost control of it. Constellation Brands is the owner now.

The China Syndrome

The penultimate chapter of Wine Wars is called The China Syndrome and it provides an interesting perspective on how much things have changed in just ten years. China was best known in the wine world back then as place to sell Bordeaux wines, both the iconic first growths but also lesser wines, even from questionable vintages. The Chinese couldn’t get enough Bordeaux.

Submerged under that sea of Bordeaux, however, was a growing Chinese wine industry — that’s what caught my eye. I reported on my first taste of a Chinese wine and it wasn’t very pleasant. Ashtray, coffee grounds, a whiff of urinal crust. Ugh! Bad Chinese wine was very bad indeed, as bad wine is everywhere.

But I also reported on a much different experience — a bottle of Grace Vineyards Cabernet Franc that we shared at an Open That Bottle Night dinner. Very nice indeed and it made me wonder where Chinese wine was headed (a question that continues to interest me — I’ve written about China in each of the subsequent wine books). Not good vs bad — I was pretty sure that better wine would rise to the top. No I wondered if Chinese wine would try to copy-cat the French as wine has done in so many other places. Or would the wine industry there develop in a way that reflects its particular terroir — wine with particular Chinese characteristics?

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I do think that the overall argument of Wine Wars has help up pretty well, which is a bit of a surprise given how much has changed. What would I change if I were writing it again now? Come back next week to find out.

Wine Book Review: Adventures on the China Wine Trail

February 18, 2020 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, China wine, Economic impact, emerging wine regions, extreme wine, wine, wine exports 2 Comments

china Cynthia Howson & Pierre Ly, Adventures on the China Wine Trail: How Farmers, Local Governments, Teachers, and Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the Wine World. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

I remember my first taste of Chinese wine very well. My university student Brian brought a bottle of 1999 Changyu Cabernet Sauvignon back from his study abroad semester in Beijing. It didn’t really taste much like Cabernet, but it was the smell that really got me. “Ashtray, coffee grounds, urinal crust” was the tasting note I found on the internet. Exactly. Quite an experience.

The second taste was not much better. Matt, another student, found a case of Dragon’s Hollow Riesling in a Grocery Outlet store in McMinneville, Oregon. He gave me a couple of bottles that I tried (but failed) to serve at a student tasting. The smell (something rotten?) got in the way of tasting and the wine went down the drain.

I learned two things from these tastings. First, maybe my students were out to kill me! And second, Chinese wine had a long way to go.

And a long way it has come, too, in only a few years. That’s one of the messages of Cynthia Howson’s and Pierre Ly’s fast-paced new book, Adventures on the China Wine Trail. Howson and Ly, partners in life as well as wine research, might have been initially attracted to Chinese wine by its peculiar taste and unexpected existence. But as they have immersed (I nearly said marinated) themselves in the wine, the people, the geography, and the culture they have discovered so much more, which they enthusiastically share with their readers.

Adventures on the China Wine Trail works on many levels. It is in part the record of the authors’ personal journeys and it is interesting to travel with them as they lug their seemingly-bottomless wine suitcase from place to place. The authors have an amazing mastery of the detail of the people and places, food and wine. It’s almost like being there.

In fact, the book works as a travel guide as well wine journey account, providing information of where to go, what to do, where to stay, and so on. But beware: Howson and Ly aren’t your typical tourists, so while they do take us on a walk along part of the Great Wall, this is only because they took part in a wine conference quite close by. They still haven’t seen the famous Terracotta soldiers despite spending time in that region. They couldn’t pull themselves away from the wineries. Maybe next time, they sigh.

More practical advice appears in the closing chapters. Where should you go to buy or drink excellent Chinese wine if you visit China? They have recommendations for you. And when will you be able to enjoy Chinese wines (good ones, not the drain-cleaner stuff) at home? Sooner than you think, they say.

Some of the wines are already here, including the $300 Ao Yun that Pierre bought at a Total Wine in Washington State. But that is just the iceberg’s tip and if you are reading this in London or Paris you may know that Chinese wines are no longer the shocking discovery that they were just a few years ago.

And how are the wines? They vary in quality, just like wines from any place else. But many of them (more each year) are excellent and even distinctive. I know this both because Howson and Ly tell us about the wines and also because Sue and I have been fortunate to share some of their Chinese finds — including that luxury Ao Yun.

There’s a final layer to the story that I can’t forget. Howson and Ly are both professors and serious scholars. Although the book doesn’t read like an academic treatise, it has a serious purpose. The authors began their study of the Chinese wine industry wondering where it might lead? Could wine possibly be the basis of sustainable rural economic development? Or was it an alcoholic dead end in terms of a greater purpose?

Chinese wine’s journey has been anything but simple or smooth and continues today. It will be a long time, I suspect, before we know for sure how the story will end. But as for economic development, Howson and Ly have overcome their doubts. Wine in China is the real deal, whatever specific shape it takes in the future. All the hard work of the farmers, government officials, teachers and entrepreneurs we meet in the book has succceeded in building a viable industry.

So here’s my tasting note: Adventures on the China Wine Trail is a fast-paced journey through the world of Chinese wines that will appeal to readers who love wine, China, travel, or who just looking a good adventure yarn. Highly recommended.

Got Wine? Is It Time for a Generic Wine Promotion Campaign?

December 3, 2019 By Mike Veseth in wine, wine markets 4 Comments

I’ve had several conversations recently that circled back to the idea that the wine industry should invest in a generic promotion campaign. You know what I mean. Not “Got Milk?” (maybe the most celebrated generic promotion of all time), but something along the lines of “Got Wine?” or “Got California Wine?” depending on who’s talking.

“Got Wine?” is too copy-cat to work, of course. You can come up with something better if you give it some thought. But you get the idea.

Subsidy Wars?

One argument for generic promotion of wine is based on the realization that wine isn’t connecting with new, younger consumers the way we hoped or expected. If we want consumers to have a particular image of wine (or of the wine-drinker identity), maybe we should be more proactive in shaping perceptions. Laissez-faire isn’t working so well. Let’s do something.

A second argument, which would support “Got California Wine?” or “Got American Wine?” is provoked by the subsidies the European Union is giving to its member states to promote their wines in the U.S. market.

Years ago the EU used to support prices and winegrower incomes directly, but buying up surplus grapes and wine (we called the result the European Wine Lake). Now the EU has changed tactics and supports the modernization of wine production and the promotion of exports. Basically, they want the wines to be marketable and if the EU market won’t buy it all (and it won’t), then exports are promoted to avoid re-filling the dreaded lake.

This is a better approach from an economic standpoint, but you cannot blame American producers for thinking that it creates an uneven playing field. It might be better, many argue, to get the EU to stop subsidizing wine export promotion. But that would be complicated and take time. In the short run, the argument goes, generic promotion of U.S. wines might even things up a little.

Milk is All Over

Talking about wine promotion got me thinking about milk. That “Got Milk?” promotion ran for 25 years and attracted lots of attention. All sorts of celebrities posed with milk mustaches (aka moo-staches) to draw attention to milk and its broad appeal. Everyone enjoys milk — that was the message. The Whoopi Goldberg ad was my favorite.

But, memorable as these advertisements are, they were fighting a losing battle. Increasingly, American consumers don’t follow the “Got Milk?” path.

milk I first realized this a few years ago when I heard wine economics guru Karl Storchmann talk about trends in various consumer beverages. He examined Google data about searches for wine, tea, coffee, milk, and water and concluded that while water was rocking it, milk was fading fast. “Milk is all over,” Karl said at the time (here is a pdf of his study).

Karl wasn’t wrong. Dean Foods, America’s largest milk producer, filed for bankruptcy in November 2019. Milk sales fell for 4 years in a row as Americans shifted to plant-based cow-milk alternatives, including oat milk and especially almond milk.

Wine vs Milk?

Got Milk? Yes. Always. But increasingly it doesn’t come from a cow.

When you think about it, what happened to milk is a little bit like what seems to be happening to wine. There are lots of new products available that compete with wine including craft beer, craft spirits, and alcoholic sparkling water. Some of these products are popular in part because they have less alcohol than wine, addressing a health concern in the same way that almond milk avoids a health problem for some dairy-intolerant consumers.

Is wine all over? I don’t think so. But the industry is obviously not as healthy as we’d like it to be.

So what should wine do? A generic campaign is fine, but it matters a lot who it is aimed at, what it says, and how it is organized. And someone has to pay for it. A “Got Wine?” style consumer-focused campaign isn’t the only option.

Sue and I recently attended a promotional event for Italian wine that was aimed at trade — importers, distributors, sommeliers, journalists, and various “influencers” — but not consumers themselves (there was no consumer tasting). The product chain for wine is long and complex and there are several points where promotion can be effective.

Come back next week for thoughts on some of the issues that a “Got Wine?” push needs to take into account. In the meantime, I have discovered that there already is a GOT Wine — GOT stands for Game of Thrones!

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The chart comparing Google search term data for wine, milk, etc. is taken from Karl Storchmann, “Wine Economics.” Journal of Wine Economics 7:1 (2012), p. 3.

The video above is the very first “Got Milk?” commercial.

What’s Ahead for Wine Tourism in Mendoza? Lessons from a Rock Opera

November 28, 2017 By Mike Veseth in Argentina, wine, wine brands, wine tourism 1 Comment

monteviejo The United Nations World Tourism Organization’s global wine tourism conference in Mendoza, Argentina was full of contrasts as you might expect in a high desert region that is punctuated by isolated vine-filled green oases. The morning sessions featured conventional conference formats — speakers, panels, Powerpoint slides, dark rooms, coffee breaks (and really good simultaneous translation — thanks for that!). And then …

Hardly Working?

The afternoon and evening session moved out of the conference center and into the wineries, so that international participants could take in the landscape, marvel at the wonderful winery architecture, appreciate the warm hospitality, sample the many winery experiences, and of course enjoy food and wine as any wine tourist would.

Does this sound like hard work? Very few of our friends feel sorry for us when we post about these experiences on Facebook, but it really is work because Sue and I are always observing and analyzing both what the wineries do (and how they do it) and the reaction from their guests.

moonshot2 This was particularly interesting at the UNWTO conference because our fellow delegates were mainly tourism people who see opportunities in wine whereas Sue and I come at this more from the wine side, where tourism is one important element. The organized winery visits were interesting to us because they highlighted the tourism offerings rather than the wines themselves.

A reception at Bodega Séptima, for example, showed off its striking architecture and invited guests out to the big patio to stare at the moon and stars through telescopes while sipping wine. Wine tourism and astrological tourism combined.

A visit to Bodega Norton featured an opportunity to ride bicycles through the vineyards followed by a late lunch and then a chance to paint with wine (I saw a rabbit in the vineyard, so that was my artistic contribution). Norton’s program stresses active involvement, which is always more engaging than passive participation.

asado The historic buildings and ancient vines were a highlight of our asado lunch at Bodega Nieto Senetiner, where we were treated to a sensory experience organized around a Torrontes perfume and a Malbec cologne. This was interesting even though it violated the first rule of a wine tasting — don’t introduce any scents that might mask the wines’ aromas. It worked as a tourist experience, but would turn off any serious wine lover.

The Missing Link?

Sue and I enjoyed these experiences, but we noticed that something was often missing. The wineries worked very hard to show off their delightful wine tourist offerings, but they missed many opportunities to tell their stories and reinforce their brands. Perhaps this was by design because of the special character of the UNWTO audience, but it seems to me that it is always important to tell your story and build your brand.

Two of the most effective wine tourism programs we have experienced are Larkmead Vineyards in Napa Valley and Sandeman in Porto. The two wineries differ in almost every way but this: there is a clear story, which is told in several ways, and everyone you meet tells the same essential story, reinforcing the message.

A goal might be for each winery visitor to encounter the defining story three times in three different ways during a visit and to be able to share it with friends. You might call it the “Tommy” tactic (after the rock opera composed by The Who). See me, feel me, touch me, heal me. Stimulate all the visitors’ senses and touch them in a way they won’t soon forget.

The Next Step?

Perhaps this is the next step that Gabriel Fidel hinted at in his conference presentation, which encouraged the Mendoza wine tourist industry as well as the rest of us to think beyond the current focus on creating experiences. The facilities in Mendoza are world class and the experiences, including food pairing sessions, vineyard walks and rides (on both bikes and horses), and so forth are great, too.

All the pieces are here in Mendoza. Now the wineries and local wine tourism officials need to steal a tune from Tommy so that they all come together with the defining stories of the wineries and the region to create an total experience that resonates with visitors from around the world.

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