Category Archives: Fielding Hills

Internet Wine Scams

November 3, 2007 By in Fielding Hills, internet scams, Paul Gregutt Leave a comment

The internet has done a lot for the global wine industry. It promotes the diffusion of useful marketing and research information, facilitates wine tourism, promotes professional collaboration, and helps individual winemakers and regional groups to establish distinct market identities. Many winemakers and winesellers rely upon internet contacts for a good proportion of their sales. If you are reading this blog entry, chances are that you get a lot of your wine information over the internet, too. It’s a good thing, for the most part.

But not everything about the internet is good for winemakers. Do you remember the old New Yorker cartoon with the punchline “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog?” On the internet we are who and what we pretend to be. Obviously wine marketers can use this fact to tailor the imagine of their wines and winemakers. Nothing surprising there. But, as I have recently learned, there are some predators out there who use the internet to try to take advantage of wine producers.

Karen Wade, who owns the Fielding Hills winery with her husband Mike, recently sent me an email that she received from someone posing as a wine buyer, writing under the subject heading, “I Need Wine for my Birthday Party.”

Hello,
My name is Robert Peter, an American .
I live and work here in Seoul, South Korea.
Actually when I was around last year for chistmas holiday, I got a a bottle of of one of your wines from a friend and i love the taste .since then , I been planning on getting your wines for my birthday party …coming up third week of novemebr here in Seoul, South Korea.
I will be making my payment via my American based credit card .
You are not shipping the wines ….The wines will be picked up at your winery by a licensed shipping agency .This shipping agency have all the appropriate exportation documents and permits .
I got your contact thru your website and I want to know if you will be able to supply me some cases of wines for my upcoming birthday .
Concerning the shipping of the wines , I will refer you to a shipping company that will come for the pick up of the wines in your winery once I have made my payment .
Kindly get back to me so that I can make my orders .
Thanks.
Robert .

Karen writes that

Mike and I receive almost weekly, very official emails from places in Asia wanting to buy wine. They always offer to pay by American credit card and promise to have the wine picked up by their shipper. I answered once and told them to fax me the credit card info and order and never heard anything back.

I guess this indicates that the sort of people responsible for those bogus Nigerian email scams have now become more specialized, targeting wine producers. I wonder if anyone has fallen for this? Have any other winemakers received these emails, or are the Wades just lucky? Do other businesses received specialized scams like this?

On a related note, Mike and Karen Wade received good news this week in the 2008 edition of Tom Stevenson’s Wine Report, one of the best annual guides to global wine. Paul Gregutt, the Pacific Northwest contributor to this volume, rated their winery as the number one “new and up-and-coming producer” in the region. He also listed the 2004 Fielding Hills Cabernet Sauvignon as number four on his list of the ten “greatest quality” wines. That’s high praise for Fielding Hills.

Paul Gregutt has a new book out about Washington wines and wineries. I’ll be posting a review of it later this week.

Fielding Hills Strikes Gold

June 7, 2007 By in Fielding Hills, Wine Competitions Leave a comment

A quick update on Fielding Hills winery (see below). Mike and Karen Wade earned three gold medals for their 2004 wines — the Merlot, Syrah and RiverBend blend — in the recent Seattle Wine Awards competition.

What does it mean to win a gold at a wine competition? Karen Wade pointed out to me that it means different things to different people. To the Wades, for example, wine competitions are a way for them to see how they are doing relative to other boutique wineries (Fielding Hills bottles just 800 cases per year). Winning a gold is good for them, but what it really means depends upon what other wineries also entered the competition and which of their wines they entered. It would be possible, I suppose,for the Wades to win a meaningless gold medal if there were no other boutique wineries in the competition. I notice a number of high-end wineries represented on the Seattle Wine Awards list, so this is probably a satisfying win for the Wades.

I naturally think about wine competitions in terms of their market value. Success in wine competitions is one of several factors that can be used to differentiate a wine in the marketplace and so sell more of it or charge a premium price. Since most buyers are not able to taste wines before they buy them, I think that they look for independent quality indicators, such as wine magazine ratings, wine competition medals and regional or vineyard designations, to assure them that they are making a good choice.

I’d like to know what a gold medal is worth — how much does a medal increase the demand for a given wine? My intuition is that it is a complex problem. Some wine competitions are probably more important to buyers than others. And a medal is probably worth more to a wine that has not received any other distinction than to one that has plenty of laurels. And I suspect that all the medals in the world are not as economically significant as a good rating from or The Wine Advocate or Wine Spectator. But it would be interesting to know what the numbers look like. I notice that some of the judges at the Seattle Wine Awards competition head up the wine programs at prestigious Pacific Northwest restaurants including Salty’s, Canlis, Rover’s, Ray’s Boathouse and The Herbfarm. They are people who know wine, obviously, but they are also people who can influence wine sales.

Bottling the 2005 at Fielding Hills Winery

May 29, 2007 By in Fielding Hills, Supply and Demand Leave a comment

I spent the weekend after commencement in Wenatchee, Washington helping Mike and Karen Wade and their friends bottle the 2005 vintage of Fielding Hills. I got to drink some great wine, meet some wonderful people and learn more about the wine business. Here are some photos (courtesy of Dave Seago) and some observations.

The Wades are orchardists and fruit distributors in Wenatchee, which is the heart of Washington Apple country. They got the wine bug a few years ago and now run an 800 case operation from a building near their home, overlooking the Columbia River. The grapes come from vines they own near Matawa on the Wahluke Slope, further down the Columbia. They make reds — Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Cabernet Franc and a blend called RiverBend red. These wines are not easy to find (remember: only 800 cases total) but they have received rave notices in the wine press: Wine Enthusiast rated them all between 91/100 and 95/100 points in its December 2006 assessment of the 2004 vintage. They are all good, the magazines and web sites say, the only question is which one is best.

I know the Wades through their daughter Robin who is one of my students at the University of Puget Sound. She knows about my interest in the wine business, so when they needed volunteer labor for the annual bottling weekend, she knew who to call.

I have taken dozens of tours of large wine-making operations, so it was interesting to see the process first-hand and on a very human scale. I hope the photos capture something of the process. We bottled the Cab, a blend featuring 76% Cabernet Sauvignon, on Friday afternoon. The first step was get the appropriate barrels of wine out of storage and to carefully pump the right proportions of the right wines into a large stainless blending tank. From there, the wine moved to the assembly line, where I worked alongside about a dozen of the Wades’ friends and neighbors.

The bottling process reminded me of Adam Smith’s famous pin factory example of the division of labor. One person (1) brought in pallets that contained cases of empty wine bottles. A second person (2) removed the bottles from the cases onto a table so that another worker (3) could invert them over a nitrogen supply, which removed any oxygen. The bottles were then (4) filled with wine on a six-bottle machine (see photo), then corked (5). A foil closure was then placed over the cork top (6) and secured firmly using a surprisingly nasty electric device (that was my job — #7). Then the bottles were wiped down (workers 8 and 9) before going through a label operation (10), being loaded back into boxes (11) that were sealed and stacked (12) and then moved out on the pallets they came in on. It took us about six hours to bottle 200 cases of Cabernet Sauvignon on Friday afternoon. We did 150 cases of the RiverBend Blend in four hours on Saturday morning. My reward? Wonderful family-style meals with my co-workers and one bottle of each of the wines I worked on, autographed by my fellow volunteers.

One thing that you can’t see in the photos is the fuel that kept the volunteers going: it was the wine we were bottling, drawn straight from the barrel. Good juice, in my opinion. Can’t wait to taste it when it’s had a bit of time in the bottle. (Expected release date: October 2007.)

One thing I learned from this is that although 800 cases of wine is a tiny operation by the scale of today’s wine business today, it is still a very significant investment of time and energy. I thought we would never come to the end up those 200 cases (2400 individual bottles) of Cabernet on Friday afternoon!

Because they have been so successful, both in terms of wine quality and wine economics, the Wades are planning to take the next step — to expand production from 800 cases to 2400 cases. This is a big step, since the business model changes with the higher volumes. Family labor plus volunteer help at key points works fine for wineries producing 1000 cases or less, but a bigger operation means hired help and higher fixed costs. The marketing end changes, too. The Wades prefer to sell most of their wine direct to customers rather than to discount it in order to get it into wine shops and restaurants. Given their stellar ratings, they have a good opportunity to build a “wine club” list that will automatically take most of their output, matching demand and supply very efficiently. Building a bigger winery will mean matching a bigger demand to their bigger supply.

Mike Wade told me what it takes to make good wine — it’s in the fruit, he said. The economics of wine is in the market — matching demand and supply. I would say that the Wades understand both the fruit side of their operation and the market side, too.