Last week I wrote about two “misunderstood” or maybe “misunderappreciated” wines — Riesling and Oregon Pinot Gris — and the conferences that Sue and I attended where the problem of marketing them was discussed. This week I report on those discussions and try to draw some conclusions.

Identity Crisis

So how do you get consumers to buy wines that they don’t necessarily completely understand or fully appreciate? Well, perhaps predictably the discussions at both the Oregon Pinot Gris Symposium and Riesling Rendezvous turned early on to the idea of a cool motto — the “Got Milk?” killer tagline for their respective wines.

This always seems to happen when wine people get together to talk category marketing despite the fact that there are darn few generic marketing slogans that have had much impact on sales (how many can you think of?) and even fewer when it comes to wine. I used to think that this discussion was simply a waste of time, but now I recognize that the function is not so much to bring in consumers as to give wineries and distributors a rallying cry.  No harm in that, so long as the slogan isn’t offensive, and it might even be useful.

Chateau Ste Michelle CEO Ted Baseler proposed “Right On, Riesling!” and that seems fine — certainly better than the vaguely suggestive “Riesling: Just Put It In Your Mouth” that one break-out group played with for a while during a discussion of how consumer perceptions change when they actually taste different Riesling styles.

Similarly, the Oregon group settled on “Oregon, Get Your Gris On!” for a summer campaign, which I prefer to “Fifty Shades of Gris,” which may be more descriptive of the wide range of styles of Oregon Pinot Gris, but is a bit too reminiscent of the title of a recently popular erotic novel.

Radar Love

Fortunately, the discussions soon turned to what I see as more substantive ideas. Riesling Rendezvous panelist Blake Gray (of The Gray Report) offered the very useful suggestion that efforts to bring new wine drinkers into the Riesling camp should perhaps be secondary to strategies to get consumers who already know and like Riesling to drink more of it.  Riesling is already on their radar, so they are your best prospects for increased sales.

This idea is particularly relevant for Riesling because research reported at the conference suggested that Riesling lovers don’t focus on their favorite wine with quite the intensity as Sauvignon Blanc followers, for example. I’ll bet this is true for Pinot Gris consumers, too.

So how do you do that? Well, I’m not quite sure (although I have ideas — I think the Summer of Riesling project is terrific), but the point is that it is a different problem than trying to convert consumers who don’t currently drink Riesling either because they don’t know it yet or because they were unhappy with a previous Riesling experience. Current drinkers are known knowns, as one former Bush-era official might have said. The non-drinkers have many unknown unknowns and that’s a different problem.

There Must Be 50 Ways

But even if increasing consumption by current buyers should be the number one priority for both Riesling and Oregon Pinot Gris, that doesn’t mean that the rest of the market is unimportant. So how do you win them over? Well, it seems to me that the examples of Ernst Loosen (in the Riesling group) and David Adelsheim (at the Oregon Pinot Gris symposium) are instructive. Ernie and David have worked tirelessly to promote their wines. I can’t imagine how many times they (and their colleagues at other wineries) have poured the wines, told the stories, answered the questions and then gone on to do it all again.

There isn’t any one way to build a market for a misunderstood or misunderappreciated wine — no silver bullet as we say in the U.S. And it’s not really rocket science either, despite what that mashed up Einstein photo above seems to suggest. There must be 50 ways (or 500), but they all seem to boil down to hard work that is done one glass and one consumer at a time (leveraged by whatever peer-to-peer social media effects you can muster and of course beneficial media attention). Unite behind whatever rally cry works for you, residents of Planet Riesling and people of Oregon Pinot Gris, because there really is strength in numbers, and get on to the hard work.

Do Think Twice (About Price)

But this still leaves the problem of price which, as you may remember from last week’s column, is the sticking point for Oregon Pinot Gris. The difficulty of raising price is seen by at least some Oregon producers as an obstacle to raising quality and assuring a sustainable future.

Raising price, especially in the face of rising costs, is a problem all right, but not exclusively a problem for Oregon Pinot Gris or even for wine. Many business sectors struggle to find a way to pass on costs to distributors and final purchasers, as a recent “Schumpeter” column in the Economist magazine makes clear.

Many businesses, the Schumpeter columnist writes, have prices but not a pricing strategy or, if they do, it is determined at a low level in the business structure (perhaps because selling stuff isn’t always given a high priority compared with making stuff or organizing the business). Sometimes prices are “eye-balled” based on intuition rather than carefully calculated or strategically set.

It wouldn’t be fair to pick on Oregon Pinot Gris when it comes to pricing strategy, since this is a general issue, but it is probably true that improvements could be made. Purchasers generally see Pinot Gris in the context of other Oregon wines, especially Pinot Noir, so that a joint pricing strategy is probably necessary to account for the complex complement and substitution effects.

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The British economist economist John Maynard Keynes famously took an interest in the pricing of Champagne in the bar at the Cambridge Arts Theatre where his wife, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, often danced. As chair of the theater’s board, Keynes would have  to help fund the inevitable operating deficit, so anything that increased revenues was highly desired.

Keynes wanted to nudge patrons to move up to the better Champagne on the bar menu, where profit margins were higher. His strategy? Not to cut the price of the good stuff in an attempt to sell more, which he had reason to think wouldn’t work because of inelastic demand. And not to raise the better wine’s price, which was sure to make enemies. Instead he pressured the bar manager to raise the price of the ordinary product, thereby lowering the relative cost of the upgrade to the better Champagne that he suspected many patrons secretly desired.

How do you market misunderstood wine? That was the question posed at two otherwise very different wine industry symposia that Sue and I attended in recent weeks.

Although neither meeting arrived at a definitive solution, I think I begin to see the outline of an answer as I compare the two situations and start to connect the dots.

Gris: The Other Oregon Pinot

The Pinot Gris gathering

The first gathering took place amid barrels and cases of wine in the cellar room of Oak Knoll winery near Hillsboro, Oregon. The common thread that united the small group that assembled was Oregon Pinot Gris.

The first Pinot Gris vines in the United States were planted by David Lett at The Eyrie Vineyard, so Oregon has a legitimate claim to this wine, which is hugely popular in its Italian Pinot Grigio identity, but still not as widely embraced when presented as Alsace- or Oregon-style Pinot Gris.

The wines themselves can be wonderful and distinctive and Jo Diaz is helping to organize a movement to make Pinot Gris Oregon’s signature white wine (to complement Pinot Noir, the signature red). But there are problems to overcome.

The first is consistent quality, which is obviously key. Oregon Pioneer David Adelsheim told the group that the variability in quality, which was once shockingly high, is now thankfully reduced. Although there may not be a distinctive “Oregon style” there is far more consistent quality. Good news.

Misunderappreciated Quality

Perhaps because of this quality, the wines sell very well. When Paul Gregutt asked the wine makers if they sell out of Pinot Gris, a great many hands were raised. Much of this action is in the tasting room and it seems that tasting is believing. They come for the Pinot Noir, but when they taste the Gris (at half the price of the Noir and sometimes less), they walk out clutching bottles. Sounds like a success story.

But that’s also the problem, too, Adelsheim noted. Pinot Gris sells very well in the $15 to $20 price range, but there are precious few PGs that break though the $20 glass ceiling. My calculations (based on very limited data) suggest that a $15 Oregon Pinot Gris is not hugely profitable when sold directly and less so when sold into the 3-tier system at a discount. Low profitability puts a glass ceiling on quality, according to some of the winemakers present, who believe that additional research and investment in viticultural and winemaking practices could make Oregon PG as great in its own way as Oregon Pinot Noir.

Consumers misunderstand Pinot Gris — or maybe I should say they misunderappreciate it (if that is indeed a word). They love it, but they don’t appreciate its quality (maybe it is the Pinot Grigio curse?) and won’t pay prices that would power the category to new heights. That’s what we heard in the Oak Knoll barrel room. What is to be done?

A Riesling Rendezvous

300 participants x 20 dry Rieslings each = 6000 Riedel glasses

The second gathering started on the grounds of Chateau Ste Michelle in Woodinville, moved to the Bell Harbor Conference Center on Elliott Bay and concluded (lavishly) at the Chihuly Gardens at Seattle Center. Riesling Rendezvous gathered together Riesling makers, drinkers, distributors, sellers and critics from just about everywhere on what master of ceremonies Stuart Pigott calls “Planet Riesling.”

Winemakers (and their wines) came from seven U.S. states (Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Michigan, New York and New Jersey) and seven  countries (Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States) .  France was missing in action (Planet Riesling sans Alsace? Incroyable!), but they made a big appearance at the last Rendezvous three years ago and so perhaps can be given a pass this time.

(Riesling Rendezvous is part of a three year rotating series of international Riesling gatherings with the other meetings taking place in Germany and Australia. This was the fourth edition of Riesling Rendezvous and my third.)

Mike with Ernie Loosen

Riesling Rendezvous is organized by Washington State’s Chateau Ste Michelle, the world’s largest producer of Riesling wines, and Germany’s Dr Loosen. Ernst Loosen is perhaps the world’s foremost, most enthusiastic and hardest-working proponent of Riesling. And he makes some damn good ones, too.

So what’s the problem with Riesling? Well the issue, which has been discussed at each of the four meetings of this group, is that most consumers misunderstand the wine and the issue is usually sweetness. Riesling is fascinating because it comes in such a vast array of styles — I almost run out of dimensions when I try to explain all the aspects of Riesling, but sweetness seems to be the focal point.

Rieslings come in all shades of sweet from not sweet — as dry as you can get — all the way over to intensely sweet (but usually balanced by acidity).  What you think of Riesling may be determined by your first sip and for many people that sip was uncomfortably sweet (especially if you weren’t expecting it).

So Riesling (like Sherry, another misunderstood wine) is held to be guilty of criminal sweetness until proven innocent. And many consumers, convinced by what they have heard or believe, never give it a fair trial.

Even worse in a way is the fact that some people who like sweeter wines are confused when they chance into a dry Riesling. Is that Riesling? Not what I expected. The opposite confusion can confront the dry Riesling fan who ends up with a bottle of off-dry to sweet wine.

It isn’t always easy to tell sweet from dry from the information that you find on the bottle, although the sweetness scale created by the International Riesling Foundation (an organization that came out of the first Rendezvous meeting) certainly helps.

Research presented at the conference suggests one final problem. The people who love Riesling the most (perhaps because they appreciate its diversity) apparently also appreciate the diversity of wine generally. They drink Riesling, of course, but not with the single-minded resolve of, for example, Sauvignon Blanc fans, who come back more frequently to their favorite wine than do Riesling’s core consumer group.

As with Pinot Gris, the problem isn’t life threatening, just frustrating. Riesling, in fact, has been a hot wine category in the U.S., but growth has faded a bit recently and the momentum shifted elsewhere. That seems to make everyone on Planet Riesling nervous.

Misunderstood Riesling. Misunderappreciated Oregon Pinot Gris. What is to be done? A further report on the discussions and perhaps the outline of a strategy in the next post.

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Thanks to both the Oregon Pinot Gris group and to Riesling Rendezvous for allowing us to participate. Thanks to Sue Veseth for the photos.