[This is the third and final article in a series inspired by our recent visit to Collio DOC in north-east Italy. Click here to read the first report and click here to read the second.]
What does it take for a wine region to stand out in today’s crowded market? Excellent wine, of course, but good wine isn’t enough because there are lots of quality wines around the world; consumers need a reason to buy one instead of another.
Brand and Identity in Wine
What else does it take? There are many ways to think about it, but in my book Wine Wars II, I focus on two necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) factors: brand and identity. Brand is the image that distinguishes your wine from the competition. Identity is the quality that defines the brand. Many wines suffer from the lack of a memorable brand. Others may have a brand, but its power is limited because it doesn’t actually stand for anything. Put wine, brand, and identity together and much can be achieved.
Sometimes an iconic wine can define a region, giving it a brand and identity. The market for wines from Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast, for example, was shaped by Tenuta San Guido’s famous Sassicaia, Bolgheri, Sassicaia, Super-Tuscan.
Sometimes a singular event can provide the spark. Here in the United States, for example, the Oregon wine industry’s rise to prominence was at least partly due to success at the Wine Olympics of 1979. I wrote about this in the Wine Economist on the occasion of the Eyrie Vineyards’ fiftieth birthday:
The Wine Olympics was a competition, sponsored by the French food and wine magazine Gault Millau, that featured 330 wines from 33 countries tasted blind by 62 judges. The 1975 Eyrie Pinot Noir Reserve attracted attention by placing 10th among Pinots, a stunning achievement for a wine from a previously little-known wine region.
Robert Drouhin of Maison Joseph Drouhin, a Burgundy negociant and producer, was fascinated and sponsored a further competition where the Eyrie wine came close second behind Drouhin’s own 1959 Chambolle-Musigny. Thus was Eyrie’s reputation set (and Oregon’s, too). It wasn’t long before Domaine Drouhin Oregon (DDO) was built in the same Dundee Hills as Eyrie’s vineyards — a strong endorsement of the terroir and international recognition of the achievement.
Oregon wine was a thing, the Willamette Valley was the brand, and Pinot Noir was the identity. Oregon produces other good wines besides Pinot Noir. And Pinot Noir grows in other parts of Oregon. But the wine, brand, and identity were established anyway.
Building Brand Collio
Collio DOC, which hugs the Slovenian border in north-east Italy, has long been known for its excellent wines and it is home to many strong private wine brands. Sue and I visited Livon on our recent trip, for example, enjoying the delicious wines and the amazing view from the tasting room deck. The sleek wines are easily identified by the distinctive art nouveau-style label, which is just risqué enough to have been banned by authorities in at least one state in the American South!
A strong regional brand benefits all producers, so the Collio Consortium, which celebrates 60 years in 2024, has worked diligently to establish the image and reputation of the region and its wines.
Sue and I encountered the “SuperWhites” campaign about 20 years ago at an event in Portland, Oregon (not “Porland” as printed on the event poster shown at the top of this page). Sponsored by Slow Food Friuli and supported by a range of regional organizations, the promotion was inspired by the success of “Super Tuscan” red wines. The idea is that Friuli (and Collio) are to Italian white wines what the Super Tuscans are to Italian reds.
Although the Super Whites theme seems to have run its course, the commitment to collective effort persists, along with the color of the Collio wine region, bright yellow, is still very much alive. (I think of it as Tour de France Yellow Jersey yellow, but that’s just me). Yellow is Collio’s color, featured in all the promotional literature, the capsules found atop many of the wines, and even a bright yellow Vespa scooter that seems to show up in many photos of the region. If you are in Collio and you see yellow, you can’t help but think Collio wine.
More recently there has been an effort to promote a trademark Collio wine bottle shape, which is also shown in the photo above. The distinctive bottle actually requires a special cork to seal it properly. Adopting it is a serious decision from a practical standpoint.
The Collio bottle shape is instantly recognizable on store shelves and when you look around at what is on tables at a restaurant. Although its use is strictly voluntary, not mandated by consortium rules, we saw it almost everywhere and sensed a certain pride in the identity. It makes a strong statement about the Collio brand project.
Collio’s Identity Quest
If Collio has been purposeful and successful in building a regional brand, the road to a specific identity to back up the brand is less clear. Indeed one person we met told us he thought that Collio was still searching for an identity.
Thirty or forty years ago Collio was pretty much synonymous with a wine they called Tocai, made from the Tocai Friulano grape variety. The grape variety’s name is still the same, but the wine can’t be called Tocai anymore because of objections from Hungary’s Tokaji region. Now the wine is Friulano and if you ask for a glass of local white wine at a bar or restaurant, it’s what you’ll get (and happily drink, I think).
Having lost control of its signature wine’s name, some winemakers in Collio looked in a different direction for a regional identity. The result, we discovered when we visited in 2019, was an emphasis on white wine blends under the name Collio Bianco. The wines we tasted on that trip were terrific. White wine blends are under-appreciated. But aside from their high quality, the wines didn’t have enough in common to be the foundation of an identity. Some were blends of native grape varieties. Others were blends of traditional grape varieties like Chardonnay, Sauvignon, and Riesling. Others combined native and traditional grapes.
The Collio wine identity remains a work in progress and perhaps that’s how it always will be. What all the wines really share is not color or grape variety but sense of the place, shaped by the local ponca soils and hillside vines. If I had to pick a grape variety it would probably be Tocai Friulano, but why do that? It seems like it would exclude so many great wines and accomplish very little.
No, I think Collio isn’t any particular wine. As we suggested in the first two articles in this series, it is best to think of it as a particular place and a deep experience. You don’t just drink Collio DOC, you experience the place through the wine. I know that that’s inconvenient when it comes to marketing, but important indeed when it comes to the wine.
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Sue and I recently received a very thoughtful gift, a copy of The Food of Italy by Waverly Root (1971). We turned quickly to the section on Friuli and found this:
“Our wines,” laments a writer from Friuli, “are more exquisite than renowned.”
More than 50 years have passed and I think the wines are even more exquisite, if that’s possible. Renowned? Not as much, but the word is getting out there and Collio’s reputation is fast catching up to its reality.
[This is the second in a series of articles inspired by our recent visit to Collio DOC in north-east Italy. 
Sue and I keep returning to Collio because offers so much that we enjoy and appreciate in terms of food, wine, culture, and nature. It seems to us that Collio today is doubling down on the “Collio Experience” and not just the wine. That was the case at Collio & the Beach and Castello di Spessa. And the experience especially stood out at 
Collio DOC is a tiny appellation snuggled up against the Slovenian border in north-east Italy. It is a beautiful place. How beautiful? After our recent visit to the region, I noticed that Sue changed her computer’s desktop image to a photo of these hills. Collio replaced another beautiful vineyard area, Cartizze, on the screen, which last year replaced a photo of the Douro Valley. The competition for real estate on Sue’s desktop is fierce. Collio is that beautiful.
For this trip we explored all of the white wines, including also Pinot Grigio and Malvasia, in blind tastings led by the talented wine writer and Friuli wine expert Richard Baudains. One thing that stood out from the tastings, winemaker meetings, and winery visits, in addition to the overall excellence of the wines, was the rapid pace of change in the post-covid era. We found a lot to consider. A quick list includes:
Austria’s colors are red and white. Those are the colors of the national flag and the uniforms of the country’s football team, too. You can see them clearly on the bottles of many Austrian wines because a seal atop the bottle continues the red and white theme.
You can chill any red wine, I suppose, and it is conventional wisdom among wine geeks that most red wines are served too warm (and most white wines too cold). But what makes a red wine particularly suitable to this category? Think light body, low alcohol, fruity, juicy, refreshing. What’s not to like?
President Trump doesn’t drink beverage alcohol and neither does Vice President Pence, and yet wine is a constant at White House state dinners and similar events. What’s served is nice wine, too, according to records found in this rather fascinating new book.
Fine wine meant European wine in the 1950s. Eisenhower’s guests were only very occasionally served anything else. A typical Eisenhower state dinner started with Dry Sack Sherry, Spain, and then moved on to Chateau Climens Barsac, France, and what is listed as Beaune Greves Burgundy, France. Pol Roger Champagne, France, brought the evening to a close. There were variations, of course, for particular guests. German Rieslings for Chancellor Adenauer and Lafite for Winston Churchill.
Your first impression when you arrive at Cantina Tramin is that you’ve entered some sort of space portal. Here in the lush Alto Adige hills, you expect to see a sturdy old building housing
Maybe the biggest bet of all is Tramin’s signature wine, the Nussbaumer Gewurtztraminer. Although it is difficult to know for sure, many think Gewurtz originally hails from this region. It sure does well here, whatever its origin. It is an easy wine to enjoy when done well, as it is at Tramin, but not necessarily an easy wine to sell. There’s the name, which some consumers are afraid to pronounce, and then there are the different styles of Gewurtz that you find, from austerely dry to sweetish and flowery.
This is one of those annoying “devil’s advocate” columns. It seems like everyone I meet in the wine business is talking about sustainability and with good reason. Regional sustainability programs have had great success in bringing the industry together. Given all the attention, however, maybe it is no surprise that some people are starting to have second thoughts.
It is easy to see how consumers could become confused about what sustainable wine means. Sometmes you only have to pick up the bottle to start to have doubts.
No wonder Torcoli sighs that “We are (almost) all convinced of the need to think about sustainability, but the word is wearing out.” He’s right. Maybe we need to unpack this term and explain what we are trying to sustain, how, and why. It might be unrealistic to expect a single word to hold all that information and to convey it persuasively to consumers.
Willamette Valley: The Winemakers’ Lunch
Virginia: The Governor’s Cup Case
We are working our way through the Governor’s Cup case (hard work, but someone has to do it) and learning a lot in the process. Matching grape variety to terroir is important everywhere, but perhaps especially so in a hot, humid region. The first white wine we tasted was a Petit Manseng from Paradise Springs Winery in Northern Virginia. The wine was fermented and aged in a concrete egg.