Recently a strange fashion trend went viral on the internet: dirty jeans. Denim company PRPS (read: purpose) was skewered on the web for selling $425 men's jeans with fake mud at Nordstrom. Why would you pay $425 for fake dirty jeans when a pair of $25 Wranglers and a day spent working on a farm reaches the same result? Average people took Nordstrom and PRPS to the woodshed for the absurdity of the existence of these jeans. An NPR columnist rightly tore into PRPS and the uproar in this piece. I love that the author drew out the contradiction over PRPS creator Donwan Harrell's definition of authenticity. "The brand uses denim woven on vintage looms. Harrell started it in response to what he saw as a lack of "authentic" jeans on the market. Even the name — PRPS, as in Purpose — is a callback to a time when jeans were designed as workwear, with a real function. In an interview last year, Harrell invoked authenticity — or the emulation thereof — as a core design principle." I'm bringing up this fashion-related issue because the same principle applies to the distortion of "authenticity" in winemaking. The emulation of authenticity is a key principle for industrial wine. Corporate strategy is to convince consumers to buy wine based upon branding and perception, even if it is not rooted in truth. Unjustifiable claims such as "sourced from the best vineyards in California" are made all the time. Also, brands which have no association with an actual location or person are sold on the strength of the false brand association. I don't find too much evidence of corporations starting a "_____ Family Wines" brand, but frequently they buy a family or personal brand and retain the name. It's the most valuable asset of that company, more so than the vineyards or the production facility. My favorite example is of Kim Crawford Wines, the omnipresent New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc producer. The actual man Kim Crawford sold his company to Constellation Brands in 2003, and was henceforth prohibited from using his own name in any commercial venture. The current website refers to Kim's story many times without acknowledging he is no longer associated with the winery. And Kim is unable to even use his name with his new winemaking venture, Loveblock Wines. Not only are personal names used deceptively, but so are place names. The Don Sebastiani and Sons wine company produces a Cabernet Sauvignon called Gunsight Rock. The grapes come from Paso Robles, but the actual Gunsight Rock is 250 miles north in Sonoma County. It's a locally-famous overlook in Hood Mountain Regional Park with my favorite stunning views of Sonoma Valley. Sebastiani pitches the wine thus: "Gunsight Rock wines highlight the richness and beauty of California’s wine country. Wild, intense and adventurous, they evoke the feeling of the sun on your face, the wind at your back, and the view of one of the world’s most picturesque wine regions spread out before you." Most people probably don't know and don't care where Gunsight Rock actually is. The tagline insinuates that the "picturesque wine region" would be Paso Robles, which the label designates as the origin. But the location of the landmark and the vineyards are totally unassociated. This inaccuracy is a violation of authenticity and a deliberate decision to manipulate truth to suit a brand. (Coincidentally, the Sebastiani family no long owns Sebastiani Vineyards, which was sold to the Foley Wine Group in 2008). The Kim Crawford and Gunsight Rock examples are far more nuanced than PRPS's ridiculous filthy jeans. At $425-a-pop, it's quite easy for shoppers to guess that the jeans weren't actually dirtied up on a farm, nor are the idiotic purchasers of these jeans trying to pass themselves off as farmers or construction laborers. It's far more difficult for people to discover that Kim Crawford has nothing to do with wine sold under his name or that Gunsight Rock is nowhere near the vineyards which grow the grapes.
However, the common thread is that falsehood in branding is rampant. Consumers are explicitly or implicitly convinced that a product is authentic: that it's origin and production honestly match with the brand marketed at them. Anything less than that is disrespectful and deceitful. I'm guessing that PRPS learned a lesson from their exposure. What will it take for big wine corporations to learn their lesson?
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The launch of Alit Wines's first release has been making the rounds on the blogosphere the past couple months. This new Oregon winery is taking a stab at transparency, a subject with which I'm obsessed.
This brand was created by Mark Tarlov, a modern Renaissance man whose accomplishments include founding celebrated Oregon wineries Evening Land Vineyards and Chapter 24 Vineyards, being a Hollywood producer/director, serving as a special antitrust attorney in the U.S Department of Justice, and working as a speechwriter for Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger. Impressive. With this latest venture, Tarlov & Team are taking a stab at making a wine that is more transparently grown, vinified, and sold. Their effort is really worth taking note of and watching. By transparency, Alit means they are going to tell consumers exactly how the wine grapes are grown, by what process they are turned into wine, and what it costs at each step. They are not the first wine producer to do these things, but to my knowledge, they're the first to do them ALL. From Alit's infographic above, you can see a basic presentation of their farming and winemaking methods, cost breakdown, and sales strategy. I read a few favorable articles about their wines from Bustle and Quartz, and I poked around the Alit website. I have a few critiques about how they present the vineyard origins of the wines, the lack of enological details like pH and TA for the wine geeks, and the fact that you can't even figure out the Pinot is a 2015 vintage. I'm also perplexed as to why they're selling grower Champagne. But we shouldn't dwell too long on the minor details. Let's focus on the purpose. In Alit's own words, this is why they are doing business this way: "Alit is a new kind of wine brand that’s stripping away all of the extra layers between the winemakers (us) and the wine drinker (you). Our goal is to bring you closer to the story of our wine, the people who make it and the place that it comes from. We believe great wine should be made naturally and with integrity, with no synthetic ingredients or chemicals. We also believe the winemaking process should be shared with everyone, not just “wine people.” So we’re being fully transparent about what it costs us to make wine without compromise." As for their sales model, Alit will be solely direct-to-consumer (DtC), which has proven to be the fastest growing and most profitable way to sell wine in the online age. Of course, none of this means Alit's wines are going to taste good or be the best value for the money. But it does mean that wine drinkers will have a complete picture to make an informed choice about what they're buying. I give Alit a BIG round of applause for trying to transform the values of transparency and integrity into a business plan. I hope other wine brands are taking cues! I'm excited to announce that some of my wine travel stories have been published by the Tampa Bay Fine Wine Guide!
I wrote a series of articles for them based on my travels in New Zealand. I've been to 41 wineries in NZ and chose 10 of my favorites, of which 7 made the final cut. Check out the online version using this link, and let me know what you think: https://issuu.com/thefinewineguide/docs/tbfwg_tp_2017_2/88 I'll also be reposting the stories in their entirety here on my Travel section for your reading enjoyment. The launch of The Martha Stewart Wine Company was announced this week, and I read about it in a favorable Fortune.com article as reposted on Terroirist. The Martha Stewart Living portfolio is owned by the publicly traded Sequential Brands, a retail licensing company which paid $353 million to acquire Stewart's brands in 2015. I'm telling you all this because it represents so much of what I detest about wine marketing and sales.
The venture is nothing more than a deceptive operation to make loads of money peddling private label bulk wine. Per the company website, "The Martha Stewart Wine Co. is a direct-to-consumer wine service, bringing you wines that Martha Stewart loves. The Martha Stewart Wine Co. delivers carefully curated selections of these wines straight to your door." Five minutes of online digging is all it takes for someone with a little wine knowledge to see through that charade. Unfortunately, many consumers aren't that savvy. Martha Stewart's domestic wines are produced by "Saddlehorn Cellars" which is really ASV Wines, a huge private label and bulk wine operation with locations in San Martin (south of San Jose near Gilroy) and Delano (just north of Bakersfield in the cheap-wine-haven Central Valley). Online wine retailers frequently sell private label plonk, such as ASV's wines, and trick customers into "deals". I found a telling tale about a novice wine drinker lured by marketing tactics into a Groupon wine sale. The wine happened to be made by ASV, and nearly identical to the domestic selection "carefully curated" by Martha Stewart. This guy eventually connected the dots about the wine's origin and has an informative blog post about it. Many other wine subscription clubs, such as Winc, The Tasting Room, and Bright Cellars, similarly sell private label wine while using creative marketing to make it appear cool and authentic. Why does private label wine bother me so much? Thanks for asking.
According to the Fortune piece, "The wine delivery company intends to work with Chris Hoel, the former sommelier of famed chef Thomas Keller's The French Laundry, to consult vintners to develop the collection." For the sake of the suckers who subscribe to Martha's wine club, I sure hope they bring on a qualified somm to ditch the private label garbage and give these folks some honest product. |
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