Wineries Need to Get Creative to Attract Readers to Their Newsletters

Every day, we all get requests to join a winery newsletter list. Sometimes this happens at the tasting room, sometimes at regional or varietal wine tasting events, and sometimes friends send a “you must join this list!” e-mail. But there’s got to be a reason beyond good will for a consumer to agree to have yet another message delivered to the in-box. Here’s one creative idea that worked, from Charles Creek Winery, Graton, CA.

Their Tecolote Times newsletter often has recipes, suggestions for wine pairings, notes about upcoming seminars and other things that go beyond merely trying to sell more wine. Those are reasons enough to like a newsletter, but then they added a compelling item: a cartoon caption contest. Who isn’t addicted to cartoons?

Readers are urged to “put on your (funny) thinking caps for this months’ Cartoon Caption (or word balloon). Send your witty verbiage to info@charlescreek.com with “CCV CCC” in the subject line. Remember, the winner will receive a pair of seriously tasty Charles Creek wines as their reward. With that in mind, don’t forget to vote for the winning entry from last months ‘toon-test...”

So I did put on my funny thinking cap, and Guess What! I had two seriously tasty Charles Creek wines delivered to my door.



WINNING CAPTION:

Nice glass for a nose bath, but where do I put the wine?







The red wine was an En Casa Merlot, Carneros, Sonoma County, 2004. I found the aroma and taste of plum, a very juicy wine, with soft tannins and light pepper on the back palate. It paired wonderfully with the New York strip steak that my married son Matthew grilled up for Sunday dinner with his family. Yet to be opened is the Las Patolitas Chardonnay, Sonoma County 2006.

If you’d like to participate in the contest – it is fun! –you’ll have to sign up for email communications at their site at http://www.charlescreek.com/mailing_list.php. And the newsletters are archived (click here) so when you win, you can just forward the fun on to your friends. What a good idea!

Is San Francisco the Epicenter of the Wine Business?

By definition, blogging can get personal, so here’s a doozy for you. I’m apprehensive about moving from San Francisco because it seems to be the epicenter of the wine business. A couple of things lead me to think this epicenter thought. Factoid: a recent winejobs.com ad for a marketing position noted that the work could be done anywhere (thank you, internet) or the San Francisco Bay Area. Factoid: Wine 2.0 held its first big event here. I could quote factoids and more factoids about other massive wine events held in Fog City.

When I moved to San Francisco four years ago, I was in the middle of an unexpected divorce. I hoped to learn more about wine, enjoy city life, and perhaps stumble across someone who’d combine the both in a romantic sort of way. Two out of three ain’t bad. I’ve enjoyed city life and learned a lot more about wine and the wine industry.

Now I hear the fog horns blowing as I sit in the middle of enough Lake-Tahoe-bound packing boxes for six months of life on the mountain and I wonder: is San Francisco the epicenter of the wine business? The place where things move and shake and new wine industry ideas, brands, concepts are born? Is the rest of the wine world simply an also-run?

Over the past years of my journey to learn more about the wine business, in Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, New York, Texas, Florida, Colorado, British Columbia, Washington-Oregon, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, among other places, I confess that I’ve met wine industry people who are just as passionate about this elixir as is anyone who lives or works near the Golden Gate. But no matter where I’ve traveled, once you say you live in California, and specifically San Francisco, the conversation seems to shift a bit toward enhanced credibility. Is this my rampant imagination at work?

I confess I’ll miss the foghorns… but they’re being replaced with the raucous morning calls of Stellar Jays, the Alpenglow, and deep gulps of clear mountain air. Once I get the wine column established for The Tahoe Weekly, I’m turning my attention to building-out a concept of managing wine brands more efficiently and inexpensively via the use of social networking tools. There’s also a lot of pent-up poetry to write, maybe a wine industry book or two to draft. Bikes to ride, hikes to take, fish to catch. The world of wines is close by via the shops and restaurants around the lake. And… it’s only 205 miles to San Francisco.



(Photo Credit: Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy)

Have You Got Them on Your (Wine) List? These Ideas Should Not Be Missed!

With restaurant visits down, it makes sense to raise the tab by selling more wine to each and every patron. I’m sure there is consumer behavioral science involved in creating the optimal wine list, and certainly knowledge of wine, but my sense is that most restaurateurs and wine bar owners simply do it their own way. So here are a few thoughts on making a wine list more attractive and consumer friendly.

• First Principle: Readability PLEASE! No patron should need to pull out reading glasses to see what’s on the list… kind of destroys the romance, I think. So if you can print your wine list in 11-pt type or above, you’ll be ‘way ahead of the competition. There really should be no compromise on this principle. Use more pages. Or feature fewer wines.
  
  
• Intrigue the customer. I really enjoyed the list at Six Peaks Grille, the fine dining restaurant at the Resort at Squaw Valley. Rose Chehade is in charge of the wine selection there. She divided the list by the usual categories – white wines, red wines, and then added a separate category for small formats and large formats of each. Who could resist looking at Ms Chehade’s selections called Particularly Diverse Whites, and Diverse and Extraordinary Reds? Ka-ching!
  
  
• Educate the customer. It’s nice to help your patrons understand the AVA or region that the wine is from, but that information can take up a lot of space on a wine list, threatening readability. One clever way around this conflict is the solution used by Bistro Ralph in Healdsburg, CA. They’ve abbreviated those terroir designators and put the index to abbreviations at the end of their list with only the abbreviations next to the winery-vineyard-varietal-year information. For example, AV – Alexander Valley, CH – Chalk Hill, DCV – Dry Creek Valley, and so on.
  
  
• Offer a good selection of 375 ml bottles. This probably goes without saying, but it’s one way to offer fine wines at an affordable price point.
  
  
• Make your list a souvenir. Giving a copy of your wine list to your customers just makes good sense … it’s more powerful as a marketing tool and more compelling for repeat or word-of-mouth business than that dinky business card. And why not offer your customers a pencil to make notes directly on that give-away list, nothing what they liked about the wine they chose?
  

Feedback, anyone? Comments welcome on your favs and gripes about wine lists!

Other Factors in South African Wine: Big Love?

Wine is not an island unto itself. Political events, weather, economy, safety (health, food, national) – all kinds of exogenous variables feed into consumer choices and perceptions. So news about Zuma of South Africa, the president with oh-so-many wives, certainly affects how we think in puritan America about South African wines.

Having spent several weeks recently in the CapeTown and Stellenbosch/Paarl area, I enjoyed more wines than I can remember. Even though I lifted a lot of glasses, somehow I missed out on the Zulu “Big Love” thing. Maybe next visit. But my overall impression of South AFrican wines is that they have New World tones with an Old World overlay.

In many ways, that sums up the market dynamics for South African wines too.

The recent Wine Business Monthly.com series of articles was intensely interesting to me. The article didn’t reach deeply into the mechanism of BEE – Black Economic Empowerment – the government mandate to staff more positions up and down the hierarchy of a winery and the wine industry itself – with black and colored workers, and also with women of color as a unique target group for more Economic Empowerment job formation.

I’m an old-fashioned liberal who did social work in my 20’s in the ghettos of Newark, NJ. I’m a firm believer in the need to break the cycle of poverty through economic programs. In my estimation, reparation is a good way to go, and that’s what BEE is, at core.

The South African wine industry is learning how to accommodate this mandated change in their workforce and management composition. This is happening on top of the usual agribusiness and marketing challenges that a wine industry faces.

But South Africans of all colors are a hardworking and determined people, and the wines will prevail. The Laduma program, wine tourism, wiser use of WOSA and USAPA marketing dollars will all add up.

And someday we hope to see South African wines in their own section of the shop or menu … instead of grouped into the “other imports” category. THAT’s the real challenge – getting out of “other”. I’m just not sure how many wives that will take to accomplish...

(Photo attribution: left, Pieter Bauermeister-afp-gettyimages; right AP/Jerome Delay)

Wine by the Helmet? Packaging COULD BE a lot more fun!

What hath God wrought? Walking down Polk Street in San Francisco, I spot a rotund gent on a moped, wearing Bermuda shorts and bowling shoes, no socks. Tee shirt with effects of chilly day evident. (I guess that is better than assless chaps – we have to wait for the Folsom Street Fair for that!) But it struck me that this is a demographic – the moped-riding-short-wearing-bowling-shoe-fan – that new wine packaging might appeal to. Like a motorcycle helmet-shaped wine bottle.

In many ways, wine packaging today is uninspiring. No significant change, really, in hundreds of years. I know that food packaging is culture-bound; I remember the olden days when Tetrapak had a heck of a time making inroads outside Northern Europe. And clearly, wine packaging is VERY culture-bound.

I like the concept that MÁS Wine Company introduced, that of packaging a super premium wine in a mini tank. According to their website, “the German engineered mini tank is an environmentally friendly, air-tight, stainless steel container that mimics the way wine is stored at a winery. These mini tanks are re-usable, and they keep every glass as fresh as the first.” Now if we could just move that down from the 11 or 15 liter size to something that fits on my kitchen counter…. You get the idea. New packaging ideas!

Last year at a wine shop in CapeTown, South Africa, I was amazed at the plethora of wine packaging alternatives. Doypack. Bag in Box. Cans. Tetra. A bunch more I forget. So if things are changing elsewhere in the world, they will slowly but surely make their way to the shores of this colony – you know, the place where packaging changes most slowly – the US of A.

I think that we need to help it along.

Just for fun, give me some ideas of new demographics/market niches (see my example above) and the wine containers that would appeal to them. Keep it clean. Keep the other stuff for San Francisco the weekend of September 27, 2009. (There is so much to enjoy in our Folsom Fair city!)

Retainers Stink: It’s Time for the Wine Industry to Change the Old Ad Agency Paradigm

In the middle of a recession, buyers with cash have enormous power. It’s no wonder that vendors of advertising and marketing services target their pitches toward wineries, wine bars and wine shops that have either backers or profits, or both. Those in the wine industry rightfully seek to protect their resources - in this case, their marketing budgets. That’s frustrating to providers of advertising and other marketing promotion services. But it is long past time for a significant shift in the ad agency paradigm.

It’s not only wineries who are rethinking how to squeeze the most out of their marketing budgets. I talked to the Director of Group Sales for Kimpton Hotels on a flight to Chicago recently. He is fed up with his agency and their insistence on hefty monthly retainers, billed automatically without a report on progress toward marketing goals.

He’s not the only one who is annoyed with the old ad/promotion agency paradigm of retainers.

When I was starting my marketing career, I worked in PR for a big ad agency in Boston. At the end of every month, usually around the 24th, our group director would cast his eyes over the billables to date. If they were too low to justify the retainer, the command went out to, well, um, churn the account… not in so many words, of course, but the end result was slap-dash quick-and-dirty projects that filled the timesheet.

I learned from this. I learned it stank. It sure wasn’t consonant with my Midwestern farm girl ethics. And this is the great danger of one of the elements of that old ad/promo agency paradigm, the retainer.

So here is what I think is right for today’s recession-benighted budgets. Ask your agency to move toward more transparency in their advertising and marketing proposals. Have them put together project-based programs that work toward your goals. Each project has a budget, and it is billed 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 at beginning-middle-end. Insist on monthly progress reports for each project, even if the report is just a “we are working on the press list, we have contacted major bloggers, we have a few initial design concepts.” And be prepared to give your agency at least 30 minutes a month to discuss the report.

Is there a downside in this approach? You bet. Some agencies, used to the easy buck, will refuse to play. ( Why should they? They’re playing with your money.) Some marketing departments won’t like the peaks-and-valley billings that this project-oriented approach sometimes creates.

There are other stinky parts of the way advertising and marketing services work, too. Recently I’ve heard rumors of a marketing group who charged a $5000 monthly retainer to a wine industry supplier company, more as a guarantee that no other clients in that segment would be served by that marketing group, than for the creation and execution of a legitimate marketing programs.

Shameful.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share some other ideas and war stories from the marketing battlefields with you. In the meantime, post comments with your own pet peeves, ad/promo horror stories, or just the inevitable don’t-rock-the-boat. And post comments on the warm fuzzy stuff too. Hopefully we will all learn from one another on how to get more bang for our marketing buck. A bottoming-out economy can bring some important changes. Let’s hear more about what some of those changes should be.

Stimulus Pricing Eludes Wine by the Glass

It's a confusing economic world that we live in right now. I admire the spunky restaurateurs in the up-and-coming Mission area of San Francisco, and appreciated the bravado of the "Stimulus Dinner" sandwich-board sign at the corner of 22nd and Guerrero. This French restaurant offered a delicious 3-course meal for $29. What they didn't offer was a Stimulus Wine-by-the-Glass list. The least expensive offering, their house Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc, was $8. It was almost enough to make you order tap water as the beverage of choice.

I don't really understand wine-by-the-glass pricing, so I'd like some commentary here. I've heard folks say that a glass of wine should be priced so that it pays for the cost of the whole bottle. If I've heard that, you can bet that other wine drinkers and Joe/Jane-average-consumer have heard it too. It doesn't exactly make you feel warm and fuzzy at the thought; in fact, it kind of feels like price gouging.

On-premise sales are suffering as belt-tightening keeps more consumers dining at their own tables. A chat with LJ Brimfield at Piazza Market in North Beach on Sunday afternoon confirms that; their sales of value-price Italian wines are 'way up, and he attributes that to the dine-at-home movement; he gets asked a lot what wines will go with the "I'm preparing a chicken dish" course.
So if restaurateurs want to offer a Stimulus-Pricing glass of wine, just how do they price that? Is it 25% of a 3-course meal? Seems high to me. That glass of tap water just might be a serious contender for a value beverage...