Wine Dark Sea
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
GENERAL INTEREST MAGAZINES like Time are nice barometers of what a culture is supposed to be like, but give me an industrial trade magazine, any day. Who wouldn’t rather read Blackstockings than Playboy?
When it comes to my own trade, selling wine, I read the two main consumer mags, the glossy Wine Spectator with its fondness for California chardonnay and the fussy Wine Advocate with its preference for wine you can’t find (let alone afford), as well as an assortment of crass rags (Market Watch, Beverage Retailer) geared for managers of chain stores.
But the best publication for anyone who wants info on the wine industry is Wine Business Monthly.
It also happens to be very entertaining and, if you pass for an insider, free.
The seven-year-old monthly has the look and heft of Barrons, running about 80 legal-size pages of better-than-newsprint black and white articles illustrated by charts, graphs, and photos. Advertisements provide color as well as information about bottles, corks, fake corks, industrial machinery, and farm equipment.
The news can come across as the kind of no-bullshit approach you get in the Wall Street Journal news section (not to be confused with the editorial blather), although some pieces rely on too few sources. A recent story on Best Cellars failed to point out that these “bargain” boutiques actually sell the most expensive cheap wine around (in Seattle, at any rate, the same bottles can often be had across the parking lot at the U. Village QFC, for a buck less).
Much of the March 2000 issue is devoted to the theme of packaging, focusing on bottle and label designs; but two pieces leap out and grab casual reader/ drinkers and political activists: an op/ed primer on media relations and an article on the wine industry and the WTO.
“Winery Public Relations Is Changing,” by p.r. exec Judy Kimsey, presents a peppy mixture of common sense and stupefying bromides to inform as well as entertain. Unfortunately, Kimsey for the most part minds her diction, primly shielding readers from the array of argot neologisms that often make business writing more dazzling than language poetry.
She does, however, advocate exploring long-term pro-active strategies and maintaining an effective Internet presence by having a “sticky” website (i.e., a site people who don’t have a life in meat world will keep coming back to out of sheer boredom). A “sticky” website is, after all, “a vital part of your public relations arsenal.”
Rather than hold up a mirror to see ourselves as others see us, op-ed pieces like this let you see them as they see themselves.
Nothing against Gina Gallo (or against whatever data may indicate that Gallo sales are up), but how strange it is to read of the “Gina Phenomenon,” where the pretty celebrity/ heir/ winemaker drives sales by providing a “personality-driven image!”
And while the wine industry plunges into organic viticulture, there’s a “misperception” that it’s “the environmental bad guy” because it’s a monoculture and because of “novice owners whose vineyards slide off the hillside into the local creek.”
If that isn’t enough of a trip to Never Never Land, get this:
“Return press calls promptly. In most industries, not returning a press call within the day, if not the hour, is a firing offense.”
In the real world, as in prevalent practice in the wine world Kimsey chastises, p.r. flacks must get bonuses for not returning press calls; and when they do call back, the reporter is in for hours of happy talk in lieu of concise information.
“Wine Still Swirls as a Trade Issue,” by Lisa Shara Hall, came at an ideal time for me: en route to have dinner with some visiting Italian wine execs at a restaurant along the trail of tear gas that police blazed to drive protesters out of downtown and into the neighborhoods of lower Capitol Hill.
Simon Siegl, ex-Washington Wine Commission czar and current head of the American Vintners Association, was the only quoted source for the article. His message to winemakers? Shut up and join an organization like his. “This is an area where horizontal expansion of communications merely adds confusion,” he says.
As a WTO protester and a co-owner of a small wine shop, I remain skeptical of the WTO having any say in my industry. But thanks to this article, I was able to relate my skepticism to the Italians in a way that hit home.
The main enemies of people who drink, sell, and make wine that’s imported to the U.S. are tariffs and pressures to remove “subsidies.” Fortunately for us, the U.S. has the lowest tariffs on wine; and European farmers and vintners have resisted attempts to change the way they do business. So, as things stand, a good bottle of Chianti Classico is still $12-$15 and plenty of good Italian wine is still under $10 a bottle.
In other words, I said, the protesters in the streets of Seattle were not destroying property; we were defending our right to purchase Italian wine at fair prices.
The big U.S. wine interests may be too sophisticated to behave like hicks and demand an end to all, say, tax breaks that foreign wineries enjoy. After all, their main concerns involve exports: getting other countries to lower tariffs and to accept some kind of label standardization.
But, “Next on the list is the elimination of subsidies,” which is complicated because “The EU wants to protect its historical and culturally based subsidies.”
Make that, the EU, American consumers, American importers and dealers, and everybody else.
The only ones who don’t like this arrangement are outfits like Gallo, whose Gina Phenomenon doesn’t change a legacy of farm-worker exploitation and a line of rotgut sold under names swiped from Europe and then trademarked so the world could come to know Hearty Burgundy and Chablis.
(To receive Wine Business Monthly, pick up a sub form at a local wine shop or write to them at 867 W. Napa St., Sonoma, CA 95476. Make up an industrial position for yourself (retailer, grower, restaurateur, etc.) and don’t tell them I sent you.)
TOMORROW: Dave Eggers, Threat or Menace?
ELSEWHERE:
