Retailer pisses off winery by promoting its wine

Frank's Wine is probably Delaware's best wine shop, in part because of the effort owner Frank Pagliaro makes to offer tastings and events. Frank has personality. Last year he posted this video of a guy stealing a $25 wine from his store on Valentine's Day and ended up getting local media coverage and selling stacks of the wine, which he renamed "Assclown Cab" after the poorly dressed perpetrator.



Last week, a more normal, non-profane promotion -- a simple mixed-case discount -- riled up a tone-deaf California winery so much it threatened to pull its wine from his shelves.

Here's the sequence of events. Frank's weekly email blast featured a laudatory introduction of Peter Stolpman, who has taken over the winery his parents founded. A sample:

"This propelled Pete on an adventure of a lifetime - making Shiraz in the Barossa Valley, Sangiovese in Chianti Classico and returning to California to work under Master Sommelier Peter Neptune at the Henry Wine Group, one of the largest wine distributors on the West Coast.  It was here that Peter was awarded Fine Wine Specialist of the Year in 2008 at 26 years old, the youngest salesman to receive this award to date.  More importantly, he also met his fiancé, Jessica Simmons, here during training!"

It's all nice, all sales promotion talk, nothing objectionable. Then Frank writes about the wines, again all positive:

"Intense and focused on the extremely long finish, which strongly repeats the floral and spice notes. Although this wine will be enjoyable upon release, Peter is confident it will continue to give pleasure for 10+ years."

And then he offers a deal: A 6-pack of 3 Stolpman wines for $99.99. This is two each of wines normally priced $30, $25 and $20, so it looks like $150 worth of wine for $100, or 33% off. 

In fact, like most stores Frank's builds a little extra margin in the regular prices to allow him to give a 15% discount on a mixed case. So realistically, it's only a little more discount than usual, and Frank is promoting a Santa Barbara County brand that, while it has good quality (the winemaker is Sashi Moorman), isn't exactly a household name. Frank promises an all-day Saturday tasting of all three wines with Stolpman sales guy Yves Borquet AND an all-afternoon Sunday tasting with store staff. Stolpman's gotta love that, right?

Here's the e-mail Frank got from Borquet: I copied the way Frank presented it in his follow-up email blast:

And here's what Frank sent back, again copied from his email blast:

I asked Frank what the response to this second email blast has been and he said:

"I've literally spent the last 2 1/2 hours replying to 100+ emails from customers who are pretty outraged by Stolpman and Sussex Wine Merchant's take on this ... Should be interesting to see if they sell me wine when I go to re-order... we've had a pretty crazy day at the shop and this email was all the buzz.  Folks who were not planning on coming in to taste or buy Stolpman wines were here both tasting and buying! I'm sure I'll be out by tomorrow!"

The irony. Maybe Stolpman's anger at the discount was the best marketing of all? Though given the nicknames Frank gives out when displeased, you gotta wonder what Peter Stolpman is being called in Wilmington this morning.

Follow me on Twitter: @wblakegray and like The Gray Report on Facebook. 
Just don't let Frank name a wine after me.