Actual results from marketing to bloggers

A few weeks ago I was offered the chance to participate in a live online blogger tasting of expensive (over $30) Chilean red blends.

I said yes; I'm not sure why, because I don't know if I've ever ordered a pricey Chilean red blend. Then I got busy that night and missed the event.

I got to wondering how effective that campaign was, so I asked, and Wines of Chile answered.

Turns out the wines were sent to 50 bloggers. I have posted the list below, unfortunately in JPG format, so they're not hot links. You'll have to seek out the blogs by their names or URLs to read the posts.

I had planned to write something about these posts, but fell asleep reading them (note to these bloggers: certainly I fell asleep before getting to yours.) Most are little more than tasting notes, with many people making a connection to the Chilean miners being rescued.

Is this effective marketing? Most of the big names among wine bloggers skipped it. Is this enough payoff to justify the expense of shipping a box of wine to 50 bloggers -- many of whom, like me, took the wine and wrote nothing?

I'd love it if people would weigh in and tell me any evidence of wines being sold because of these posts. I'd also like it if Joe Roberts or Jo Diaz or some of my other online friends who posted on the tasting would tell me if the tasting affected their opinion of Chilean wine, these wines, red blends, etc. Will you write more on the topic, or is that the end of it?

I also know that I have a number of wine industry readers, so I'm curious for your take on the success or failure of this campaign. There's a reason I still allow anonymous comments on my blog, despite legal headaches (and cowardly meanies), and this is part of it. In this instance, candor may be more valuable than identity. Thanks.

Michelin, European snobbery and food fights

Which Michelin guide story would you rather read first:
1) How European snobs suckered the always gullible Wall Street Journal;
or
2) How I instigated a near food-fight between Michelin Guide worldwide director Jean-Luc Naret and Slanted Door chef Charles Phan?

Let's take a quick online poll, using Diebold voting machines tested in Ohio.

Great! Results are in already -- how about that? You want to read the media criticism, and you're willing to wait until afterward to read about how I got previously jolly Phan to stare daggers at Naret.

First, here's the Wall Street Journal story. It's written in the classic Time magazine style, with three reporters sending stuff to the home base to an editor who already knew what he/she wanted to say.

I'll summarize it: restaurants in Japan's Kansai region (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe) did very well in the latest Michelin guide, better than the restaurants of Paris or New York or London. Therefore, the guide is wrong and Michelin gave out inflated ratings as part of a cynical business plan to sell more tires in Japan.

Folks, I lived in Japan and I'll testify that, next to Singapore, it has the best overall food on the planet. This wouldn't be a surprise to the unnamed WSJ editor if she/he was on the food beat, as gushing columns about visits to Japan by chefs and food writers are common.

The WSJ would protest that the article is not an opinion piece, like this one, but a reported story with both sides. Bullshit. The story cites independent people in New York, London and Paris who think Michelin's belief in Japanese restaurants is wrong, but not one person other than the Michelin guide chief -- obviously biased -- to defend it.

Note to WSJ: The next time, if you want some actual balance in a Eurocentric piece like this, I can give you a list of American chefs who think Japan has great food. But perhaps you're just trying to curry favor in France and the UK? Parochially praising that country's food, as you point out, is good marketing.

*******

Everybody else who interviewed Jean-Luc Naret yesterday in San Francisco focused on which restaurants got stars or lost them.*

(*Bully for Michelin for pointing out something major Bay Area food writers are too timid to admit, that Chez Panisse -- now starless -- isn't a good dining experience. If there's a more pretentious place, I hope I never eat there. And the food is competent but uninteresting.)

But I wanted to talk to him about sake. Since last year, Michelin has awarded a little flask symbol to restaurants with noteworthy sake lists. Fifteen Bay Area restaurants (mostly Japanese, but including fusion restaurants Ame, Namu and Nombe) -- got the designation.

I'm delighted to see the recognition that sake is an important part of fine dining. It's the golden era for top-end sake, which is just as exciting as great wine and is better value.

Unfortunately Naret wasn't the guy to talk on the topic. He's brilliant -- he speaks so fast I couldn't keep up and seems to have a mental file of every starred restaurant in the world. But while he enjoys sake, he's a food guy.

I did learn Michelin felt it had to add sake lists because of the Tokyo guidebook, which had a big impact on the company's overall food culture. Michelin cross-exposes its inspectors, so it now has French and American inspectors visiting Japan and Japanese inspectors visiting Europe and the US. This is why a tire company has a global food perspective the Wall Street Journal lacks.

I also learned markup doesn't play a role in the designation of noteworthy sake lists -- or wine lists. They are French at heart, so they care about region; Michelin wants to see a choice of wines or sakes from different places, including locals where appropriate. And they care about the sommelier's knowledge and advice. But if there are a couple of affordable selections -- regardless of the markup -- a restaurant can still get the "noteworthy list" graphic for wine or sake.

The fooderati who follow the Michelin guide can afford to pay a 4x markup; what they want is a good bottle, carefully chosen and explained. But caveat emptor to those of us on a budget that "noteworthy" doesn't mean "reasonably priced."

*****

Did you know that, despite all the pomp of its release parties and tales of selling 150,000 Tokyo guides in 24 hours, the Michelin guide doesn't make money?

Naret, who came from the hotel industry 7 years ago, said the dining guide on its own is only 0.5% of Michelin's business. As the Wall Street Journal conjectured, it's something of a loss leader for the global brand.

And no wonder, when you think about the expenses. Before giving a third star to a restaurant like Meadowood (congratulations, Christopher), inspectors will visit at least 6 times, anonymously, paying the tab each time. A cross-inspector might come from another country, and Naret might visit as well.

You can see the work in the guide. I find its uniformly positive tone a little less helpful than it could be -- when everything is good, nothing stands out. But they described 519 Bay Area restaurants in this year's guide, and you have to nitpick to find inaccurate entries. I'll leave that to others.

*******

Instead, I'll get to the fun part.

Something I hadn't known about the Michelin guide is that it gives its stars on food quality only -- not service, not decor. Naret said he put that explicitly in the guide when he took over. He spoke of a Tokyo sushi bar under a train station that got 3 stars (pissing off the Wall Street Journal).

But most chefs still believe otherwise, and it's not pretty for them to find out the truth.

I interviewed Naret at Slanted Door because KGO (channel 7) was doing a TV interview there beforehand. Why KGO chose Slanted Door, which did not get a Michelin star, you'll have to ask them.

Naret and I were chatting when Charles Phan walked over. His restaurant had been given a "Bib Gourmand," a designation for good cheap places.

Naret said he loves Slanted Door and eats there every time he's in San Francisco; he said it's his favorite lunch place here. So I asked Phan if he thought he should have a Michelin star.

"I love my title, Bib Gourmand," Phan said. "That will bring more people to my restaurant. They have a certain aesthetic and a certain genre of restaurant and I might not fit that model. I think it's great that they might have different things for different people. Maybe I'll have to build a different type of restaurant to get a star. They can't change what they do. Life is like that. It's not one size fits all. If we weren't in the guide at all, something wouldn't be right."

Then I turned to Naret and asked why Phan doesn't have a star.

"He's not looking for a star," Naret said. "He's doing 950 covers a day. You can eat as much as you can here at a very reasonable price. We love the food."

So I channeled my inner Jerry Springer and asked him, "But the star isn't about the size or the price, right? Isn't it only about the food?"

"It's about the food itself," Naret said.

"So what's more important, the Bib Gourmand or the star?" I asked.

"The star," Naret said.

"So let me ask this," I said. "You say this is your favorite lunch restaurant in San Francisco, that you eat here every time you come. And size and decor don't matter. So why doesn't it have a star?"

This was the only time I saw Naret hem and haw. I didn't get down his noncommittal words, though, because it was then that Phan realized what I was saying, and his facial expression changed from "I got a Bib Gourmand!" to "you stole my wallet and I'm going to kill you."

I said that if Slanted Door is one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the country, and it didn't get a star, was it even possible for a Vietnamese restaurant to get a star? Phan didn't say anything, but he didn't like that either. Naret demurred, he said the Bib Gourmand is a very important award. And then I let him off the hook, and went back to talking about sake.

I took the photo of the two of them before this question sequence. But the discomfort only lasted a couple of minutes. By the time I left, Phan was smiling again and the two were sitting together, chatting like good friends.

But it does bring me back to the Wall Street Journal story. The paper was asking the wrong question -- not whether Japanese restaurants are really that good, but whether Vietnamese and Thai and Indian and Mexican restaurants really don't measure up.

God decides California grapes had hung long enough

Thank you, God.

I didn't expect you to get involved in the hangtime, concentrated-wine debate. You have so much else on your plate, including your unexpected intervention in the National League Championship Series, for which I am extremely grateful.

But I forgot you were both omnipotent and omniscient. Which means I don't really need to finish this post. But I'll spell it out for the humans who have made me one of the world's 10-most-read wine bloggers (thanks for that too, God, as it is another of your mysteries).

The 2010 northern California vintage might be the most compelling of the century so far, but only for vintners who picked their grapes before last weekend. They benefited from your long, cool summer, as their grapes had months to develop flavors without building up the huge amounts of sugar that lead to high alcohol. I simply cannot wait to start tasting these wines.

But not everybody recognized your grace. Some worshiped the false idol of super-ripeness.

On Saturday, you sent them a warning, with a little less than an inch of rain. Then on Sunday you poured nearly 6 inches of rain on Mt. St. Helena. It wasn't exactly Noah's worst storm in the rest of our Wine Country, but it might have been one of his lesser 40 days.

Winemakers who were waiting to harvest, hoping to make inky, concentrated fruit bombs, are today wondering what to do. If they harvest now, their wine might be surprisingly decent; the water absorbed by the grapes might cut their concentration enough to produce food friendliness. They might not get 98 points, but they'll be able to enjoy these wines at the dinner table with your other gifts of beast and fowl and root. It's almost like a miracle your son performed.

Or they can wait another fortnight, into November, to see if they can make a Dark Monolith Wine. But you have their attention, and they know you might again express your displeasure with this style.

God, you are tremendous. You created vitis vinifera grapevines and you didn't intend its fruit to be left out in the fields in the last week of October, with nets and fences to prevent your other creatures (birds, deer) from harvesting it when it's ready.

You created the annual cycle of generation and rest in these vines that arguably reaches perfection in northern California, where you bless us with dry summers and all the water we need in winter. You have planned a schedule that works, and all we have to do is have faith in it.

I never really thought about whether or not you actually drink wine, which is one of your greatest gifts to us. I know many believe that you do, which is why they offer it to you as a blessing.

After last weekend, I agree with them. I think you do drink wine, and you prefer balance and elegance.

Having already received so many blessings from you, I am loath to ask for too much. But I would be grateful if you would speak to the hearts of the winemakers who left their fruit out too long, and to the tiny number of influential critics who pushed them into it. Nothing dramatic like a plague on my account, please! However, I will not presume to know your methods. Sometimes a grand slam is needed, but other times only a sacrifice fly. Speak to them, and show them how they might show respect for your gift of grapevines by making the type of wine you intended.

Thanks again, God. You have spoken, and the wise will listen. Amen.

And now, 300% new oak!

Here's how Bodegas Balbas made its 2003 Ribera del Duero Alitus Reserve.

It spends 3 years in new oak barrels: 1 year in American oak, 1 year in French oak, and 1 year in a special barrel made of American oak heads with French oak staves.

In other words, 300% new oak! A new record!

Wow, talk about one-upmanship! All those Argentines who age their Malbecs for a year each in two different new oak barrels (200% new oak) must be rending their garments and wearing sackcloths. Ignominious defeat, you namby-pamby under-oakers.

Don't believe me? It's on Balbas' website; they're proud of it.

I tasted the wine at the Wine & Spirits Top 100 event in San Francisco (still the best wine-tasting event in town), and guess what it tastes like? Give up? Oak! Yeah, there's some dark cherry fruit and nice hints of dark chocolate. But if you like oak, and many people do, why settle for less?

Kudos to the producers for discovering something missing from the wine market, and giving us what we deserve.

In light of this, here are some more items I'd like to see:

* Single-grape Cabernet Sauvignon. Each grape is individually washed and dried before being individually crushed into a tiny fermenter with a single commercial yeast cell. Each bottle is made by combining the best 500 of these individual lots of Cab. I believe Harlan Estate is working on this.

* Winemaker essence red blend. A celebrity winemaker works out in the fields, then runs 3 miles fast on a treadmill positioned over the freshly crushed grapes, adding her essence to the wine. "I'm getting cherries, berries, and a fascinating savory, gamy note ...."

* Underwater-processed Albarino: A few bottles of Rias Baixas wine are sunk to the bottom of the sea for two months, then rescued and sold for a lot more money.

Ooops -- that last one already exists (Raul Perez did it). Blink and you miss the latest wine trend. 400% new oak, I can hardly wait!

Organic wine standards could change for the better

The Huffington Post occasionally notices wine, but politics are its main gig. When it does run a wine piece, it's apparently edited by people who don't know anything about the topic; some of its wine pieces have been embarrassing.

This week, the Huffington Post ran an innocuous, poorly written and edited piece about organic wine that nobody seemed to read; there are no comments.

Yet it's actually a huge story, about US law regarding organic wine possibly changing for the better.

Here's the deal. Currently, US law does not allow wines labeled as "organic wine" to contain any added sulfites. This is bad because sulfites preserve the fresh fruit flavors in wine. A wine without added sulfites is vulnerable to spoilage, and in any case can not be expected to last long on the shelf.

US law is out of sync with European law. The French in particular recognize the necessity of adding sulfites to wine; most of the "organic wines" you see from France have sulfites added.

This silly restriction is the reason I (and other wine writers) have discouraged readers for years from buying wines labled "organic wine." Instead, if you care about the environment and the way your wine grapes were farmed, I encourage you to drink wines labeled "made from organically grown grapes," or biodynamic wine.

The reason US law developed this way is because the federal bureau in charge of US wine law (now known as the TTB) is usually reactive, rather than active. The TTB doesn't make policy; instead, it responds to petitions from businesses to make changes, such as creating new American Viticultural Areas.

I've been told the original applications for an official "organic wine" designation on US wine labels were led by anti-sulfite zealots at a time, decades ago, when few wineries cared about organic wine because it was a tiny niche. Most wineries didn't want to use the label anyway, so nobody fought very hard over how the regulations were written.

Now, organic anything is a big category, and more wine companies want in. But they want to rewrite the standards to allow added sulfites so their wine won't smell like dirty socks after a year on the shelf.

On the surface, this sounds like a Huffington Post story -- wine companies want to weaken organic standards.

But look at the company that, according to the story, has made the proposition. It's not The Wine Group or Gallo or Constellation: it's "Organic Vintners," a tiny wine importer that apparently has two employees (they haven't returned my calls.) And right on its home page, the company brags that one advantage of organic wine is that it's low in sulfites. This is not an agribusiness.

That said, the size of the companies here is immaterial. What matters is that many consumers' desire for a wine made through responsible, safer farming is being held hostage by a tiny minority who think sulfites are bad.

Ronnie Cummins, director of the "Organic Consumers Association," wrote the Huffington Post piece. I'm sure he's well-meaning; organic food standards are under constant attack from agribusiness. But he clearly knows nothing about wine, because he writes a lot about the USDA and doesn't mention the TTB, which has jurisdiction over wine labels. It's not clear to me from reading his piece that he has ever had a glass of wine in his life.

Wine lovers can't let people like this decide on standards for wine labels. I want "organic wine" on a label to mean something other than "unpreserved wine that probably tastes bad." I want it to mean what it does in France: "lovingly farmed wine made from grapes not exposed to pesticides and herbicides."

I want to throw my support behind Paolo Mario Bonetti, Organic Vintners and their attempt to change US organic wine label standards for the better.

So my first call (metaphorically speaking) is to the Huffington Post, to do a better job on this issue. Assign a real reporter and a real editor; don't let somebody who knows nothing about it write an opinion piece.

And Paolo, give me a call. I'm on your side.

Charles Smith Wines explains the lawsuit against my readers

I want to thank reader Jason Vance, a Utah wine lover, for sending me a copy of the email below and giving me permission to print it. It explains a lot. I have removed the email addresses and phone numbers so they won't get spammed, but otherwise it's unedited.

For those of you who need the background, here's my original post about Charles Smith and here's the post about Smith and K Vintners suing readers of my blog.

Charles Smith: Here's an offer. Drop the lawsuit against my readers, and I will give you 700 words on this blog to say whatever you want. I retain the option of editing out profanity, obscenity or other offensiveness. Otherwise, go to town. You have my card; email me.

**************

From: Janna Kline Rinker <(charles smith wines' email address removed)>
Date: October 13, 2010 5:13:56 PM MDT
To: (Jason's email address removed)
Cc: Charles Smith (email address removed)
Subject: Your email

Hello Jason,

Thank you for your note, although it was obviously disapproving of what you claim are our actions we have a policy to get back to everyone no matter what.

I wanted you to know that we have not filed any action to specific commenters or to bloggers, and that is evident should you read the entire story. We believe that the anonymous commenter is someone who had a mutual non-disparagement agreement with the winery and unfortunately something that should have been kept private was made public.

Again, we have not taken any legal action toward any bloggers, in fact we've done nothing but take them out to dinners, invite them to parties and be nothing but really nice to them in general! We've received negative reviews before and will in the future, of this we have no doubt. Fortunately for us, most are positive!

Your remarks about Utah puzzle me. I work with a broker there and do know that people in Utah drink wine and in fact have been trying to do more business there, it just takes a bit longer than other states. My broker was not familiar with your group and he has a great portfolio of domestic and international wineries. Their website is www.bottleneckwines.com, you should check it out if you've never worked with their wines.

In addition, you are still welcome at the winery should you change your mind. Perhaps you would find for yourself that we are nice people and really just want to make great wine!

Best,

janna kline rinker
the director - west and international
k vintners | charles smith wines | charles & charles
m: (phone number removed)
o: (phone number removed)
(email address removed)
visit us:
charlessmithwines.com
kvintners.com
bielerandsmith.com

More unnatural wine and other notes

Get 1/2 off shipping when you buy Italian wine in quantities of 6 bottles or more with code "blake23"

Wine Business Insider had an excellent story yesterday describing a new whiz-bang winemaking gizmo that, if I understand it correctly, uses heat and a vacuum chamber to remove the character of grapes.

The idea is that underripe grapes can have bell pepper characters removed. The resulting beverage will have a little higher alcohol because its sugars are concentrated.

It's not a reach to say it will be jammier. Ripe fruit + vacuum + heat + sugar = jam, right?

I guess I'm supposed to wring my hands about the future of wine. But it's telling that this machine is in Lodi, source of fine $7.99 reds, but a little challenged at the high end of quality. If somebody's drinking a $7.99 California appellation Cabernet, I don't think they care about native-yeast fermentation, and neither do I. Enjoy your beverage.

The question is, will high-end California winemakers soon see this as another way of getting more intense, concentrated, higher-octane, smoother $150 Cabernets?

Dan Berger recently reported in his newsletter that some high-end wineries are harvesting grapes overly ripe, fermenting them to dryness (can't do that with natural yeast), removing some of the alcohol through reverse osmosis for barrel aging, then adding the alcohol back in. It sounds like light-beer processing, but Americans love light beer.

My colleague Remy Charest did a great piece for Palate Press on natural wine in which he seems to intimate that the wine media cares a lot more about what goes on behind the winery doors than the public does. I think he's right, but that's no reason for us to stop talking about it. But I do have to keep this in perspective: I predict nobody will comment on this post who doesn't either write about wine or work in the wine industry. If you're a "civilian" and you care about this stuff, let me know.

****

Congratulations to Crushpad, which claims to make more than 1% of all commercial wine in the U.S. (Not by volume, by unique SKUs.)

For those who don't know Crushpad, it's a Napa-based business that allows anyone -- yes, you too -- to make small amounts of wine from quality grapes, with advice and support from their in-house pros. It has allowed folks to transition from making a few cases of Viognier for their friends to making a few dozen cases of commercial Viognier that they now have to figure out how to sell.

Crushpad has been responsible for 3,247 different labels filed with the US TTB. In 2010 alone, Crushpad received approval for 787 different wines. These are not just different labels on the same juice, but unique small-production wines.

It's part of the reason I could walk into a restaurant three blocks from me recently and not recognize a single label on the wine list -- that hadn't happened to me, I think, ever. Bully for Crushpad for not only letting a lot of people realize their expensive dreams, but for keeping even wine geeks on our toes.

But memo to Crushpad dreamers: I don't care if it cost you $30 to make that Monterey Viognier, I'm not paying $60 for it on the wine list. There's a reason they call it "economy of scale." Count on losing money until somebody -- like the folks below -- notices you.

*****

I'll admit that, cravenly, when I got "The New Connoisseurs' Guidebook to California Wine & Wineries" by Charles E. Olken and Joseph Furstenthal and noticed there were four pages recommending wine blogs, I wondered why this one wasn't listed.

But then I started looking for some of my favorite wineries and discovered that I'm in excellent company.

Here are a few wineries not listed in the 456-page book:

A Donkey and Goat
Anthill Farms
Arnot-Roberts
Bedrock
Benessere
Black Kite
Denner
Eberle
Keller Estate
L'Aventure
Linne Calodo
Lioco
Martinelli
Natural Process Alliance
Pax
Radio-Coteau
Samsara
Saxum
Scholium Project
Vision Cellars
Wind Gap

Those are just a few that I thought to look for; I'm sure there are others. It's a pity because the book has nice, concise summaries of wineries' backgrounds, and I'd like to know more about some of the wineries above. You might note a common theme: many, but not all, are part of the "natural wine" movement, which to my mind makes them more, not less, attractive to "connoisseurs."

Hey, Charles and Joseph, try reading a few more blogs, you might learn something.