Wine takes to Internet in a big way
We’re honored to be mentioned in a great article in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat about Wine in the social media age. You can find the article by Peg Melnik at the Press Democrat’s site.
How do you measure Social Media?
My question to the wine industry is, how are you measuring the success of your social media participation and if you are not participating how do you plan on getting started?
We at Cruvee developed a social media monitoring system that aggregates millions of blogs, forums, microblogs (twitter, et al), social networks and more for wineries to measure their success and shortcomings when it comes to social media. We even give every winery the option to look at their results for FREE on our site http://www.cruvee.com by entering their winery or product name into our search tool bar. Then a nominal utility fee to see the unlimited results based on our technology combined with your unlimited customized search keywords.
Definitely a great place to get started if you are not participating now as you can see who is talking about your brands and wineries. An even better tool to measure the effects of your participation if you are socially active
What tools do you use?
Cruvee Acquires Scrugy.com
Cruvee for Wineries™ the powerful, real time wine market intelligence platform that analyzes wine information from vast sources across the web for wineries, has acquired scrugy.com an online wine information aggregator that consumes and analyzes wine information such as tasting notes, reviews, wineries and influential wine blogs while connecting that collective information back to specific wine brands.
“Cruvee for Wineries moves to the next level with the acquisition of scrugy.com,” said Evan Cover, Cruvee CEO and Co-Founder, “Cruvee is now an even more powerful tool as we can keep our winery clients at the forefront of audiences such as the millions of core wine consumers, and key trade buyers, as well as track the chatter and electronic conversations that surround specific wine brands.”
Cover also announced that James Jory who founded scrugy.com has joined Cruvee for Wineries as Vice President of Technology. Jory brings more than 20 years of experience in software development focused primarily on server-side Java development and worked as the Director of Software Development and Chief Architect for Kurant, an e-commerce software startup acquired by eBay that became ProStores. As an independent entrepreneur, Jory combined his two passions of technology and wine which resulted in the creation of the powerful scrugy.com wine aggregator, search engine and platform.
“Wineries are in a race to gain customer loyalty at every tier,” Cover stated, “Cruvee for Wineries helps increase wine sales by providing one channel for the distribution of information to online retailers, social networks and mobile wine-related sites. Beyond tracking, the information that Cruvee provides creates opportunities for wineries to interact and engage customers which fosters brand loyalty and in turn impacts the bottom line.”
A first for the wine industry, Cruvee for Wineries™ provides up-to-the-minute business intelligence and performance management services as well as digital clipping capability. Wineries can click to sign up at www.cruvee.com. Cruvee uses proprietary technology to sort social media and informational sources (such as forums, blogs and social networks) and then identifies insights and trends that will help wineries make good business and marketing decisions.
Cruvee for Wineries™ currently monitors sources such as 600 wine blogs, 19 million blog posts and comments, two million Twitter tweets per day, 50,000 registered forum members, 100 million FriendFeed entries and 100 wine-related social networks and groups.
The Cruvee® executive team includes Evan Cover, Cruvee CEO; Alex Kremer, Vice President of Technology Business Development; James Jory, Vice President of Technology; Andrew Glover, Chief Software Architect and serving on the Board of Directors VinTank Chief Strategy Officer Paul Mabray. Based in the Napa Valley, Cruvee®, and the new Cruvee for Wineries™, is the first company to provide business intelligence and performance management services for the wine industry and wine brands of every size. For more information call 707.737.0277 or go to www.cruvee.com.
We’ve moved. Sort of.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted on our blog, and the reasons are all good. They’re also behind the change of address for our wine social network, which we’re announcing today is moving from www.cruvee.com to www.cruveenetwork.com.
Our core vision has always been to offer a suite of products to both the consumer and business segments of the wine industry. This includes some of the offerings you’ve seen from us previously: a consumer site with our powerful data aggregation technology behind it, and business offerings that leverage our technology to inform wineries what consumers are saying about their brand.
This vision has resulted in some tremendous response and feedback for us. One of the biggest items was something we heard loud and clear: Better separation between our B2B and B2C products. So, today we’re taking the step to separate our product segments and drawing a more defined line as to who we are and what we’re doing for both market segments. This necessitated the move of our social network to a new domain. While the address is new, the features and functionality stays the same - just update your bookmarks.
We’ve got some exciting things in store for the wine industry in 2009 - stay tuned.
PS: A huge thanks to our resident blogger and friend Thomas Pellechia, who has written truly great posts on this blog for the past few months and unfortunately leaves us as of the post below. We strongly recommend you continue reading his work and subscribe to his blog at http://www.vinofictions.com/
mail order
In my household, it’s my wife who’s gaga over mail order/online shopping. She spends hours each week reading catalogs online plus the ones delivered by the post office. I believe her complete Christmas shopping is accomplished this way.
I can’t tell you how many items of clothing bought mail order for me as gifts either haven’t fit or haven’t appealed to me.
When I shop, I know what I am looking for. I get no pleasure from rummaging through lists of what might raise my interest. In fact, when I shop, I don’t want a list. I want to see, touch, try on, listen to, or taste what it is that I intend to buy.
I say all this is by way of introduction to my inability to understand the appeal of shopping for wine from a mailing list.
Over the years mailing list wine shopping has become a boon for so-called cult wine producers, especially from California. Putting aside the distasteful idea of wine being any sort of cult, isn’t the primary joy of shopping for wine the ability to taste it first? Isn’t that why we have wine tastings and wine bars?
Many cult wines are not readily available through the distribution channel—you have to be in or go to California to taste and buy them or you buy them through the mail, if you live in certain states. As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t or won’t get the wine to me, then I’ll move on. There’s plenty out there from which to choose. Still, I wonder how people make their mail order buying decisions.
Do they follow the critics and hope that they will agree with their assessments once the wine arrives?
Do they remember a previous experience with the wine and hope that the next one will be equally to their liking?
Do they seek the advice of friends whose tastes they respect but who may not have tasted the new wine either?
Do they ask the wine producer to send some samples for them to taste? (This is preferable over all possibilities, but highly unlikely.)
Do they expect that each year the wine will be relatively the same as it was the year before?
That last question brings up a disappointing possibility—that the wines might be so consistent from year to year that I would become bored with them. I don’t mind a winemaker working on the wine to shape it, but I prefer that the manipulation retain the integrity of each separate vintage—vivre la difference!
It’s also hard to understand those who complain that they receive too many mailings from too many wineries, and that they can’t afford to buy it all. One is left to wonder why they don’t simply cancel some of their subscriptions. Are they afraid that they may miss out on a life-altering experience? If so, let me assure them that few wines, if any, have the power to change a life.
On the other hand, why do some wait years for the privilege of buying someone’s cult wine at a high price?
To paraphrase that saying attributed to Groucho Marx, “I wouldn’t join a club that would have me as a member,” I wouldn’t join a club that would force me to wait for years before allowing me to participate in its offerings.
I wouldn’t join that kind of club whether it was mail order or not, but if I had joined, I certainly would be extremely annoyed with the club if it sent me its mail order offerings and then prevented me from buying them.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’ll be on my way to my favorite wine shop for a tasting of some Italian wines. I might even buy some.
Long Live Taste
Many years ago—in fact, it was during my first year in the wine business—at the end of a long day behind the tasting bar, a couple walked through the door that was about to give me a lesson.
There’s a kind of dance that takes place when a tourist enters a wine tasting room. It’s difficult to explain, but after you see enough of them, you get to know whether or not your visitors are everyday wine drinkers or just travelers looking for a good time.
The two people before me were not everyday wine drinkers, but they weren’t just looking for a good time either. They were on a wine learning curve. I found this out after a few minutes talking with them while they tasted wine.
Throughout the conversation, the woman kept referring to Riesling—it was her favorite of all wines. Being the natural annoying wine educator that I try to be whenever another human being is in my presence, I asked her which wine she drinks when she’s enjoying a juicy steak.
“Riesling, of course,” she replied.
Without thinking, I reacted.
“That’s crazy,” I said. Remember, it was my first year in the business.
I lost any potential sales from that couple and I didn’t get a chance to explain myself as they huffed out of the tasting room.
These 25 years later, I realize more potently how wrong I was back then. Sure, there are many technical reasons behind the concept that Riesling and a juicy steak is not a pairing made in heaven, but what of technicalities?
People drink certain wines for the pleasure we derive from them, and we eat certain foods for the pleasure we derive from them, and many, many people don’t ever think about how matching the two might offer a new level of pleasure. Should we in the wine business proclaim ourselves the arbiters of everyone else’s pleasure?
In any case, even though I learned something that day about how not to sell wine, and about the fallacy of being cock-sure of my opinions, I have never given up the idea that Riesling with steak is nuts—I just don’t say it to other people anymore.
The other day, someone mentioned to me that since she is a vegetarian, she takes a lot of ribbing from friends when they go out to dinner, especially since she likes big red wines. They tell her that because she doesn’t eat meat she has no business drinking big, tannic reds.
I told her about Cahors, that area in France where Malbec is king. Some Malbecs I tasted in Cahors were as big and tannic as any red wine I’ve ever experienced. And while they offer a fair number of hardy meat dishes in the region, I saw the people of Cahors drink Malbec with almost any food they put into their mouths, whether meat, vegetable or cake!
Having said that to my friend, I also gave her some ideas for ordering in a restaurant that might pair well with her red wines, and that she could have her friends sample to make them understand the error of their conviction. I told her to seek grilled mushrooms or grilled vegetables in general, to look for bean casseroles, meatless chili, and, if she eats fish, try tuna or salmon steak with a tannic but lighter bodied red wine.
If, however, my friend finds herself in a restaurant where none of the offerings like the above exist, and she is stuck having to order red wine with a meatless salad, I told her to go for a balsamic based salad dressing and then give in by pairing it with a nice semi-dry Riesling.
She gagged at the idea, and I said nothing in response.
Long live taste preferences.
Wine retailing
This blog entry is for a reader named Mitch.
Do you know what life as a reputable wine retailer is like? The following is what it was like for me in Manhattan.
The wine shop I started with a partner (is-wine) was intended to serve particular types of customers: those seeking good value wine and not necessarily wines that are rated by the critics. The shop was also intended to be a neighborhood place that could become a comfortable wine-learning center.
We focused on finding wines from regions that, until ten years ago, when we began, were virtually by-passed in the press and by the critics—places like Gaillac, Limoux, Cahors, Brindisi, Sardegna, Marche, Trentino, Aquilea, Toro, LaMancha, Austria, Cyprus, Ontario, Idaho; you get the idea?
To find such products from such places takes legwork. On any given day, I could have spent hours just searching for wine, but I had also to run a business.
My first task was to set a weekly schedule.
Unfortunately, many wine sales people are so busy and scattered that it is not possible for them to make their sales by appointment—they often just drop into a retail shop on their schedule, which can be quite an interruption in a tiny shop like mine was. Therefore, I had a game plan.
As the wine buyer for the store, I selected two or three days of the week, and then set up the times within each day that I would see sales people, and asked sales people to pick the day and time that best suit their schedules to come visit me with new products.
I instructed every sales person that if he or she had a special reason to see me or could not make a scheduled appointment, to please call ahead. Still, many disregarded the plea. I can’t tell you how many times I heard, “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by with this great new wine or this importer who wants to meet you.” They always seemed to drop by when I was in the middle of something like taking a telephone order for a catering event, or creating point of sale files for new products coming in that week, or trying to eat my lunch! I simply refused to see them.
Generally, for at least three half days a week, my store was busy with sales reps who by appointment brought products for us to taste. We tasted every product before we took it into the shop, and we tasted new vintages of products that we stocked.
Deliveries came in on a regular weekly basis, and they had to be carefully checked in (amazing how many delivery mistakes wholesalers can make) then marked with our own in-store labels for the computer scanner and the shelves. The rest were put into case storage.
If there were new items in the delivery, they had to be processed through the system and then some sort of introduction to customers was designed for them.
In Manhattan, a supplier portfolio wine tasting took place at a restaurant or hotel almost weekly. I attended those too, always seeking those new products.
We instituted a learning system at my shop that included on the sales receipt a brief description of each wine’s pedigree, style, and food pairing possibilities. Since we continually brought in new products, the database was an almost daily effort to maintain. Much of my time was taken up with computer work.
In our shop, we hosted regularly scheduled in-store tastings plus special event tastings. Each tasting required selecting the wines and purchasing foods. So, at least a half-day each week was taken up with planning the tasting, and then a full day was taken up for each tasting.
At least once each year, I made trips to wine regions, either in the U.S. or outside the country. It was the best way to find new and unique products—then, we had to find the importer/distributor who brought the products into New York, or we had to find one who would be interested in bringing in new products.
Also, every so often I was called upon to be a wine judge at various competitions. Sometimes this was in Manhattan and other times it was out of town. The out of town ones of course ate into my weekly chores at the shop, so I had to hire a second in command to take up the slack that I created.
All of these tasks are essential for good wine retailing, and by that, I mean a shop that eschews Lotto ticket sales and big box wines but has a particular wine and customer focus, whatever it may be.
Still, a major part of a retailer’s time is dealing with the phone company, the electric company, the landlord of the building, the garbage and recycling pick up, the wholesaler’s multitude of mistakes, and the state government’s many ways to suck money out of us. Plus, I made quite a number of wine deliveries in the neighborhood over the years.
In polite company, wine retailers don’t discuss the antics of customers. Suffice to say that customers can be fickle and, despite all efforts by retailers to the contrary, they normally buy what they want, not what we think they should drink.
I can proudly announce that after five years at it, I managed only once to throw a potential customer out of the store! The potential just wasn’t great enough for me to withstand the fellow’s pomposity.
I hope this answers your concerns, Mitch.
A con job?
After hosting that German/Finger Lakes Riesling taste-off that I wrote about a few weeks ago, I was reminded of a comment made a while back by a wine critic who called blind wine tastings a con job.
To be more precise, he called blind wine tasting the “biggest con job in wine evaluation.”
The critic claimed that evaluating wine blind produces “aberrant results.” I agree, and that is the exact reason that blind evaluation is important: it humbles those who think they know and it catapults those who think they don’t. In other words, blind wine evaluation levels the playing field; it also requires a level of training.
There are two types of blind wine analysis. Single blind means that the tasters know one or more of the wine’s classification (grape variety, region, vintage, etc.). Double blind means the tasters are supposed to know nothing about the wines, which they evaluate based on the merits of the wine’s performance in the glass. In either case, the producer’s identity comes after the analysis is finalized.
There’s apparently another form of evaluation where a score is given on the merits of the wine, and then a re-evaluation is made after the wine is revealed. This method is supported and practiced by some critics who evaluate wines for their ability to age. They claim that knowing the producer is essential to considering the wine’s future. Hmmm.
Trained tasters should be able to tell a few basic things about a wine—variety is among the important ones, as is overall structural integration. Trained tasters should also be able to pick out whether or not there are technical flaws among the attributes. More important, trained tasters should be able to make these evaluations without much or any information.
The majority of trained tasters that I’ve met have always been cautious about predicting age-ability because the variables are many.
So, what is a critic doing with aging predictions after knowing the producer’s identity?
Quite simply, the critic is using past information to make claims for the future. The critic doesn’t seem to be making an exact statement about that particular wine in that particular glass at that particular evaluation.
Frankly, I was shocked to discover that after they learn the wine’s identity some respected critics revisit the scores they’ve assigned on its merits. The critic above who called blind tasting a con job defended this practice, claiming that it is essential to know the producer to make a good judgment concerning the wine’s age-ability.
I agree that knowing the producer makes it easier to assess the wine’s aging potential, but what impact does that knowledge have on the merits?
Are wines that score lower than the producer’s past performance implies automatically scored up after the producer is revealed to the evaluator?
If so, I protest.
Once you know and are familiar with the past performance of the producer, do you really have to be a professional to guess how long the wine you just tasted might age?
And what’s to stop the evaluator from rethinking the merit score, sans aging consideration, after realizing that the producer deserves either a better or a worse evaluation?
It seems to me that making claims about a wine when you know all there is to know about it, seems to provide something other than critical analysis on its merits. What it provides I really can’t say.
A con job, maybe?
Hypocristupidity
When I made plans to start a winery in the Finger Lakes region many years ago, I did it like so many others do it: with romance in my soul.
The romance of wine was knocked right out of me the day a New York State Liquor Control investigator knocked on my door to inspect the property that I claimed would be used as my winery—he had a gun in a holster at his side.
If the gun itself hadn’t wiped away the romance, the investigator’s response to my question certainly had.
I asked, “If I fail inspection will you shoot me?”
He replied, “We don’t take issuing licenses to produce alcohol as a joke.”
With the passage (and the rushed ratification) of the 21st Amendment to repeal Prohibition, Congress gave states the freedom in 1933 to control alcohol traffic separate from other commercial traffic; it did so in deference to a lingering anti-alcohol sentiment that permeated the majority of states at the time. The rationale of these people was that 33 years of Prohibition proved that alcohol production and distribution is a criminal activity that, though legal, must be controlled (that’s called irony).
Most states accepted alcohol’s legality and then went ahead to create a set of regulations with the express purpose of making access to it extremely difficult. It was a perfect venue for the hypocrisy that gave us our national system of controlled corruption that is euphemistically referred to as the Three-Tier System (hypocrisy is irony’s cousin).
Wine goes from producer to warehouse/distributor to retailer—three tiers—before we get it. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this distribution system, it happens in many industries, except that this particular system operates under state regulation and control, and most functioning adults know what that means.
My second brush with the death of romanticism came when a partner and I applied for a wine retail license in Manhattan. A local block association was against a wine shop on its street. The association had absolutely no legal jurisdiction over the issue yet, through a series of connections, the group managed to delay our license by raising bogus issues that led to a hearing.
My partner and I stood in front of the three-person Liquor Control Board and were abused verbally by the sanctimonious chairman of the board who wanted to make sure that our wine shop was not going to be just another den of iniquity serving demon rum to the good citizens of the neighborhood.
We got the license. There was no basis to stop us from getting it. But soon thereafter, the sanctimonious chairman that spent twenty minutes in deep concern over our morals was indicted for taking kickbacks from local wine and spirit wholesalers so that they could disregard some of the controls the board placed on them.
Worse than hypocrisy, however, is stupidity—here are two examples.
The New York State Legislature and Liquor Authority go to lengths to make access to wine difficult. Yet that same legislature budgets millions each year to pay for grape and wine research and promotion.
I am called each year to judge wine at the New York State Fair. Judges aren’t paid for the service, but we are reimbursed for expenses, and that includes dinner. Yet, by law, the state cannot reimburse for alcohol at dinner, even if it is a glass of New York wine that the state helps to fund and promote.
Last month the New York State Liquor Authority handed a $10,000 fine to a wine retailer in Henrietta, New York, near Rochester. His infraction was to sell wine gift bags to consumers.
New York State liquor regulations prohibit an alcohol retailer from running a separate business within the confines of the licensed retail space, a space that is defined by a map one must submit with a license application. The alcohol control officer with a gun in the holster inspects the site to ensure that the applicant is running only one business (that means you must already own or pay to lease the site BEFORE you have the license—cute, isn’t it?).
Apparently, the process of selling a gift bag in which to slide a wine bottle constitutes running a separate business in the wine retail shop, and that’s worth $10,000 to the state coffers.
The ruling itself may seem stupid but the situation is worse than that. It’s monumental stupidity.
Had the retailer given the same gift bags away in his store with a bottle of wine inside each bag he would have broken no regulation at all.
This seems like a good place to end my rant.
Here’s a link to the retailer story:
1.5 saves money.
The time has come for me to buckle down, or should I be tightening my belt, and start finding ways to save money.
In my household, cutting the budget never meant that we would cut the wine budget; so many things are less important than that! But this time, we are forced to take a long, hard look at that wine budget which has inched high enough to make me feel as if I am being too extravagant for my station in life.
I’m not interested in cutting consumption, but I must cut the wine budget. What to do?
The answer: 1.5 liters, of course.
For the past two weeks, I have bought six bottles of 1.5-liter size wine for every case I would normally buy. Budget wise, the plan works. I’ve saved at least $100 each week. So, why do I feel bad?
Have you ever tried to sustain a daily wine habit on what comes out of those 1.5 liter bottles? Believe me, it is not an easy task.
First, the selection is of course limited. Where I shop, which is a store with quite a large floor space given over to wine, the 1.5-liter portion takes up a fraction of that space. The 750s are scattered all over the place, in a labyrinthine manner so that shoppers get their exercise going around the racks. The 1.5 liter bottles are lined against a wall.
Second, what’s in the selection presents a veritable crap shoot of labels I’ve never heard of mixed in with a few labels that I recognize and would consider, plus others that I recognize but am uninterested in trying, having already had their 750 versions.
This coming week I’m making my third foray into the 1.5 wall hoping that I find just a few more wines I want to try. My aim is to discover those wines that I like, buy them in quantity, and have them around the house; then, I will alternate at home opening a 1.5 liter one day, drink it over two days, and open a 750 on the third day.
I’m fast losing hope, though. After two weeks of sampling, I’ve found only two wines in 1.5 liter packaging that I really, really like—Citta Montpeulciano D’Abruzzo and Pallazzone 2007 Orvieto (wonderful wine to find in a large package)—and one relatively low acid wine to have around the house maybe for hosting a party, Barefoot Zinfandel. The rest of the wines I bought fall into the category either of bland to sweet whites or disturbing reds.
The latest wine to disappoint me is the Columbia Crest Two Vines Merlot-Cabernet. The back label of this 1.5 liter bottle refers to fruit forward blackberry/raspberry plus vanilla from extended oak aging.
I don’t argue with the extended oak aging, which is one reason I don’t like the wine, but I question the origin of that fruit. Both my wife and I thought we tasted something phony or chemical about the wine—you know, like maybe an artificial flavor. I certainly can’t say for sure whether or not the flavors are artificial, and they may not be. But they taste that way, and that’s all that matters.
As an aside, back labels happen to be one of the things that bother me about wine marketing. I hate the usual bad grammar, poor metaphors, and either pompous or warm-all-over feel of the verbiage. But I hate even more the way the labels say things in such a way as to obscure the facts.
For instance, on the back label for the above Merlot-Cabernet it states that the product is a “…tribute to the special trellising of our vines.” Because, like all great wines, the quality “…begins in the vineyard.”
I have no problem with the sentiment expressed on that back label, but I noticed on that portion of the label where the information counts, the wine has been “Cellared and Bottled by Columbia Crest Winery.”
My understanding is that, according to TTB regulations, “Cellared and bottled by” means that the bottler aged the wine and then bottled it.
In other words, the above wine was fermented (made) elsewhere, which leaves me wondering about those vineyards of theirs with the special trellising. That’s the kind of stuff about marketing that would prevent me from buying it again even if I liked the wine.
No matter. I don’t care for the wine. I will be back at the shop on Tuesday, hoping for new discoveries to both save money and enjoy my daily wine.
