For the last two weeks, Bordeaux buzzed with the “En Primeurs” campaign for the 2010 vintage. Last week was the peak of the campaign with tastings all over the Bordeaux area. Every appellation and classification opened their doors to journalists, bloggers, importers, distributors and all kinds of professionals. This time of the year is a blessing because it is possible to meet all those people one knows through Internet, via their blogs or virtual events.

Château d’Yquem, true to its cult status, organized the tasting of its 2010 vintage in the most beautiful room of the Bordeaux Opera.  The staging was gorgeous with beautiful white flowers in huge vases and the golden sculptures of the walls.  It gave a very zen feeling to the tasting very much in symbiosis with the vintage. As most know, I am not a wine critic and will not comment on the 2010 vintage, except to say it was as zen as the staging. I enjoyed the smoothness and the elegance of the wine. As Sandrine Garbay, the brilliant cellar master of Yquem, told me, it is already very drinkable and amateurs will be able to enjoy it earlier than the 2009.

After the pleasure of tasting the 2010 and the 1988 vintages, meeting a few friends, exchanging a few words with Pierre Lurton, Sandrine Garbay and Valérie Lailheugue, Communication Director of the Château, I started thinking about cult wines and branding. When I wrote Wine Brands – three years ago – I concluded that cult wines like Château Haut-Brion or Château d’Yquem, were not wine brands: they were luxury brands, but not to be treated like a Dior perfume.  Luxury wine brands are a very specific type of brands: very rare (a few thousands bottles every year) and not expandable, often expensive, exclusively distributed, luxury wine brands can thrive only in the rarefied atmosphere of  exclusive events and zen elegance.  But because they are an agricultural product as well, they cannot be treated like Calvin Klein jeans. How did they achieve this legendary status? Answer: organic marketing. According to Michael Havens, who founded the Havens Wines Cellars in California, “Synthetic marketing emphasizes the brand’s concept, label and price, followed by the wine; organic marketing focuses on the wine and the region first, followed by concept, label, etc.”, said Havens to journalist Marvin Collins of Winesandvines.com (Sept. 18, 2007).  As Michael Havens said even more wittily, it is “a story of a guy in a place with a grape”. Of course, luxury wine brands are more than just great wines grown in an exceptional place and elegantly bottled. Nowadays it is also a concept. The concept certainly evolved over the years more “organically” than voluntarily. Each luxury wine brand had to differentiate itself from the others but instead of emphasizing the packaging, they worked on the emotional link they created with their customers. Drinking a glass of Haut-Brion or Yquem is like drinking a little part of European history. Emotion through a beautiful wine, elegant bottle and refined staging is what created the brand over the centuries.

David Anthony Hance found 3 keys to success for a wine brand: the wine type or style, the personality or the place.  By wine type, he means a zinfandel or a Pinot Noir “burgundian style”, for example. Personality implies the brand is based on a person, such as Coach Ditka or Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon. Place is linked to the location that can help brand a wine: who didn’t hear of the famous Napa Valley Cab?

A brand is usually richer than those basic three components while those three keys can crisscross each other. The Bonny Doon brand is nurtured by the personality of its founder, Randall Grahm, by its wine styles (Rhone Valley) and by its location in the US.  What is interesting with Bonny Doon is that, since it does not bear the name of its founder, it will be able to survive it if an equally charismatic leader or a good business man runs the winery. In the case of Coach Ditka, it might not be the same if the marketing is heavily based on his personality and the person looses popularity. The brand might have a shorter life cycle.

As for the location, is it really strategic? New World consumers have the culture of the varietal when Old World consumers go by the location, even the “terroir”. As a wine consumer, I love to know if my Pinot Noir comes from Burgundy or from Santa Barbara, California. My expectations will be different for the style, the personality of the winemaker and, of course, of the location. New World consumers have also a good “location” culture: they know a Syrah from the Rhone Valley won’t taste the same as a Shiraz of Australia or even from Bonny Doone. Location is important in the branding od a wine.

Are the three criteria analyzed by David Anthony Hance the only three keys to position a wine brand? We could add the proper definition of its target. Tapena will appeal to the Hispanic consumers or the lovers of Spanish wine and food culture because of its astute combination of Tapa and Pena (the fork) with a Tempranillo grape, branding the product “Spanish”. Fat Bastard with its provocative name (and marketing campaigns) will target people who appreciate a “fun” wine with the French seal of quality.  The Barefoot wine brand applies to every kind of consumers, from the first time drinker to the hard core drinker with a large range of wines: old vines and mass market wines.

A wine brand can be positioned through various channels and strategies. The key components of a good positioning are very hard to define and are the first steps towards a successful launch. Good luck to all the new brands available each year on our shelves!

Pernod-Ricard went through major organizational changes in the last week: they launched a new brand company called Premium Wine Brands. Under this umbrella brand, consumers will find some of the group’s major wine brands: Australian wines (Jacob’s Creek), New Zealand wines (Montana and Brancott), Spanish and Argentinean wine brands with international potential (Campo Viejo and Graffigna). According to Premium Wine Brands chairman and chief executive, Jean-Christophe Coutures, Pernod-Ricard now has “a complementary portfolio of premium wine brands representing the signature varieties for each country – Australian Shiraz, Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, Malbec from Argentina and Tempranillo from Spain delivered through our leading brands, Jacob’s Creek, Brancott Estate, Graffigna and Campo Viejo.”

Let’s see how it translates in the facts. Curious to learn more about those wine brands, I googled “Premium Wine Brands Pernod-Ricard” and was sent to Pernod-Ricard-Pacific.com”. A little puzzling but I saw weirder things happening on the Internet! The homepage carries clearly the “Premium Wine Brands” title. I patiently entered my country of origin (France) and a birth date allowing me to have access to the site. And surprise : I was denied access because “my country of origin doesn’t allow access to this site”. Well, well, well! I checked “Germany” and got the same answer. I switched browser (maybe a problem of cookies?) and was denied access again. And then eureka! Is it possible that access was denied to Europeans? I tried “USA” and entered into the site with a loud sigh of relief.

The story is not over and I hope you’re not getting bored yet. I was expecting a site dedicated to those premium wine brands. Unfortunately the site is a little confusing. Under “Brands” are listed “Australian Wine” (which one?), “New Zealand Wine” (which one?), “Champagne” (really?), “Spirits” (great wine brands!), “Other Beverages” (yes?) and “Tasting Notes” (of what?). I’m usually a rather accommodating person (at least, I hope) but at that point I got slightly annoyed : first, it required special detective skills to enter the site; then I have no information on those famous “Premium Wine Brands”.

Let’s be honest. When a global company such as Pernod-Ricard invests millions of dollars (or euros) to re-organize its brands and hire new executives, is it that difficult or intellectually challenging to think about a basic communication tool, a web site? Is it too much to ask for a certain respect for the consumers? And maybe even more important, is it a positive move for the awareness of the brands involved? I’m not sure…

According to Seth Godin, “There is too much clutter … because we’ve branded ourselves to death.”.  The CMO should now be a “Chief Movement Officer”. “In short: don’t market — inspire, lead, tap into your brand’s passions and you’ll tap into consumers’ passions and build a small and committed following that will scale through word-of-mouth.”

Does this recommendation apply to wine brands? Wine brands usually try to build a large following. How does the “small and committed following” fit in? This type of following will become the leader of your (more or less) large community. One of the best examples of this kind of strategy is the Community page a fan of a brand can build on Facebook. Many brands are not mastering their Facebook page because they’d rather let their fans talk about them. It is the case of the champagne Krug, for example, with almost 10,000 fans talking freely about their favorite beverage. Whether you like it or you don’t does not really matter: the brand can always get back its brand name and start maintaining its own page.

Is it better for the brand? If there is a conversation between the fan and the brand, it is great. But unfortunately, most of the time, when the brand creates its own page, this is one of those long monologue on what they’re doing, what’s happening and how great they are. very few brands are good at engaging with their consumers. They don’t “tap in their brand’s passion”.

In spite of this rather poor communication strategy, according to Graham Holter, in the latest issue of Meininger’s IWB, “brands beat terroir”. His conclusion is the result of a Wine Intelligence recent research on how consumers perceive origins vs. brand. One of the most striking case is Lindemans: in 2006, the Australian brand Lindemans was converted to a multi-origin one. Lindemans is now 9th in the Nielsen list of top brands with sales growth for 2008-2009 of 11.1%. QED? Mostly. According to Wine Intelligence study that questioned 8,400 regular wine drinkers in eight countries (US, UK, Quebec, English-speaking Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland and Australia), the favorite brands were Yellow Tail (mostly in the US), Blossom Hill, Jacob’s Creek, Gallo Family Vineyards and Wolf Blass. More troubling, in most cases cases, consumers said they did not have a favorite brand. Does it mean that consumers see little difference between various brands?

I would consider this hypothesis as the sad sign of lack of interaction and engagement between the brand and the consumer. Can a wine drinker be passionate about a brand that tastes about the same as the next one and does not talk to him/her? Not really… We are branded to death but some brands are signing their death by standing out of the general conversation.

There are grapes whose story is very sad. Norton is one of them. It is one of those grapes that history forgot and that some bold wine makers are trying to put back on the map. The story is told masterfully by Todd Kliman in his book: The Wild Grape. A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine (Clarkson Potter, NY, 2010).

Daniel Norton was a  physician who died very young but not without leaving as a legacy to America a strong and resilient grape bearing his name, the Norton. It is a native grape like Catawba, Scuppernong or Niagara.  The wines made from Norton won awards in Europe in 1873 during the Vienna Universal Exhibition. A wine critic Vizettelly wrote: “The finest American red wines were those yielded by the vine sknown as Norton’s Virginia, [...]. The former produces a well-blended, full-bodied, deep-colored, aromatic, and somewhat astringent wine, only needing finesse to equal a first-rate Burgundy [...]” (p. 122).  Like some other grapes, Norton lost ground to other grapes, mostly coming from Europe. At the end of the 20th Century, some wine makers, led by the Chrysalis vineyards, re-discovered the potential of the Norton grape.

I let you discover the story told almost like an historical novel by Kliman. What interested me most in the book is Kliman’s thoughts on the “domination” of the vitis vinifera mostly coming from Europe over the native grapes. European wines were the benchmark of  viticulture and wine making for centuries. European wine growers and makers brought their knowledge to America when they emigrated.  Sometimes they applied it to growing local vines, sometimes to growing what they knew to grow – Cabernet, Pinot Noir or Shiraz.

My question now is: is there room in the American wine industry for a wine brand based on a native American grape? Chrysalis Winery took up the challenge.  As stated on their web site, “Here at Chrysalis, we’ve undertaken a serious commitment to restoring the native American grape, Norton, to its position of prominence as a source of world class wines.  Cloaked in myth and mystery for decades, Norton thrives in the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern regions, and produces a robust red wine with big fruit flavors that ages beautifully over the years.  One hundred and twenty five years ago, Norton wines were deemed the “best red wine of all nations” at a worldwide competition in Vienna. Today excellent Norton wines are again being produced in many states east of the Rockies.”

Unfortunately the rewards are not coming easily to those strong willed wine makers. An “Heritage Tasting” held in Richmond did not attract the attention of the wine world outside the producing area.  Articles in various national magazines failed to increase awareness of the grape. What’s wrong?  When “googling” Norton grape, very few information come up: a Wikipedia article, the Missouri Wine Organization web site and a few articles on the grape.

It seems there is no real strategy behind the revival of the grape. Let’s hope that Kliman’s book will allow Chrysalis and the other wineries growing Norton to get more coverage. But only a strong and clear strategy that will allow the Norton grape to get back on the map. The revival of a forgotten grape is no trivial matter, but not an impossible task. Some regions succeeded in creating awareness on brands with a very difficult name, like the Müller-Thurgau in the 80′s on the West Coast of the US or  the Cahors Malbec in France whose fame was “stolen” by Argentina.  Let’s hope for the best…!

A few days ago, I was talking with one of my MBA students on Bordeaux as a brand. The question was: Should Bordeaux brand itself like Champagne?  By branding its region, Champagne allowed small family owned properties to shine and sell their wines. The region leaders, the famous Krug, Bollinger and other Ruinart, did not hide the many little Champagne houses. On the contrary, under the umbrella brand, every brand was able to shine.  Champagne developed a very creative image of happiness, party and pleasure.

Would such a strategy be possible in Bordeaux? Bordeaux has the privilege of having many Classified Growths – about 5% – leading the way in term of image and price. Hidden behind this massive tree, there is a forest of small properties and estates. Some of them have a very hard time surviving and selling their wines at a decent price.  In the mind of many international consumers, Bordeaux means “quality” and “expensive”. The down side of this excellent reputation is that, when seeing a Bordeaux wine sold around $10, the consumer thinks it can not be a good Bordeaux wine because too cheap.

Is there a solution to this problem? I’m not an economist, just a marketer. As such I would answer: “Change your image”. At $10, a Bordeaux can be a very good wine. There were some efforts made at changing the image of Bordeaux in the US. Did you hear of “Bordeaux MatchMaking“? It is such a fun idea as explained on the web site : “Just tell us who you are, your interests and the wine you enjoy and we will match you with the Bordeaux wine that best suits your palate. You’ll get to enjoy this amazing evening with a group of new friends who share your way of life and most of all, your interest in affordable Bordeaux. Wine experts will be present during the evening to answer all of your questions, while our hostesses will ensure your group has an unforgettable experience. The soirees will all take place at exclusive venues in Boston, Chicago, NYC and Miami.”

“Bordeaux wines are meant to celebrate everyday occasions”, says the tagline. A little like Champagne ? What kind of Bordeaux wines ? Red, white, rosé ? All of them? In fact it seems a little difficult to match one Bordeaux with one occasion. Bordeaux wines are so different and complex it is hard to pair an occasion and a wine: birthday and white ? party and red ? pizza party and rosé ? Do you understand what I mean ? The complexity, the variety and the number of styles of wines make it a marketing nightmare.

Bordeaux is not a wine brand, not even a potential one but there are many wine brands in Bordeaux you should enjoy in every occasion. Cheers!

When traveling to Portugal, one drinks two wines: vinho verde and port. Unfortunately, vinho verde has a very poor reputation due to its poor quality: sweet, heavy, low in alcohol but sooooooooo easy to drink. Unfortunately the low quality of 98% of vinho verde damaged the reputation of an appellation that can produce great wines. There is only to taste the wines of Casa de Cello and its friends of the Independent Wine Growers Group to understand what I mean.

In fact, vinho verde has the same problem as Beaujolais in France. Because Duboeuf launched the cheap and mediocre Beaujolais Nouveau, consumers forgot that the region also produces great wines. We can just wish the efforts of the best producers from both Vinho Verde and Beaujolais will shadow the mediocre production of those beautiful wine regions.

You know how much I love Santa Barbara, California and the beautiful wines grown in the area. I raved often enough to bore everybody. But today I’m more skeptical than raving.  I just read a press release by the Santa Barbara Wine Company announcing the launch of their “Artisan Wines”. What a strange concept! What is artisan? In France, an “artisan” is a man who creates quality products in the tradition of his region. Bordeaux has some estates grouped under the name of “crus artisans”, “artisan wines”. To tell you the truth, they never met any success.

What are “artisan wines” in Santa Barbara? How do they fit themselves between the urban wineries like Jaffurs or the high quality wines of  SeaSmoke? I’m not sure the concept of “artisan” will help the branding of their Pinot Noir or Chardonnay. Their label is non descript with a palm tree, the name of the winery and the grape.  Marketing such a wine is certainly difficult, even if the wine is of very good quality.

I make a deal with you, readers. I’ll taste their wines in Santa Barbara this summer and will let you know : 1) if they were easily found and 2) if I liked them.  See you then!

I recently blogged on the re-branding of Château Laville Haut-Brion, the white wine of Château La Mission Haut-Brion, under the name of “Château La Mission Haut-Brion blanc” (white). In the same movement, Domaine Clarence Dillon, owner of both Château Haut-Brion and Château La Mission Haut-Brion,   re-branded the second wine of Haut-Brion, Bahans Haut-Brion, by the name “Clarence de Haut-Brion” and the second white wine of both estates, Les Plantiers, under the new label of “La Clarté de Haut-Brion”.

Those decisions make a lot of  sense for a marketer working on brands. Historically, Haut-Brion is the very first luxury wine brand in the world. Names change over the centuries. The re-branding of Laville in “Château La Mission Haut-Brion” blanc is justified by history: from 1928 to 1930, it was the name of the wine and several labels testify of the existence of this name. But this re-branding made a little fuss among wine lovers and drinkers. On the forum of wine-pages.com, a few connoisseurs commented on the decision, thinking some names were disappearing. Yes, of course, the names are disappearing, but not the wines. The wine in  the bottle is exactly the same, coming from the terroir of Haut-Brion.

What is the fuss about? While reading the various posts and answers on the forum, I had the strange feeling those great connoisseurs of the French best wines were already nostalgic of the old names.  It is very touching to feel this strong link between the brand and the consumer. But the main brand is Haut-Brion: behind those two syllables, there is a world of excellence, tradition and innovation. Haut-Brion was always the first one to go ahead of its time and it keeps doing the same in this second decade of the 21st Century.

Of course, it is always sad for a connoisseur to see an old and cherished name replaced by an other. But this change will make the brand stronger for the next generations: more logical, easier to remember, La Clarté and Le Clarence will help guiding the new consumers towards the greater wines.

A brand has to be able to cross the centuries. In order to do so, it needs to renew itself, to be innovative,  to adapt to new times and new trends and reach new consumers. It’s only by innovation linked to tradition that a luxury wine brand will stay alive and create a strong link with new generations of consumers. Long live to historical wine brands!

Some thought it was a good idea, making it clear that Laville was the white wine of La Mission Haut-Brion while others were sorry to see an old name disappear from Bordeaux. Re-branding a well established wine brand is usually a very well thought out decision. In the case of Château Laville Haut-Brion, both names were historically justified. For almost 100 years, Château Laville Haut-Brion belonged to the Laville Family. Marie de Laville bought the estate on July 16, 1611. Ten years later it passed to her brother, Bertrand de Laville. It was only in 1717, that the Laville family sold the estate to a surgeon called Bernard Gaussens.

It made a lot of sense to name the wine after the place it came from. Even after the Laville family didn’t own the place, the successive owners kept the name as part of the tradition. But, at some point during the 20th century – around 1930 if I remember well my history – the owner of Château Laville, M. Bibonne, changed the name to La Mission Haut-Brion blanc. The Woltners went back to the original name.

What does this story tell us about re-branding a wine? For three centuries, the name of the Laville brand was associated to a family who did not belong to the place anymore. By changing the name to associate it to a place currently existing, La Mission Haut-Brion, two factors were accounted for at once: the historical value of the name and the consumer. The latter will gain a better understanding of a rather complicated system since there are three wines available in the La Mission Haut-Brion range: Château La Mission Haut-Brion red and white, La Chapelle de la Mission Haut-Brion, the second wine (red) of Château La Mission Haut-Brion. It is always positive to help the consumer better understand the world of our wines.