Thanks to Christian Seely and Marie-Louise Schÿler of Château Pichon-Longueville in Pauillac, their guests enjoyed a wonderful Portuguese evening during Vinexpo. Château Pichon-Longueville belongs to Axa Millesimes Group that owns also vineyards in Portugal as well as other vineyards in France and Hungary. When Christian Seely traveled to Portugal 18 years ago, he fell in love with the Douro region and its wines.  That’s why this Classified Growth welcomed 26 vineyards from Douro for an elegant and very interesting tasting in the chateau chais.

After the tasting of the red wines, the guests went back to the park where white and rosé Portuguese wines as well as cod (steamed, smoked, carpaccio – whatever you liked) and various hams awaited them.  The dinner was then served under a tent in the park: a goat casserole, broad beans, new potatoes and mushrooms in a pultry sauce; almond tart and “Queilo da Serra da Estrela” cheese won the heart of the guests. Of course, red wines from Douro, Quinta do Noval Colheita 1997 and various ports from the Douro producers were served on each table. What about Pichon-Longueville wines? Forget them: for a few hours, we were in Portugal!

The evening was a great success. At first a little surprised by this “Douro Evening”, guests became enchanted by the event. They did not learn anything about the history or the wines of Château Pichon-Longueville but they will remember the most original gala evening in Bordeaux of this 2011 ediiton of Vinexpo. Is not it the best marketing strategy? Kudos to Christian Seely, Marie-Louise Schÿler and the great team of the chateau for an unforgettable evening!

A recent survey conducted by Vinexpo on women and wine in United Kingdom, France, Germany, Hong Kong and the US showed that cultural differences are an important factor of differentiation in appreciating wine.

What did those women agree upon? They usually prefer red wine over white wine. They are driving the sales for rosé wines:  16% said they’d rather drink rosé (over only 6% in 2009). This is an increase of 160% in 2 years! 70% drink wine while socializing with friends or on a date: 68% consider wine important and even essential on a romantic dinner. French women are leading the trend with 50% of the answers while 10% of British women and 5% of Hong Kong female drinkers would not go on a date without some wine.

This first breach in the consensus opens the door to the deeper cultural differences. Women do not agree on the factors leading to their choice. 70% of French women consider that the country of origin is their first criteria while it is important for only 50,8% of British women. In the USA, grape variety is the most important criteria – not surprisingly. Price (58,5%) and country of origin (67,8%) are most important in Hong Kong.

The deepest difference appears with the question : is wine part of tradition or a part of your lifestyle? American women answer loudly and strongly that wine is part of a lifestyle while for French women it is part of the tradition.

This survey is an interesting marketing tool because it was conducted on line in 5 countries in partnership with several sites of various magazines: Elle in France and Hong Kong, Konsum Göttinnen in Germany, Wine Enthusiast in the US and Decanter in England. Interestingly enough, the sites partnering with Vinexpo are not wine-related in France, Hong Kong and Germany. They are more lifestyle- or -women-related magazines. In UK and in the US, it is the opposite: the surveyed women were readers of wine magazines, but they claimed wine as a lifestyle choice.

Even more fascinating is the use of Internet as a tool. The survey revealed that the women wine drinkers in the age 18-30 are using most the Internet (14%) while in France only 3% go on line to look for wine. Let’s just hope that Internet will be more and more used to discover wine(s) from all over the world, and not only by women.

Eve posted posted about China and the growth of the luxury market, including wine about two years ago. According to the luxury lifestyle blog Luxuo, “China is expected to be the world’s seventh largest wine consumer by 2013 as the nation’s thirst for vintages continues to grow amid an economic boom.”

A new challenge has presented itself in the past few months. After over 15 years experience on the web, I though I’d solved a lot of problems, but we have never had a reason to attempt to serve content into China until recently. After a Chinese-language site opened, we were getting reports of loading times so slow the sites were completely unusable. We visited Shanghai in May 2010, and it’s true that almost everything you look at it is abysmally slow from the average DSL connection. A site that uses Flash and video is not likely to load enough to be seen.

Recently, I did some tests in this area and found more complexity than I expected. The Internet in China, I’m told by one Chinese company, is not interconnected in the same way (peering) that most other countries employ. This means that even if you have hosting in Hong Kong (which you know is considered to be outside the mainland Internet) or in a single city like Shanghai, it still does not ensure decent delivery into other Chinese provinces.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) exist for this reason, so we did more tests with 4 different CDN and found they all worked very well indeed – except in China! We tested Amazon Cloudfront CDN in Singapore and found it was no better than their US-based servers in delivery to China. There are specialized CDN for Mainland China (Akamai, ChinaCache, but these can be very costly. Most of our smaller producers whose wines are distributed in China will not be able to afford a five-digit monthly invoice to be present there. Even the less modest ones gasp when apprised of the costs involved.

We’re currently working on assembling specialized resources as a solution to this very real problem: Getting a wine web site to be not only visible, but usable. Even non-Flash, non-video heavy sites have a serious speed problem in Shanghai and other provinces, even if they show decent performance in, say, Hong Kong. Other complexities include licensing from the Chinese government, Chinese domain names (.cn,.com.cn), Chinese DNS and a presence of some kind at an address in China. We expect prices to drop significantly in the next two years, but until then, getting your web content into China will be tough going.

AMOOCON, a VoIP and technical conference that began in 2008, will features 54 talks and workshops by 38 different speakers. AMOOCON is inaugurating a new feature this year: a wine tasting!

Randy convinced author and conference organizer Stefan Wintermeyer to add the idea to this annual event held in Rostock, Germany June 3-5th this year based on the fact that last year he found many speakers and attendees were interested in wine. Because people are coming to the conference from many countries including several from Europe, the United States and Israel, they are each being asked to bring a bottle of their region’s wine if possible. They can also bring cheese if they prefer.

Randy will be speaking there again this year about the VoIP Users Conference and its activities on social networks and in podcasting.  Speakers at AMOOCON  come from different backgrounds resulting in a much more diverse program than a typical technical gathering.

I’m not an Apple afficionada or endorsing Apple. I just have an iPod Touch and my regular Windows laptop. But I’m a communication person at heart and just saw the most amazing feature for the iPhone platform today. Of course, it will not be available for a few months, but I started dreaming of all the possibilities of communicating for the wine business.

Called iAds, it is an Apple-hosted advertising platform targeted at app developers.  There are hundreds of thousands of applications developed for iPhone, some free, some at a very affordable price. We consumers all have our favorite app and we would hate to be thrown out of our app after clicking on an ad. On the other hand, if we could click on an ad, interact with compelling content and then come back to our app where we left it with no fuss, what a thrill! This is advantage Number One for the consumers.

Advantage Number Two, the ad can have the quality of a TV ad and be interactive: we can have movies, games, animations, build our own product – all the possibilities offered by a regular computer or on TV, plus interactivity. As Mr. Jobs said in his presentation, the consumer has the interactivity of the Net with the emotion of TV and movie.

What’s the point? More ads on the last ad-free space? In some ways it is true. But let’s look at the advantage for a wine brand. There are a lot of apps for wine. With the iAd,  consumers could get interactivity and information in their favorite app. Wineries could create great movies, quizzes, games for their consumers and attract their attention via this new device.

As a communicator, I am very excited by the almost unlimited possibilities of the iAd: let’s be creative, let’s move forward and towards our consumers. Wine is a cultural and fun product. Whether you like a Classified growth, a Super Toscan, Casillero del Diablo or Champagne, you’ll find the right app and the right message to listen to and to share with all your friends.

Again? Not quite. You might have used vinopedia.com when it was called freewinesearcher.com.  the new version includes now 800,000 American wines and 600,000 European wines. Paul Mabray, from VinTank as well as Gary V praised its searchability quality in their tweets.

Let’s try to look for some wines. I used the “Refine Criteria” tool and requested a 2000 red wine at about $20 with a 91 rating in Napa Valley. Weirdly enough the system selected “Red wines younger than 2000 from Napa Valley rated at least 91 points”. My price point was ignored. I suppose it’s only the bugs of an early start and they’ll be corrected very soon. or I was a little clumsy using the tool!

There are several value added features I really enjoyed: the price alerts and the mobile access. Having a mobile access is very important nowadays when you’re a consumer. While standing in line or in a supermarket’s aisle it is so handy to be able to connect and get information.

Vinopedia.com is still a work in progress but it is a great tool that just needs some improvement. Good luck!

The IPAM Marketing School in Porto, Portugal, kindly invited me to be a speaker at their conference on Wine Marketing on April 28-29. I’ll speak on “New technologies and Innovation, success strategies for wine brands”.  It will give the opportunity to visit some Douro wineries and visit the port wineries in Porto. I look forward to the event.

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!

Trust French people to associate love with (almost) anything fun and sensual! The luxury wine and food store Fauchon launched a fun concept, the “Wine Dating”.  Based on the idea of an “after work” meeting, the “wine daters” meet in the restaurant at the top of the Montparnasse Tower. They’re offered a tasting of 6 wines and a choice of cheese while walking around looking for their soul mate.

Great way to promote wine among young people? Yes, it is. Especially when you know that wine consumption is going down drastically in France. The French wine industry needs to come up with new and trendy ideas such as this one to attract younger people and give them the message that wine is easy and fun. Congratulations to Fauchon for such an innovative strategy!