With weather improving everyday, pink wine is more and more visible on restaurant tables and in people’s homes. Is it the new wine color? For many years, in Europe, pink wines were considered as “non wines”, i.e. wines for people who didn’t know anything about wine. Then,  it was considered as the “wine for women”, i.e. wine being a man’s business, women could not understand what was good for them.  And then, surprise, in 2008, a study run by the International Associated Women in Wine Organization showed that women liked their wine red and tannic. The American market did not show much interest in the color, except for white zinfandel while young female Japanese professionals fell for pink Champagne, such as the gorgeous Brut Nature Zero Dosage Rosé by Drappier.

What is the situation now? The ambiguity of the color itself contributes to a lot of misapprehensions and misunderstandings. In the French tradition, for example, pink wine is traditionally a blend of several grapes, such as grenache, cinsault or mourvedre. In the US, the few pink wines I drank lately were very often blended from one single grape, mostly syrah or grenache. It happened that this year I received several French pink wines (we call them “rosés”) made from one single grape – one from syrah and the other one from grenache. I enjoyed the Syrah Rosé by Camas, also available in Bag-in-the-Box container. Ogier, the famous Rhone Valley wine producer, also made a traditional rosé blend, with 60% Grenache, 15% Cinsault, 15% syrah, 10% mourvedre sold in supermarkets, like the Camas brand.

The fact that blended rosés, very gastronomic and fine, are able to find room on the shelves of supermarkets along with a BIB Syrah rosé, means that the consumers’ tastes are evolving. More open to novelty,  French consumers are now ready and willing to explore a different road besides the famous “rosé de provence.”

A recent study by Nielsen shows that the 2011 trend of decreasing prices for wine bottles will keep going in 2012. If this is good news for consumers, it is bad news for producers who would like nothing more than reversing the trend.  But it will not be the case in 2012:

Source - Nielsen, 2012

According to Wine Market Council President John Gillespie, “One of the reasons the over-$20 segment was strong, was that there was a great deal of price discounting in that category. When people see a wine that they’ve bought before for $45 or $35, and it’s now $22.99, they buy it.”

But what drives wine sales is mostly the economy and mid price categories. If the industry is looking to increase its prices, consumers do not have the power (or the will) to pay a lot more for their bottle of wine.  This statement is confirmed by Gillespie: “2012 will probably mirror 2011 in terms of consumption frequency and purchase price-points. Within that there may be some shifting, because if there are shortages in California, there are certainly no shortages in Europe, South America or Australia. But I don’t see any real changes on the horizon in terms of overall consumer behavior with wine in the U.S. in the coming 12 months.”

This situation is not the best for domestic wine producers but not good either for imported wines coming from France, South America or Australia. It means that the QPR must be very good in order to stand out and get the consumer’s interest. American wine professionals foresee only a few ways to get the bottles out of the shelves: direct-to-consumers sales through a wine club, a site or in the tasting room as well as on a “flash sale” site.  2012 will be again a good year of opportunities for the wine consumers.

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!