Some products just don't lend themselves to being marketed by touting their primary function or benefit. Wine is a perfect example. Wine, like beer and spirits, is primarily differentiated from every other beverage not by its taste, not by its origin and not by its appearance. It's differentiated from every other beverage by the fact that it will get you Drunk.Looped. Messed up. And yet this very specific and very primary differentiation from all other beverages is never touted in…

If you regularly read Timothy P. Carney, the reporter who covers the murky and twisted world that is the realm of lobbyists, then you recently witnessed the smug and dirty hypocrisy of alcohol wholesalers and their disingenuous calls for protection of state authority spilled out upon their shiny shoes as Carney drew is pen directly through their gut in a simple, straight-forward article in the Washington Examiner about the motivations behind H.R. 5034. "Congressmen in both parties are rallying behind…

It is a fact that the greatest deterrent to consumer access to wines today are the 37 states that prohibit Retailer To Consumer shipping of wine. What's going unnoticed in the debate over H.R. 5034, the bill now in Congress, is that, if passed, this bill would allow states to ban retailer to consumer shipping—without any justification whatsoever. Retailer (not winery) to consumer shipping is the avenue through which consumer have potentially the greatest access to the explosion of domestic…

Recently in Washington State at TASTE Washington I gave a talk on ""THE TEN THINGS EVERY SMALL WINERY MUST KNOW TO MARKET IN TODAY'S WINE MARKETING UNIVERSE." That talk was summarized in an earlier blog post here at FERMENTATION. This is the third post in a series that expands on that earlier post. ——————————————————- RULE # 4: Build Your Mailing List Your Mailing List! It is the most important tool and resource a small and medium sized winery possesses. Build…

BLOGGERVIEW #31 Who: W. Blake GrayBlog: The Gray Market ReportWhere: http://wblakegray.blogspot.com/ W. Blake Gray possesses one of the best titles in the wine world: Chairman of the Electoral College of the Vintners Hall of Fame". If it were me, I'd get myself some cards—I guess some really wide ones—and pass them around. Instead, Blake writes. And he's been doing it well for a good long while and for some very spiffy and important wine venues, including the San Francisco Chronicle…