Some very important reporting from W. Blake Gray.

For the impatient, the reason is: taxes.

Read the whole post.

With apologies to Chateau Petrogasm.

Sadly Morgan is sold out of the ’07. However, head over to bedrockwineco.com and tell him Josh sent you. Maybe miracles can happen!

Also, for those of you saying “WTF?” the password is: Panty solvent.

The opening line in Steve Heimoff’s profile of Greg La Follette in New Classic Winemakers of California reads:

“It has been said of Greg La Follette that he could bring a church to tears about Pinot Noir.”

In the clip below you can get a bit of a feel for how he earned that reputation.

In it Greg speaks passionately about working with Pinot, and it is infectious. At the tasting afterward I heard more people commenting on this bit of the talk than anything else.

Note: All these clips from Flickr are less than 90 seconds. I’m really enjoying the creative constraints. It’s kind of like Twitter for video.

Quick personal aside. I actually know Greg’s parents better than I know him, which is a little surprising given Greg himself is close to 20 years my senior. I met them at a Founder’s Club dinner kicking off last year’s Pinot on the River, my first. I was fortunate to spend a memorable night eating, drinking great Pinot, and chatting with them both.

The wildfires down in Southern California had just torn through the area (their house was spared), but they were undaunted and in great spirits. Both are longtime Pinot on the River vets and they made me feel right at home with their generosity of spirit and unexpected interest in my little winery project. With such great folks, it’s easy to see where Greg’s passion for life and wine comes from.

The other thing you should know about Greg and his label, Tandem, is that it is actually run like a real business. He doesn’t have an endless truckload of cash from which to draw to build his brand. He’s chipping away at it, paying down his debt piece by piece, old school style. Which to me makes his passion all the more authentic.

You can check out the new releases from Tandem here.

More clips Monday.

I’ll be posting a few clips from a very cool and interesting winemaker roundtable from last month over the next few days. Sponsored by Kendall-Jackson and benefitting the Sonoma County Wine Library, Steve Heimoff (his latest book can be found here) led a discussion with some of Sonoma’s top winemakers.

Today I’m featuring a quick clip of Merry Edwards talking about the Russian River Valley, and in particular the “Golden Triangle”.

In the clip below Merry talks about why she feels the Golden Triangle, a stretch of land shaped roughly like a triangle and blessed with Goldridge Sandy loam soils, is so special.

Aerial Photo

Below is an aerial view with a rough outline of the piece of land that Merry’s talking about. Some world class pinot is grown here, from Merry’s Klopp Ranch bottling, to Kistler, Dehlinger, Martin Ray and Joe Swan. And at the very tip of the triangle, near where Laguna Road hits River Road, is our 17 acre vineyard and the future site of Capozzi Winery.

The phallic, condom-looking shape wasn’t intentional. I swear.

Hope you enjoy the video and look forward to sharing more with you in the coming days.

Tom Wark’s 2008 Wine Blog Awards winners were announced today. Tom does a great thing each year highlighting wine blogging and helping to push it into the mainstream of wine media.

There’s been a bit of backlash this year for some reason though, and anonymous blogger overoaked does a fantastic job of skewering both Tom, the finalists and even some of the folks who’ve voiced their displeasure with the awards.

Wine-ing 2.0 is quickly turning into the Gawker/Valleywag for the wineblogosphere.

Classic stuff. Keep it up overoaked!

Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to be understood. And everyone wants to be acknowledged – to stand out from their peers.

The paradox is that to get the third thing, you need to put the first two in jeopardy.

Chateau Petrogasm, a blog that reviews wine using only a single picture, is doing the third thing very well. Among wine review sites it’s unique.

Below are its two most recent reviews. Taken together they’re edgy. They have the potential to offend someone other than just the wine producer, which is an interesting switch. But enough talk, have a look for yourself:

2001 Domaine Drouhin, Le Montrachet, Marquis de Laquiche ($370)

and then:

2004 Sequoia Grove Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley ($35)

Now, after you choke down your guilty little chuckle, appreciate what Ben and KIH (the respective authors of the posts) have achieved here. There’s some humor, sure, but unlike some of their other work the messages here are instantly recognizable and understood. They’re powerful.

I’m pretty sure regular folks have become numb to written wine reviews. You can only hear “aromas of strawberries and sour cherries” so many times before it loses its meaning. Not only are Chateau Petrogasm’s good reviews different enough to cause you to pause, they’re written in the universal language of images. And what I like best about this pair of reviews is that they’re self-referential. Knowing about the first makes the second even better.

I think wine producers and wine marketers should pay pretty close attention to pictorial reviews and what they’re doing at Ch. Petrogasm.

To explain why, let’s take a trip down memory lane.

Some Historical Context: The Evil Cigarette Marketers

There’s a marketing cycle for products, and cigarettes are probably the perfect case study to understand it. When cigarettes were new, the marketing focused on features and enjoyment – how the coffin nails tasted. The pitch focused on direct benefits.

Then, when the people grew tired of hearing about features, they switched to “mechanisms,” or points of differentiation.

Cigarette marketers even tapped into the growing trend of women smoking and did their part to tip the scales, helping make it socially acceptable for women to smoke with the famous line “Blow Some My Way.”

These ads were more focused on image, something for people to identify with, rather than persuasive copy.

Or my favorite:

Yes, the headline reads “Blow In Her Face and She’ll Follow You Anywhere.” Madness.

Finally, they moved to ads without any words at all. Using motivation research, they discovered that by using visual identifications they could say things that would be impossible to effectively convey using copy. They gave us the Marlboro Man.

They made millions. But even this got tired after a while, and the cycle started all over again with direct claims about flavor and satisfaction.

There’s a twist though. After years of seeing the Marlboro Man marketed at them from magazines and billboards, citizen-marketers started to use the Marlboro Man image as a weapon against smoking.

These bits of anti-marketing are the strongest of all. We got as smart as the advertisers.

So, What’s All This Have to Do With Wine?

In a lot of ways the product marketing cycle described above has been done for us (the wine producers) by professional wine reviewers. We’ve got Parker and Wine Spectator pitching wines on taste and the 100 point “mechanism.” We’ve got Allen Meadows focusing on tradition and the terroir angle.

Since we can’t legally talk about the health benefits of red wine (though media reporting helps), we’re left with flavor, terroir and lifestyle. Pictures of vineyards and blurbs from wine reviewers. But people have seen all this before. I need a new way to get their attention, and so do you.

That’s why images like those at Ch. Petrogasm could potentially be so powerful. Strong imagery is easily understandable, and highly marketable. If you get a positive AND creative review from them, it’s like having Leo Burnett working for you, for free. Minus the sleeze.

Check them out. They’re doing some very creative and interesting things and could use your support.

A quick link to a pretty fantastic article by Wired contributor Lore Sjöberg who engages in some creative wine gadget imagineering. Some of his proposed creations sound pretty freakin’ cool.

Automatic Wine Twirler
The first thing you do with a glass of wine is swirl it. I’m led to understand that there are sound gastronomic reasons for this, but mostly it just gives you a chance to lift your glass and wordlessly say, “I AM GOING TO DRINK SOME WINE NOW.”

Each variety (or, in wine jargon, “varietal”) of wine has an optimal rate of rotation, or it will as soon as I make up a little chart. This glass, then, is set on a rotating stem, and buttons on the base allow you to swirl your wine appropriately with but a touch. Also, the whirring is soothing.

No, Lore, you had it right the first time. Variety is the correct term. Varietal is mainly used as an adjective (“This wine has outstanding varietal character”), and only in one specific case as a noun (for TTB labeling). But that’s just me being pedantic. Everyone incorrectly uses “varietal,” inside and outside of the industry.

Lore is actually an accomplished oenophile, and purposefully gives himself away with his next super-awesome idea, the Tooth-Mounted Flavor Sensor.

Apparently, the amazing thing about wine is that it doesn’t taste like wine. As soon as you taste it, you’re supposed to announce that it contains the flavors of red fruit, black fruit, off-white fruit, chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, pistachio, Wavy Gravy, leather, moss, pleated slacks, tamarind, tamarin, snozzberry and the quiet yearning for the open road in the heart of every American.

Suffice to say, some of these are kind of tough to pick out. This clever little gadget can be installed in a molar. Once there, the tooth-mounted flavor sensor quickly breaks down and analyzes even the smallest drop of wine for aldehydes, esters and tannins, relaying the information it’s found to a discreet speaker in your ear. At last, you can with full confidence declare a glass of wine to have “a wispy touch of pear and loquat, blended masterfully with a strong chord of pepper and cinnamon, all held together by COMPOUND NOT IDENTIFIED — PLEASE CHECK FOR DRIVER UPDATES.”

Good times. This guy should have a wine blog.

UPDATE: In related news, Ryan at Catavino started a meme asking folks to come up with their dream wine gadget. El Jefe from Twisted Oak weighs in with his dream gadget, the Wine Restraint And Containment System. Awesome.

Congrats to Mary Baker at Dover Canyon on a great write-up in BusinessWeek. Mary is, hands down, the best winery writer out there. Her posts are detailed, authentic and beautifully written. In other words she has real talent. Like her other readers I just wish she had more time to write.

As far as the article goes, it seems the print media have finally gotten themselves a pretty good understanding of blogging and its benefits. The quote in the article by Debbie Weil is exactly on the money (see below). Nobody does care about our “widgets” – that is unless we make our widgets their widgets – and blogs can help winery writers do just that.

The link is here, and the portion of the article dealing with Mary and her blog is reproduced below. Good times for all winery bloggers.

In 10 years since starting the Dover Canyon Winery, Mary Baker and Dan Panico have learned to expect surprises. But last March, when Baker heard someone yelling from her driveway at 3:30 a.m., her heart pounded. “Truly freaked out, I awakened Dan and I suggested (in case it was a homicidal maniac) that he should go check it out,” wrote Baker on her blog the next day, adding that the maniac turned out to be a truck driver whose rig was stuck on the road to the Paso Robles (Calif.) winery.

Baker’s humorous and informative posts give readers a peek into life at the two-person, $400,000 winery, which makes zinfandel and syrah. Mail-order sales have almost doubled in the past year, and the blog is an inexpensive way to reach the growing number of online buyers. “It’s more important than ever to create a personal connection,” says Baker.

Baker started her blog in April, 2006, using a software package called TypePad Pro that costs $149.50 a year. She got the blog up in a half-hour and spent two weeks tweaking the design. “It grew into this place where I could be creative and tell what we’re all about,” says Baker. Beyond the daily happenings at the 10-acre winery, she posts articles on sulfites and tannin, grilling recipes, news about Paso Robles, and anything else she feels might pique her readers’ interest. That’s just what a blog such as hers should do, says Debbie Weil, owner of WordBiz.com, a blogging consultant in Washington. “Nobody cares about your widgets,” says Weil. “People care about what they can do with your widgets or the lifestyle surrounding your widgets.”

To get people reading her blog, Baker drops a postcard with the blog’s address into bags with customer purchases. She includes a link in the winery’s e-mail newsletter, and has joined a community of bloggers who in turn link to her. Weil suggests building an audience by making insightful comments on the feedback sections of other blogs and including your blog’s address. Just be subtle: Asking influential bloggers to trade links, says Weil, is “totally bad form.”

It’s a good idea to post at least a couple times a week, but Baker often doesn’t have time. TypePad allows her to schedule posts, so she can write several entries at once that appear several days apart. As she juggles the many tasks of running a winery, Baker takes comfort knowing she can at least blog about them in the morning.

Alan Campbell, noted photographer and vineyard owner sends in a couple of fantastic pics of him at the Burning Man. In the shirt.

I think the shirt looks right at home on the playa. I’m happy to report that Alan didn’t get ejected by a mob of angry artists for attempting to commercialize the burn.

This was an interesting year over at Burning Man. A guy actually went out and set the wooden effigy ablaze early this year and was arrested for “arson”. Then there were killer dust storms all last weekend that made life on the playa less than hospitable. You can read all about the arson investigation and more over at laughing squid.

Alan, who is currently planting a 4 acre pinot vineyard in Graton (located about 5 minutes from our place in the Green Valley AVA), looks to have had a good time despite this year’s challenges. He’s also working on a vineyard development blog and should have it up and running soon. I’m especially looking forward to checking out the photos he’ll be posting. His shots are sure to reek of professionalism.

Thanks Alan.

In other winery news, crush is halfway over. I’m wearing my “Parker’s Bitch” tee with pride and spoofulating like there’s no tomorrow. Thanks for reading.

Here’s another winery blog for your list Mike!

I met Morgan Twain-Peterson almost exactly a year ago at the OIV Wine Marketing course at Davis, just before my son was born. We hit it off immediately. We sat in the very back of the class and talked about the industry almost as much as we listened to the presentations.

I remember Jim Lapsley (the program coordinator) making a comment that in his experience there was a direct relationship between the grades he gave students and how close they sat to the front.
Burn!

I also recall Jim (who’s a great guy BTW) looking at me like I was a complete mouth-breather when I told him I was there to learn about the “old way” to market wine. Jim hadn’t heard of The Cluetrain Manifesto and he quickly ended our conversation when I mentioned it and then excused himself. Looking back Jim probably thought I was a communist.

But really, because the internets have done such a good job disseminating information, the real benefit of in-person conferences is networking not data exchange. Luckily that wasn’t lost on me or Morgan. Even though we chatted almost as much as the speakers did it was valuable time extremely well spent.

By far the best part of meeting Morgan though was the similarity of our circumstances. Both young. Both crazy enough to think we could build new wineries.

Then there’s the fact that his dad actually helped Joe Swan, our neighbor and patriarch of the Russian River Valley, build his historic winery. There’s also the fact that Morgan drank the kool aid and believes in the power of the online medium almost as much as I do. Last year while he was touring France he contributed his travel writing to pinotblogger, and just last week Morgan kicked the tires on his new winery website and blog at blog.bedrockwineco.com.

This is exciting stuff. In his words

Bedrock Wine Co. specializes in making hot-lipped, straight-up, no bullshit, delicious wines…My hope with this site is to give credit where credit is due. [O]ver the next couple of months a number of interviews will take place with those people who have helped me understand wine.

Not content to slap up just another winery blog, Morgan is taking the Bedrock Wine Co. blog into new frontiers with his extensive use of video. I especially dig his extremely detailed accounts of winemaking and winery minutiae. It’s fascinating for both industry folks like myself, and for passionate wine enthusiasts as well. For instance, there’s some great videos of Morgan out in the vineyards he’s sourcing from describing what makes them unique. There’s also footage of a barrel run to the east bay, and lots more.

Most folks have heard of Morgan’s Dad, Joel Peterson of Ravenswood fame, but his pop will be staying out of the enterprise for the time being due to a non-compete contract he signed with Constellation when Ravenswood was sold. So Morgan will be on his own this crush – no consulting winemaker on staff. 800 cases without a net (which should be the tag line for his blog IMO). Still, considering that Morgan made his first Pinot when he was 5 I’d say the family reputation is safe.

So, a great big welcome from pinotblogger to Morgan and the folks at Bedrock. I encourage you to check out the blog, join their mailing list when it’s available, and try their wines in 18 months. And until then, enjoy the journey vicariously through his words and video.

Should be good times indeed.