Dr Vino's wine blog

Gmail introduced some filters last month that pre-sort your email for you: if you’re not one of the half a billion users, emails that seem like bulkmail now get automatically sorted into a “promotions” tab out of the main inbox. I personally like it as it means fewer distractions. I check in once a day for 30% off skinny jeans coupons and discounts on backpacks at REI.

But I may be an anomaly since there’s an article in today’s Times that has a lot of hand wringing from email marketers. Apparently they feel that the “promotions” tab is tantamount to Siberia. The story didn’t have any actual data about a decline in open rates but it did mention that a few companies are clamoring to get dragged out of the promotions tab and waving special discounts to consumers to do so.

The wine industry has grown increasingly fond of email marketing in recent years, perhaps too fond as some retailers pummel inboxes several times a day with flash sales, special offers, and even just regular old offers. If anything, wine emails still seem a blunt instrument, spewing forth a barrage of offers, ranging from sweet to sparkling and every hue of wine. Wine emailers could take a lesson from Gmail and pre-filter offers higher up letting consumers just get pings about regions or styles of wine they are interested in and dropping other emails. There’s so much talk of mining consumer preferences, the one-size-fits-all model for email marketing seems from a bygone era. By maybe after the Gmail filters, email marketing itself may be taking a hit.

What do you think about wine sales emails today? If you’re a consumer, do you get too many? And if you send them, how has the Gmail filtering affected your open rate or sales? Oh, and if you subscribe to this blog’s posts using Gmail, be sure to drag them into your “primary” inbox. 😉

There’s been a lot of good tennis on TV the past ten days or so thanks to the US Open. And more exciting matches are coming over the weekend as new champions will be crowned. (The weather looks good in the coming days so they might actually wrap things up on schedule the coming days.)

I was at a tennis shop the other day and saw this item and thought it a timely fusion of our interest in wine and these current events.

Clearly, like pear brandy where the branches adorn the tree limbs, they grew these balls inside the bottle. Vive Chateau du Wilson!

Apple unveils a new line of iPhones next week. Rumored among the changes is a gold-hued exterior that the company is purportedly calling “champagne.” Cool, right?

Not if you work at the CIVC, the Champagne trade bureau. Their representatives have taken a dim view of the use of their protected term publicly decrying the term. One told L’Union that as opposed the term Bordeaux, which has a color connotation, champagne is not associated with one hue, so Apple is freeriding on the goodwill of the term (my loose translation). Elsewhere, they have noted it is a protected term in the EU.

What say you: tempest in a tastevin?

Either way, maybe Apple will call the color chardonnay–I hear the grape’s lobby is not as well funded as Champagne. Stay tuned for the details from Apple on September 10.

Stephen Erlanger, the Paris bureau chief of the NY Times, holds forth on the notion of terroir in the opinion page.

The concept is fascinating for its power to readjust markets along quality lines for products that might be prone to commoditization (hmm, I recall reading a brilliant book about this somewhere. . .). It’s clearly political since lines have to be drawn somewhere and those outside the zone might even stage bloody protests, as happened in Champagne 100 years ago, for example. The idea could be interpreted as conservative since it contributes to propping up a rural, yeoman sort of life.

But Erlanger overreaches when he writes that “The notion of terroir is essentially political, at heart a conservative, even right-wing idea.” There’s nothing right-wing about it: I haven’t heard Marine Le Pen on the stump arguing for the AOC by saying, “Long live Volnay! Down with vin de table!”

Although terroir is a powerful concept, it has limitations administratively as the AOC system has shown. Also, it’s not the only way to signal quality or even protect quality, as a company brand (estate name) can often serve as a better indicator of quality than simply reading the place name. Also, if you’re looking for a product that’s made in a certain way–Biodynamically grown, fair-trade certified–there are tons of organizations that offer third-party certifications that have little or nothing to do with terroir.

Erlanger concludes his piece with a doozy: “The preservation of terroir is finally a kind of unwritten conspiracy between the farmers and the wealthy, as well as the bourgeois bohemians of the big cities, who will pay more for quality, for freshness, for artisanal craft and for that undefinable authenticity that is the essence of terroir.”

Ah, bourgeois bohemians–I thought David Brooks had his own space on the op-ed page? But, really, a “conspiracy”? Sorry, but I didn’t know that tin-foil hats came in AOC styles.

Coravin, a new wine preservation system, has garnered a lot of praise since its soft launch in June with the latest big piece coming from Eric Asimov in the NYT. The device uses a syringe to pierce the cork, withdraw wine, and replace the liquid with argon gas. Argon, for those who haven’t been keeping up with gasses since Chemistry class, is heavier than oxygen so it forms an invisible blanket to preserve the wine from the corrosive effects of oxygen.

Coravin seems to have an audience problem as I depict above in a Venn diagram (Coravenn?). There are a lot of people who think 750ml is too much wine to drink all at one time. But these are not the people likely to plop down $299 + tax + capsules. So, in this regard, Asimov is right to focus attention on Coravin to its impact in wine bars and restaurants. Is this audience big enough to recoup their latest, $11.5 million round of venture capital? Perhaps.

Asimov didn’t address the reservations that some collectors have about bottles that have been “accessed” by the device’s needle. David Beckwith of Grand Cru Wine Consulting touched on some issus in a thread on his facebook page, getting the ball rolling with this: Read more…

I’m doing a series of micro-pieces over at FoodandWine.com in a space they’re calling “Dr. Vino’s Verdict.” I can’t promise the wisdom of Solomon but hopefully the verdicts are better than those of Judge Judy. So far I’ve weighed in a few topics, such as the the fastest way to chill wines, how to save leftover wine for free, and which corkscrew offers the most bang for the buck.

The magazine has commissioned original art for each post and I can unabashedly say (since I had nothing to do with it) that the art is fantastic.

They have very good folks contributing wine posts to their enhanced wine coverage; the best ways to keep up with it, should you care to, is to sign up for the weekly email “The Wine List” or follow them on Twitter.

There has been a spate of articles about a new gadget for preserving wine called the Coravin. What’s not been widely commented on is the fact that the founders raised a lot of money, notably almost $11.5 million in the last round.

The company, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, raised these funds from 106 equity investors, including restaurateur Joe Bastianich who had tested the product–formerly known as the Wine Mosquito–at his restaurant, Del Posto. The CEO, Nicholas Lazaris, ran Keurig before and after it was sold to Green Mountain Coffee Rasters.

Where does that put Coravin in terms of recent rounds of wine venture capital in apps and gadgets? At the top.

Two days ago, the team behind the label-recognition app Delectable announced a $2 million placement with angel investors. According to venturebeat.com, Club W has raised $3.1 million for their “personalized” wine club. The Danish company behind Vivino, also a label recognition app, has raised $10.3 million.

In previous non-winery M&A news, Lot18 raised $44 million though their last-completed round was in 2011. In December 2012, an anonymous group of investors from Singapore purchased a controlling stake in the Wine Advocate reportedly for $15 million.

New York law states prohibits wine shipments from New Jersey retailers to NYS residents. But you’d never know it since New Jersey is home to many wine shops that sell wine online to New York and beyond. One of the state’s highest profile retailers is Wine Library, popularized by Gary Vaynerchuk who once streamed 1,000+ videos from the store.

In a staggering change of direction, the New York State Liquor Authority has now decided to enforce the law on the books. In a letter dated 8/12/13 that has not been seen publicly even though it is on the SLA website, the SLA instructs Wine Library to “immediately cease and desist” sales to New York residents. Wine Library did not respond to a query for comment.

Over the past decade, New Jersey has turned into Read more…