MILF or Merlot?

Us Brits used to enjoy the superiority we felt while watching American politics from afar.

The religious fundamentalism, the assertions of manifest destiny, the  illicitly stained dresses of interns and mistresses, the militias in the woods shooting defenceless squirrels, the obscene level of corporate influence, the willing delusion to see America as a peaceful nation – all topped off with the American public falling for the promise of “change” every 4 years from whoever was next in line.

And then Britain elected Tony Blair and our superiority was replaced by a realisation that we had become what we had mocked. Ouch.

And so, when it was recently announced that Sarah Palin will speak at this years Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) convention in Las Vegas I choked on my wine-gums. What if the UK follows the WSWA example and asks Nick Griffin to become keynote speaker at this years London International Wine Fair?

In explaning his choice of Palin as the keynote, the WSWA president (Craig Wolf) said, “Governor Palin is a great supporter of America’s free enterprise system and understands that industries like the beverage alcohol industry play a key role in driving our national economy”.

The irony of this statement is not lost on the readers of Decanter Magazine with this particular contribution summing the situation up nicely,

“Anybody familiar with our 50 state tangle of restrictions on alcohol beverage sales knows that the system is hardly ‘free enterprise,’ and that in many cases the restrictions serve the wholesale tier of the industry quite handily. The WSWA has been very skillful at protecting its interests at both state and federal levels for years, and much of this effort has been devoted to measures that effectively block anything resembling free enterprise”

Although the content of Palin’s speech is not yet known, Mr Wolf gave us this frightening insight , ’We expect she will share with the convention attendees her analysis of the current political environment and her vision for America’s future.’  Why is the WSWA providing a prospective presidential candidate a soapbox in this way? Has Mr Wolf succumbed to a schoolboy crush?

In the 1980′s p*ss poor drummer Phil Collins famously said that he would leave England if Labour came to power*.

If Palin wins the presidential race in 2013, I will leave the universe.

* n 2005 Mr Collins said he may return to Britain if the Tories regain power. Please remember this when you come to vote later this year.

See also: Sarah Palin Guilty – It’s Just Not Hockey Mum

And so it comes to pass. First Quench, the owner of Threshers and Wine Rack, have announced that they are to go into administration.

The news comes as no surprise to those of us who have watched the retail giant lumbering along a path towards irrelevance over the past few years. And yet for those thousands of employees who work across the group’s 1300 outlets the news will no doubt cause a great deal of anxiety.

Perhaps predictably, First Quench released a statement on Wednesday saying that “it is no secret that the credit crunch has made a very competitive marketplace even more challenging.” But First Quench’s problems run much deeper than any fissures created by the financial crisis and it would be disingenuous of them to suggest otherwise.

The company’s financial results throughout this decade have been poor, its management teams have come and gone too regularly and its ownership has changed hands too often. No, this is a story of the proverbial oil tanker – the Woolworths of the wine world.

Quite simply, they have run out of ideas. The stores are generally small, poorly presented and offer a limited range of unimaginative wines. The supermarkets offer the same wines at cheaper prices and in recent years their only weapon has been the “bargain booze” option of unprofitable and unsustainable 40% off deals.

But Supermarkets don’t just win on price alone, they win because they recognise the significance of data in the role of marketing products to consumers. First Quench never understood this. They have little concept of lifetime value, loyalty and targeted marketing. I’m sad to say that the company is a paid up member of those bricks and mortar retailers who have been left behind by the digital age.

First Quench must take some stick on the mismanagement of their customer strategy and their failure to turn massive footfall into marketable data.

I have my own association with Threshers. Two winter ago I was employed as a consultant to sense check their business plan for a proposed eCommerce operation.

I found the Business Development team to be bright, energetic,  driven and eager to take the jump into the unknown but I also sensed a senior management team for whom the digital revolution was something that “other people” participated in. My involvement was a brief one  and the eCommerce operation never materialised.

The UK wine world doesn’t need to see another casualty on the high street but conversely the wine customer has been poorly served by Thresher and Wine Rack. If the supermarkets pick up the lions share of the group’s £800m turnover then life for the UK wine drinker will be all the poorer for it.

So that leaves us with Oddbins and Nicolas on the high street. Good luck to them both.

It’s not often that WineOfTheWeek copies and pastes articles from the press but this piece in the Guardian is so well put that, ladies and gentlemen, I present below a damning indictment of our once proud nation.

Personally I hope this trend of Supermarket madness continues and that consumers seek out alternative, independent retail outlets to source their wine:

Management consultant Jackie Slater thought she was completing a normal shopping trip to Morrisons until the checkout assistant demanded to see her ID before scanning two bottles of wine.

“I told her I was really flattered, but I was the wrong side of 50,” she said. But the assistant pointed to her 17-year-old daughter, Emily, and her 18-year-old niece, Annice, who were standing at the end of the checkout chatting.

“She asked: ‘Are they with you?’ I said they’d come to help me carry the bags back to the car. The assistant said: ‘You could be buying the wine for them. It’s the policy – I have to see everyone’s ID to make sure they are all over 18′.”

In vain, Mrs Slater insisted that the wine was for herself and her husband, Peter. But the assistant and then the store manager refused to budge.

Nor was their decision deemed an over-enthusiastic interpretation of company rules. Morrisons’ head office last week backed the store – a move that suggests new guidelines, introduced to limit access to alcohol among youngsters, could soon cause chaos if other shops follow Morrisons’ lead.

“Under current licensing laws, stores are unable to sell an alcoholic product to a customer they believe could be buying for a minor or for someone who is unable to prove their age,” said a spokesman for Morrisons, citing the Think 25 scheme that has been put in place by major retailers to prevent the sale of prohibited items to under-age shoppers.

Morrisons does not contest Mrs Slater’s version of events. The assistant even agreed that she would have sold the wine to a mother who had younger children with her because “no one would buy wine for a 12-year-old”. However she still refused to scan the wine without seeing Mrs Slater’s daughter’s ID – which she did not have with her.

“I was embarrassed, there was a huge queue building up and my daughter found it all excruciating,” said Mrs Slater, who describes the incident as “the silliest bit of jobsworth nonsense” she had ever come across.

“It comes to something when a mother can’t take her daughter shopping without being made to feel like a criminal.”

Last week Asda had to apologise to Gill Power who was told that her 14-year-old son was not allowed to help her carry shopping bags containing a bottle of wine. Mrs Power was told by the cashier: “Sorry he isn’t allowed to take it because he is under age.”

Asda later said its staff had been “overly cautious”.

Morrisons is unrepentant about its Leeds store’s decision. “We take our responsibility with regard to selling alcohol very seriously.” said the spokesman. “The rules are in place to protect our customers and their families, as well as local communities who, in the majority of cases, appreciate our vigilance in the sale of age-restricted products.”

Mrs Slater’s MP, Greg Mulholland, a health spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said: “Whoever thinks this policy will do anything to stop antisocial drinking by kids is in cloud-cuckoo-land.

“This is simply absurd and Morrisons should be ashamed of themselves.

“We need a more mature and sensible approach to alcohol in general – and refusing a mum a bottle of wine with the weekly shop because she has her 17-year-old daughter with her is ridiculous. Morrisons need to think again and this time do so with just a little common sense.”

“You’ll need half a bottle to go into the dish itself and half a bottle to go into yourself”.

Bacchus bless you Sir Keith of Floyd.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evm30HTbD0&feature=player_embedded]

There’s nothing I like more than strolling through a vineyard in my birthday suit in support of worthy causes and that’s exactly what hundreds of our French cousins did at the beginning of this month, answering the clarion call of photographer Spencer Tunick who wanted to illustrate the threat of global warming through art.

Tunick was there supporting Greenpeace and the wider message of climate change was illustrated by a specific focus on the vulnerability of wines and agriculture in France.

The brief clip below shows Tunick delivering his message and you can find more about his naked adventures at the Greenpeace site.

Over the last six months there have been as many news stories extolling the health benefits of wine as there have been warning against the dangers of vinous indulgence. It seems that wine will make you live longer at the same time that its sending you to an early grave.

It surely will only be a matter of time before the Daily Mail announces that a glass of Syrah a day will keep the Swine Flu at bay…

It’s a case of “you pays your money, you takes your choice” as far as the relative health benefits of the vine are concerned. Or rather, “you pays your research company, and you pick whatever politically motivated stance that suits” as far as the lobbyist industry is concerned.

A cynical view? Probably not. Next time there is a budget round, look out for a government report highlighting the effect of alcohol consumption on the health service and then watch as duties are raised by the chancellor. This year it was an attack on the middle class (and middle aged) wine drinkers that provided the news headlines, quickly followed by the inevitable tax increase. Let’s ignore the silent majority of responsible drinkers and swell the coffers anyway.

Indeed, there is a war of attrition being conducted by vested political, moral and industry interests all of whom deploy the forces of PR and research as their weapons of choice. Tis a dirty job…

One of the enduring criticisms of news journalism is the willingness of many practitioners to publish PR puff without checking the motivations/credentials of the puffer. Couple that with the fact that Universities receive a significant amount of research funding from commercial and industrial interests and you can see that something may be rotten in the state of Denmark when it comes to health reporting. Press, PR and Research Grants – an unholy trinity if ever there was one.

So here’s where I need your help. It’s time we looked under the bonnet of the often contradictory stories in the news media and established any links that may exist to politically motivated research funding. If anyone out there can provide insight, documentation, phone numbers or secret handshakes that will help us unlock the secrets of puffery then I’d love to hear from you.

And for those of you who are either looking to give up on the booze or are searching for a reason to continue, here’s a list that should give you the justification you require, whichever path you tread:

“I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour…”

Drinking wine may help protect against skin damage by radiation therapy – The Food Consumer 15/08/2009

Red wine may be helpful in fighting off several diseases and conditions, including high cholesterol, heart disease, various cancers and even aging – Newsday – August 14, 2009

Women who drink red wine enjoy better sex lives – telegraph.co.uk 07 08 09

An antioxidant found in red wine could treat life-threatening inflammations like appendicitis -  Decanter Magazine 11th August

Wine may help men outlive teetotallers - The Guardian 30/04/09

Wine boosts cancer survival rates – The Scotsman 22/04/09

Wine May Protect Against Throat Cancer – Wine Spectator 02/03/09

Wine Slows Mental Decline – Saga

Red Wine Reduces the risk of prostrate cancer -  Harvard University Review

Wine may protect men against impotence - Decanter 28/01/09

“But heaven knows I’m miserable now…”

Red wine “good for you” Scandal – The Examiner 31/07/09

Daily Drink raises cancer risk in women – Decanter 25/02/09

Millions of middle-class drinkers putting health at risk with evening tipple – 22/01/09

Wine Won’t Cut Breast Cancer Risk – 17/08/09

Drinking White wine may stain your teeth – CNN 03/04/09

Average wine drinker puts on half a stone of fat a year – telegraph.co.uk  18/04/09

Wine is worst for brain cells than beer, scientists reveal, in a blow for women drinkers – Daily Mail 17/03/09

Back in 2006, Jean-Manuel Spriet, the then chief executive of Pernod Ricard UK, sent shockwaves through the wine trade by admitting that many of the “half price” wine deals in supermarkets were actually a rip-off.

The fact that a leading player in the wine business had admitted that consumers were being conned caused many a raised eyebrow.

In effect, Spiret was saying that many of the “half price” deals that you’ll find in your local supermarket/ discount retailer are not in fact deals at all. Put simply,  a bottle reduced from £7.99 to £3.99 is often worth only £3.99 in the first place.

Retailers use a policy called “marking up, only to mark down” where they put a product on sale at a high price in a select number of regional outlets for a long enough time to ensure they can legally claim the product was being sold at that price before then offering it nationwide at a lower ” was/now” price. The customer will then beleive he is getting a quality wine for a bargain price. Confused? That’s the general idea.

The industry beleives that the “mass market” wine drinker is obsessed by the £3.99 price point and this affects the way that retailers are selling us wine and the way that some suppliers are now producing their wines.

In Spiret’s mind  ’Consumers know they are getting misled … they get used to it. At the end of the day, it just leads to the impoverishment of the wine trade”.

Spiret’s insight provides us with a depressingly cynical view of the way wine is both sold by the big retailers and supplied by the big wine brands.  More worryingly it gives us an insight into what the big retailers really view their customers to be,  namely lazy and ignorant.

In many ways Spiret was simply highlighting the types of marketing practices that are in play in many industries and it would be unfair to single out the wine trade as unique in using such tactics.

Given that supermarkets represent two thirds of wine sales in the UK, these practices also have a direct effect on the public perception of the value of wine.

If the regular wine drinker believes that he is getting £7.99 of value from a £3.99 bottle then it follows that it will be much harder for the independent wine retailer to sell something whose real value is (and always was) £7.99.

There is, of course, no end in sight to this type of price fraud – the subjectivity of a wine’s value leaves this particular sector open to all sorts of underhand practices.

However, if the political mood continues to be against discount selling for alcohol,  it will be interesting to see how the big retailers find a real price for wines they have knowingly mis-sold for the last 10 years.

I’m devastated. Distraught. Bereft. Less than three weeks after I purchased a brand new MacBook Pro, the poor machine is now lying dormant, unable to power up, utterly f*cked. And it’s all the fault of a Malbec from Concha Y Toro.

Here’s the sequence of events:

2008-2009 - I pontificate, procrastinate and ruminate about buying a MacBook Pro. I really want one but they’re expensive right?
08/07/2009 – An unplanned visit to the Apple Store in London’s Regent Street results in a purchase of my first mac. I’ve finally done it!
08/07/2009 – 29/07/2009 – Love blossoms. I transfer my itunes library to its new home, download Handbrake and start a project to convert all my movies to a digital library. I download Evernote and Omnifocus for work based notetaking and project management. I give my first Keynote presentation with some awesome embedded video – in short I fall in love with everything Mac. What is a PC anyway?
1.30am 30/0-7/2009 – Lying on the couch, watching series 3 of The Wire, I hear the notification sound of a text arriving on my wife’s iPhone. The sound is muffled, so I  lift up a couple of cushions, searching, and then… OH NOOO!!! The cushion in my left hand barely touches the glass of Malbec on the coffee table, but the force is still enough to send the Reidel glass of red crashing on to the keyboard of the MacBook Pro. Sh*t!! Panic. Fear. Impotence. And yes, the eyes started to moisten.

I turn the power off. I wipe away as much of the wine as I can. I’m frantic, I feel ill. Meanwhile McNulty is out on a dinner date with the Campaign Strategist in uptown Baltimore. Christ McNulty, you’re always thinking of yourself!

I go to bed. Everything will be fine if I believe it to be so.

08.30am 30/07/2009 – I’m awake. I take the Mac into the garden and power up. It’s working…but wait. I have a working trackpad but no typing capability – the keyboard has shorted. Bloody hell. So I turn my poor Mac off in the vain hope that if I re-boot everything will be ok. Except now the machine won’t even turn on! Oh God, say it ain’t so Joe?

So that’s it. The Apple store say that it’s not covered under AppleCare as my carelessness is classed as “accidental damage”. The repair bill is going to be at least £600 and likely to be more if the wine has touched the hard drive.

I am utterly gutted. After two years of dreaming of a MacBook Pro, I’ve managed to kill mine within three weeks of finally purchasing it.

And the wine? A Winemakers Lot Malbec from Concha Y Toro that I picked up from Oddbins on the way home from work. The wine was pretty average – how cruel that such mediocrity could be responsible for the death of something so great.

It’s all in the hands of the insurers now.

The Wine Society committee take questions from members at their AGM

My dear friends at The Wine Society recently tweeted an announcement about their 2008 Bordeaux en primeur offer.  I clicked on the link and was, as ever, impressed with what I saw. So I tweeted back to ask for some recommendations.

I waited for a reply. I waited some more. I’m still waiting.

Alas, The Wine Society is one of those business’s whose twitter page erects a big “talk to the hand” sign to anyone who want’s to start a conversation.  I’m afraid they offer little more than an infrequent stream of sales messages & news updates and, judging by the stream, the Society has yet to publicly engage with any of the 1500 tweeps that follow it.

That’s a lot of followers to ignore. Wowzers.

It’s ironic that Britain’s most highly revered co-operative wine merchant remains a society without community.  Of all the UK merchants they remain uniquely placed to take advantage of social commerce and they’ll no doubt get there in the end – but it will be by accident rather than by design.

Oh, and despite my eternal frustrations with the old duffers, I’m still going to grab myself a case of Chateau Angludet. They remain the best Wine Merchant in town. Damn them!

Question: What do Laithwaites, Sunday Times Wine Club, Telegraph Wine Service, Natwest Wine Club, British Airways Wine Club, Warehouse Wines, Avery’s, and (pause for breath!) Virgin Wines have in common?

Answer: They are all owned by Direct Wines, the behemoth of the UK wine by the case market.

Founded upon one man’s passion for Bordeaux in the 1970′s, the company rose triumphantly into a £250m business, effectively writing the rules for delivering wine directly to peoples homes. It was an amazing success story.

But in recent years the company hasn’t found life so easy. Cost cutting, a recruitment freeze and a management cull leading predictably to this years posting of a £5.5m loss.

They remain a privately owned business so do not need to stand in front of a pack of blood hungry shareholders at an annual AGM. But if they did, they would no doubt explain away their malaise by pointing towards the recession, the weak pound and increasing prices.

All of which are valid but they do not tell the full story.

Having spent some time with the business in 2004 it was clear then that the company was at a turning point as it struggled to come to terms with a new competitive and technological environment.

The decline of Direct Wines boils down to three simple truths.

1) The business model that has served them so well for 30 years is now broken.

Direct Wines are a traditional direct marketing operation. They get you to buy an introductory case at a ludicrously low price and then try to get you to buy another case at a higher price.  If enough customers convert to the higher priced cases, they then make a profit.

Unfortunately, not enough people are “trading up”. Not surprising considering that, through their omnipresent marketing, they’ve educated the public into believing a deal is always available.

In this sense they are no better than the supermarkets who they claim to stand apart from. They’ve done as much to commodatise wine as say, Tesco, have.

2) Their wines might not be quite what their customers think they are.

Laithwaites sing proudly about the exclusivity of their wines and the fact that the products cannot be found in the supermarkets.  They invite you to believe the notion that their buyers travel the world to find real wines from real winemakers.  Direct from the vineyard.

However, could it be the case that customers have got a little wiser to what’s actually in the bottle?. Take the recent qualification added to the video of  Il Papavero on their website -

Because Giuliani (winemaker) sources grapes from all over Italy, national wine regulations demand that Il Papvero be labelled a “Vino De Tavola” however “hiding behind its humble Vino de Tavola status is a red full of the warmth of Italy” (Sunday Times)

So, each year they find the some grapes at the right price from wherever they can get them and then make the wine in any given location and ship it to England. Nothing wrong with that at all, but is it really what Laithwaites customers have been led to believe over the past 20 years?

I wonder how many other wines on Laithwaites best selling list would reveal similar stories to Il Papvero?

3) Somewhere along the way it lost it’s love of wine

Direct Wines is first and foremost a direct marketing operation. The model was genius, but it became all about the model and they forgot about the product. In recent years they might as well have been selling widgets.

The company now has a new management team in place, with much of the old guard making way for new kids on the block.

Can it survive? Of course it can. But it needs to demonstrate innovation pretty soon. The brand is an irrelevance to the next generation of wine drinkers but has enough equity in it’s existing customer base to provide a platform for either regeneration or a slow painful death.

So how do they turn it around? Over to you…