. Oi, Lazurus! Wake Up! Image from www.thecolour.com

One of the amusing aspects of wine blogging is the challenge of deconstructing PR puff.  Fancy a go? Let’s try this press release title:

“Oddbins is back on a high street near you… Unique initiative allows Oddbins’customers to choose the price of wine…”

Except, of course, Oddbins has never really been away and there’s nothing revolutionary about their new approach to wine selling.  And lets not talk about the ellipsis.

Many were sad when Oddbins went out of business earlier this year but the brand was quickly snapped up by European Food Brokers, owners of Whittalls Wines and 40 stores have remained trading ever since.

WineOfTheWeek REALLY want Oddbins to succeed but content of the press release we received yesterday felt awkward and out of touch.

“From 20-23 October, consumers will be able to blind-taste wines in-store and then provide a price that they would be happy to pay for that bottle. The wines will then go on shelves at the Customer Recommended Price (CRP)”

Sounds like Naked Wines to me.

“We’re taking the old cliché of ‘the customer is always right’ and actually demonstrating our belief that this is the case. The new Oddbins will put the consumer at the heart of everything we do, so it makes sense that we have a conversation about our pricing with our customers to explain our value based pricing model, while at the same time taking their opinions on board.

Sounds like Naked Wines to me.

“For a long time the noise around wine has been about discounting and price cuts. It is time we have a mature conversation about price and what constitutes value.

Sounds like the conversation all wine retailers have been having for the past 12 months.

We all want more decent wine stores on the high street but Oddbins need to be careful. Laying claim to revolutionary ideas that are already established could come back and bite them in the Amarone unless their execution is first class.

Oddbins are now the underdog and need to forget what went before. I hope they have the team to execute this – it doesn’t come easy and it needs to be in the DNA of the organisation not just in the marketing department.

They need to be careful too that they don’t throw out the discount model that has proofed so successful for Majestic AND the new online players. What Oddbins need is a lifetime value approach to customer acquisition not a weekly ‘feet and cash’ approach that crippled their previous bricks and mortar operation.

I shall be on the sidelines shouting encouragement. Oh, and the website still says ‘coming soon’… (there’s those dreaded ellipsis again).

Wineoftheweek returned from an enforced absence this week wondering how we might resume hostilities in the war against vinous pomposity.

So a big thank you for @HarpersWine for this magnificent tweet from last weeks London Wine Fair. It seems that Tesco’s Dan Jago thinks that Naked Wines’ Rowan Gormley is Nigel Farage.

Tesco's finest contribution to wine tripe

Just so we have this clear. Dan Jago is the Head wine honcho at a corporate monolith that sells low quality branded wine on permanent discount. Rowan Gormley is an innovative online wine entrepreneur who wants to put wine buyers in direct contact with wine makers.

I guess the choice for the wine consumer is: Choose a wine merchant who appeals to you passionately or choose a supermarket that can sell you Blossom Hill in boxes for a few quid and 100 club card points.

So if Naked Wines are UKIP, what does that make Tesco? Best answer receives a week’s worth of Tesco Pet Insurance*

*Not

Two of Britain’s newest wine retailers go head to head tonight in a dramatic ‘Clash of the wine tiddlers’ taste-off.

Naked Wines and FindWine are the digital darlings of the UK wine scene and they’ve decided to hold a taste-off in a bid to find out which of their respective business models delivers the best wine for the customer.

Tonight’s event at a secret location in central London, will include 15 wines from each retailer, split into comparative price categories and styles. Customers will taste blind and ratings will be assessed at the end of the evening.

Wow. Now there’s a ballsy challenge.

In the red corner:

FindWine, set up by Mike Howes, helps customers who are ‘confused and bereft of inspiration’, by recommending them a selection of no more than 54 wines at any one time.

And in the white corner:

Naked Wines, founded by former Virgin Wines CEO Rowan Gormley, is all about customer power; with 30,000 ‘Angel’ customers helping to fund and select the wines.

Here’s what they say about each other:

We love FindWine’s revolutionary simple approach. We’re intrigued to taste their wines… and I know our Naked Angels are too. We’re always on the lookout for new ideas and we expect to come away with a few!”
Rowan Gormley

Being a relative newcomer to the online wine scene we have long admired Naked Wine’s innovative and ground breaking approach. Their wine buying model, fuelled by consumer power, is a breath of fresh air for the wine industry and we look forward to slurping our way through their range.
Mike Howes

Enough of the niceties chaps. FIGHHHHHTTTTT!!!!!

Yes, the World Cup kicks off today and wine retailers across the land are surely trying to find a way to drive sales through any kind of footballing link they can think of. Right? Actually no.

Take a cursory look across the online landscape and you’ll see no mention of the World Cup at Majestic, Oddbins, Laithwaites or Nicolas. Even Naked Wines has nothing to say on the matter, and they are owned by a South African boy – come on Rowan, where’s the love?

The problem is, packaged sporting wine deals rarely sell. The clever direct marketers sit around and plug the numbers in to their very clever counting machines and inevitably conclude that it’s easier to sell coals to Newcastle. When it comes to football, it’s all about the cheap beer I’m afraid.

We gave huge kudos to Berry Bros for their simply brilliant Fantasy Wine World Cup so let’s not blow smoke up their proverbials yet again..

…instead it’s left to he august Wine Society to invite us to ‘Raise a glass to this year’s football World Cup hosts’ through a  characteristically straight ‘Discover South Africa case‘.

Such a paltry offering is dwarfed by Tesco who have dedicated a whole section on their website to South African World Cup Fever. There’s a competition, a full selection of South African wines,  a map of key vineyards and some info on history and climate. Reithian values from Tesco then.

And finally amongst the big boys is Marks and Spencer who, like Tesco, have gone down the highly unimaginative “25% off all South African Wines” route. Yawn.

Can I fess up? I’ve only written this post so that I can shoehorn the John Barnes Rap into this blog. Please forgive me and enjoy the greatest footballing contribution to music since Waddle and Hoddle.

What's thong with this picture?

The world of wine has been getting its clothes off recently.

From the sublime UK online retailer Naked Wines to the ridiculous U.S. wine vod-cast ‘The Naked Wine Show’, wine drinkers are being assaulted with all kinds of nudity.

Indeed, even artists have jumped aboard the nudewagon, as photographer Spencer Tunik demonstrated with last year’s Greenpeace climate change protest involving a vineyard and a hundred naked bodies picking grapes.

Now it seems that this epidemic has finally reached us, the ‘people’. Last week a woman was arrested in Nevada for trying to buy a bottle of wine while topless (and it should be said, completely intoxicated). Describing her own behavior as “mind-boggling” she now faces charges of indecent exposure, felony drunken driving and burglary.

More disturbing is the tale of the British paramedic who walked into a supermarket in his uniform, picked out some wine but was refused at the checkout as the store has a policy of not serving people in ‘uniform’.

Affronted, the man stormed out to his ambulance, stripped down to his underwear (in this instance a thong and a pair of socks) and marched back into the store declaring ‘I’m not wearing my uniform any more. Will you serve me now?’

It hasn’t been explained why the man was wearing a thong. Urrghh.

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…

A few years ago, I did some contract work at Virgin Wines, just as CEO Rowan Gormley was about to sign the deal that transferred a majority share of his business to Direct Wines. 

The deal no doubt made him a wealthy man but the relationship with Direct Wines eventually went sour and he was “removed” from his post in June this year and is currently involved in legal action, “That’s the subject of a High Court writ, so I can’t say much about it” he told Times Online.

It hasn’t taken him long to stage a comeback. His new venture is called Naked Wines and I’ll wager that his sales pitch for this new business is a broadside at the immovable object that is his former employer. Direct Wines (Laithwaites, Sunday Times Wine Club, Virgin, Averys and a dozen other white labelled clubs) is a classic collection of legacy labels that are struggling to get to grips with how the web is changing the way consumers are interacting with brands. Direct Wines continue to act as a patriarch – telling you what you should buy under the illusionary concept of “exclusive wines”.

Rowan wants Naked Wines to do things differently. His recent PR blitz has successfully communicated the concept of a hybrid wine store and a social network. But, obliging journo’s aside, what’s the deal?

Well, Naked Wines is leaning heavy on the concept of a “farmers market approach” – you’re buying wines from the people that are making them. I really like the idea of the winemaker as the hero, rather than the product, it’s exactly how I feel about wine and is a simpler route to entry than the complexities of taste and smell. As a brand construct, I can buy into that.

They’ve also introduced the idea of “wine angels” a panel of 100 wine tasters who rate the wines, a conceit that is less appealing. There seems to be a lack of transparency as to the identity of these “angels” and there’s a whiff of emperors new clothes about this notion of endorsement. The current content in the user review sections is also pretty woeful as well – if the following exchange wasn’t written by the staff I’ll eat my cork - 

by Sally Gray (2008-12-04 15:31:21.875)

Why do you think the ‘Rammed Earth’ winery produces such good wine?

Ross Gower Rose is a must for Lovers of easy drinking wine it goes down disturbingly easily Really fresh fruity taste, I love this wine maybe a little bit more than i should. 

Hmmm. I’ll let the humble reader decide on this one. 

Presently, Naked Wines is neither the great leap forward  or a real point of difference for UK wine online as it’s aspiring to be (you can’t go to market claiming that you’re a social media wine shop on the back of an rss feed and some bookmarking links) but I’m presuming that they have launched this early version of the site in December to grab some share of the Christmas market.

Here’s hoping that the New Year will bring the big concepts that are promised.