. 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).

In these difficult times, we’re all used to passing by ‘closed down’ stores on our high streets.

Here is what a closed down online shop looks like. Poor old Oddbins.

The iPad has been out in the world for a couple of months now so we thought it time to make an early assessment of the first wave of wine apps to hit the iTunes store.

Let’s start be saying that “best” is an extremely relative term when it comes to describe the early contenders. ‘Least worst’ would be a more appropriate measurement. Researching this post was a thoroughly miserable experience. Read on and enjoy our misery and remember – we do this so that you don’t have to!!

1 – Berry Bros and Rudd

As with all things digital, Berry’s are the first wine merchant to get in on the act. Berry’s consistently leave their rivals eating mulch when it comes to new technology and Simon Berry deserves great credit for putting innovation at the forefront of their marketing.

That said, this app is underwhelming. As with their iPhone offer the iPad app is simply a re-rendering of their website content. You get the wine list  and the usual navigation options but there’s a real lack of rich content or interactivity . The videos for the virtual wine school link out to their You Tube channel and this contributes to an overall feeling that the app lacks a sense of togetherness. It’s a mish mash of design that doesn’t reflect their high end values.

2 – Wine HD

WIne HD is a really, really odd thing to behold. It’s pitching itself as a comprehensive guide to wine, so you have sections dedicated to tasting buying and serving alongside an uninspiring list of wines from each region (when I selected ‘California Central Valley’ and was confronted with an image of Ernest and Julio Gallo I almost un-installed the app right there and then!).

The fundamental issue with this app is that it just hasn’t been designed with the iPad in mind. To navigate the app is to walk through treacle while being pursued by a swarm of bees. It feels like a series of PDF’s scans stitched together with the most rudimentary application of the iPad’s touch capability. This app manages the extraordinary feat of tuning Apples intuitive device into a Windows Vista like quagmire

Did I also mention that the design looks like it was put together using clip-art? Avoid.

3 – Wine Pass

As a concept, Wine Pass, promises much. The creators claim that the app ‘delivers restaurant wine lists directly to your iPad in real-time’. Choosing wine in restaurants can be a real chore, not just because of the choices available but also the mark-ups we have to endure as consumers. Wine Pass is ambitious but the success of such a service depends on comprehensive content.

In the case of Wine Pass, they is absolutely no content whatsoever. That’s right, not one single restaurant appears in my version and you are just left thinking, ‘why on earth have these guys gone live with this?’.

The model is dependent on restaurants signing up to the service and publishing their own lists but a better option would be for users to upload their own choices/recommendations.

4 – Wine Ratings

Wine ratings comes with something of a fanfare based on it’s iPhone version. ‘#1 wine app’ is the claim in the iTunes description. So, surely these guys have got it right? Wrong.

I downloaded the app just before I set off to a wine tasting in Kent and was looking forward to adding ratings and new wines. In practice I couldn’t do either task.

I tried to add a wine using the ‘suggest a wine’ feature and all that it allows you to do is send an email to the app creators. I then navigated to a product page, was confronted with a perfunctory list of attributes (but no tasting note) and then was invited to add a rating. Except no matter how hard you push your fleshy digits on the touch screen you simply can’t do what it’s asking you to. Wowzers.

As a last throw of the dice I touched the ‘share’ icon, at least expecting to see options to post to Facebook and Twitter. You can guess what happened next?

WineOfTheWeek Rating: AVOID

5 – WineNoggin

WineNoggin positions itself as a ‘new way to find, rate and share wine you love’. The service is a web based application that allows you to search a database of wines. Again, the app is drawing on the data from it’s namesake web service. As such you can search by name, winery, type, varietal and rating. There’s a social element in that you can also search by friends reviews.  Crucially, you can add new wines and review/rate existing wines  via the app.

So far so good. The down side though of all these types of social aggragator apps is that without content they are limited and without friends they are lonely places to inhabit. At the moment WineNoggin doesn’t have either for me. Until it achieves critical mass it’s really not much fun and on that front it’s surprising that there are limited social sharing tools to ensure content can be seeded to your own networks.

The other risk with data oriented apps is that unless you have an excellent user interface you end up overwhelmed by lists of data. This is the case with WineNoggin. It just doesn’t feel fun.

So what would we like to see on the iPad of wine?

1 – Snooth. The best social wine site on the web is sorely missing from the iPad. Come on guys, get your act together!

2 – More merchants with innovative apps that fully utilise the technology rather than simple versions of their existing websites. Here’s an appeal to Oddbins and Majestic – come and talk to WineOfTheWeek, we know what you need to do!

3 – Rich Content guides rather than boring PDF scans. Imagine how Hugh Johnsons Pocket Wine Book or World Atlas of Wine would render on the iPad. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.

Any more ideas, dear readers?

I imagine the thought process went something like this:

Wino 1: ‘I was in the White Burgundy section of Oddbins yesterday and I really found the wine labels puzzling”

Wino 2: ‘Yes they can be difficult to decipher. By the way, I was doing this word puzzle on the train this morning and couldn’t find the last word. Can you see it?

Wino 1: ‘Let me have a look…. wait, you’re doing a puzzle, I find wine labels puzzling… so lets design a wine label that actually IS a puzzle!’

And so Puzzle Time Wine was born to add a new dimension to our drinking experience. Below is a word search and a rebus. Enjoy.

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.

Here we go again! Voting irregularities, electors facing poll closures before they can mark their “X” and electronic machines short-circuiting due to rain storms. God Bless America, it makes you long for the hanging chad.

Obama or McCain is the choice that faces the voters in the bankrupt superpower across the Atlantic and we Brits are seemingly more transfixed by this election than we are by our own first past the post madness.

It looks like it’s Obama, but the commentators are mindful of the Bradley effect, a reference to the 1982 election for the Governor of California whereby the black Candidate Tom Bradley went into the election with a 20 point lead and ended up losing by 100,000 votes. Apparently, when it came down to it, the public couldn’t vote for a coloured fella. Hmmm.

I love election nights – National Elections, local elections, by-elections (who can forget Newbury 1993), Presidential elections – I can’t get enough of ‘em. Election nights are like great sporting events infused with real drama played out by protagonists who put everything on the line backed by parties who do anything to win. I’m happy to confess that I taped a full eight hours of the 1997 British General Election, edited it down to a 90 minute highlights package and still regularly sit through the fall of Portillo and Mellor. There was more drama that night than a title decider at Interlagos.

So, what to drink on a night like this? It’s got to be California but my choices are limited by the outlets available to me after a busy day. I ended up getting the tube back to Kentish Town which gave me two real choices – Oddbins or Somerfield. The former was the first stop and wow, what a disastrous paucity of choice these guys are currently offering from North America. 6 wines, none of which I had any confidence in buying, so a sharp exit and quick right down the high street. Oddbins have new owners so lets pray to Bacchus that a return to roots is on its way – a modern wine tragedy.

Somerfield, on the other hand, stocks one of my bankers – the Ravenswood Vintners Blend Zinfandel, 2005. The Vintners Blend is full of fruit and from Sonoma California and is as dark as haunted wood and punches more than the 13.5% Alcohol on the label. If this bad boy isn’t carrying a full 14.5% I’d be amazed. And that’s the problem I’m currently having with this vineyard. They are currently marketing their portfolio as “not for wimps” with the website providing a helpful dictionary definition of the adjective.

This just doesn’t sit comfortably with me. It’s part of the “big reds” marketing approach that seems to wear “fullness” (read alcohol) as a badge of honour, a neo-con positioning of a once noble varietal. If this wine had a political mandate it would already be raining missiles on Iran. The truth is that these wines are better than that, and the Zinfandel being produced at this vineyard deserves more respect, the Lodi in particular.  

I’m currently two glasses down with a strategy consisting of BBC coverage until 1.30am (full bottle consumed) followed by four hours kip and then a 5am alarm call for the final results. 

Who do I want to win? Well for me the choice isn’t a choice at all. I cut my political cloth resenting the Thatcher era, rejoicing the emergence of the New Labour only to be disillusioned by the suffocation of the left wing alternative just as Capitalism begins to give up the ghost. If Blair taught us anything, he taught us that the message of change is the illusory concept designed to make us swallow the continuity of status quo. Obahma stands for change in a political system that just won’t tolerate it.

But hang on, I’m ignoring the elephant (or should it be pig?) in the room! Miss Palin, it’s time to go back to Alaska – VOTE OBAMA!