Spotlight.

Last Week, Galen Struwe – President of Struwe Desnous Imports and owner/operator of the Sacre Bleu blog finewhineblog.com reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in answering a few questions for his blog. Galen was interested in exploring what he called my tendency to “surround your insights with a detached, academic kind of examination”.

Galen told me the Sacre Bleu blog is written with the millennial demographic in mind. Being older than this group, I suppose I have a limited understanding of what they are about. By numerous indications (which I am at a loss to cite at the moment), this group seems to value intellectualism and thinking. There is even a rise of something called called the “geek culture” reflected in TV programming.

How refreshing. Perhaps “Idiocracy” is not so much a prophecy as much as it is a cautionary tale being heeded by young people.

I’ll keep this short. You can read the whole interview here.

Hello Kitty.

Maybe it’s cultural. Maybe I just don’t get what this Hello Kitty is all about. I thought it was a kids’ cartoon heavily marketed through items like clothing, accessories, my daughter’s bedding and pens and stamps, etc. Apparently, this stuff has a following among adults. I would not hold my breath for Sponge Bob branded wines, beers or spirits, though.

This just seems wrong. Maybe not Ratatouille white Burgundy wrong…. But still wrong. I will be surprised if this label finds its way to the shelves of anything but adult novelty stores here in the U.S..

I may be just a tad behind the curve on this one, but it’s Wednesday and I think there are too many unknowns in the NVL-IBG-Amazon.com equation for me to be doing any intelligent commentary on  the matter. Or…it could just be Internet fatigue.

So…cartoon wine labels are all I have today.

Read more here and here.

Test pattern.

Having injured my knee over the weekend, I will not be posting for a week or maybe more.

In the interim, I recommend the winebusiness.com daily round up of blog postings.

Today, a few interesting pieces worthy of your attention can be found here:

SteveHeimoff.com – A commentary on the attempted division of the Paso Robles AVA into West and East portions.

graperadio.com – Speaking of Paso Robles, this is an interesting piece on Ancient Peaks Winery and Santa Margarita Ranch.

DrVino.com – During med school I got by on canned meat hash that probably was closer to the dog food than the pate. It went great with a lager. So much of canned pet food advertizing is geared towards the pet owner that it makes sense that the producers would want to make the stuff somehow appealing to the people who buy it. When you remember how many retirees subsit on canned pet food, it stands to reason the stuff is not all that bad.

Terroir

The concept that unique geological and climatological characteristics of a particular spot on the planet come together in synergy to create sublimely perfect conditions for the cultivation of a given crop whose distinct character then distinguishes it above all others is not unique to the world of wine. It is used in marketing campaigns to distinguish and sell produce from competing parts of the world.

I am a believer in terroir and its expression – even if others feel they cannot describe or detect it. It goes back to my childhood. I remember that the cherries in my grandparents’ village tasted very different from those grown in my village (a few miles away). (more…)

Network.

I recently parted paths with a college friend. We had grown in different directions, become different people who valued different things. Time spent apart and out of touch made our personal and philosophical paths diverge ever more and the differences were painfully obvious when we occasionally spoke or met.

After college, we had gone our separate ways. I went to medical school and he became an I.T. guru and web designer and later developed his own e-commerce business. Numbers, and the bigger the better, seemed to take center stage in his thinking. I don’t blame him. E-commerce is a tough business and you have to be fierce to survive. (more…)

"The Pour" header image.

Some time ago, I wrote about the homogeneity in blog design. Just recently, I noticed that The Pour has undergone a few infrastructure changes.

The hallmark of the blog, “The Thinker”, has been replaced by a generic looking wine glass – part of the original design: photo of Rodin’s “The Thinker” pasted into a drawing of a table with a glass of wine on it.

Eric Asimov kindly responded to my query about the change, saying that the NY Times had done some software updates on their blogging platform and the header image had been changed. (more…)

Viral marketing is alive and well. And if you don’t think it pays, ask Gary Vaynerchuk or the folks at paltalk.com who produced the slick, fun video piece above. (Hell, ask whoever told Robert Parker about the pending Ch. Montelena sale).

(more…)