This year's Christmas Letter to anyone who cares

Well it’s been a very interesting year for us – especially given our varied range of activities in the wine world. Obviously Christmas won’t be quite the same without cousin Rudy, but he sent us a very nice-looking bottle of Burgundy to enjoy with the turkey. And on the bright side we can celebrate the fact that another of our cousins has just become co-owner of the Wine Advocate so  maybe we can get that nice Mr Parker to come and help out with our next white Zin release.

Perhaps the biggest thing for us in 2012 was the move into supernatural wines. As you may remember we launched some cloudy brown unsulphored wines last year but when we tasted them, we felt they maybe lacked a certain something. They were certainly authentic, but were they really expressing the terroir as fully as they could? That was when Alberic our consultant had his Eureka moment. What we had to do, he said, was ask all the winery staff simply to stop washing. As he logically pointed out, “the Romans didn’t use soap – and nor did the people who produced the great Bordeaux of the 19th century”. It was, he believes, the arrival of personal hygiene and sulphor dioxide that industrialized wine and removed its soul. Well, all I can say is that introducing a wide range of unfamiliar human bacteria into the cuverie has undeniably helped to reveal terroir characteristics neither we – nor anyone else - ever imagined.

The most brilliant part of the story – apart from the prices these wines now command in New York and Paris - is the response we have had from sommeliers and a small group of very influential wine writers. We particularly treasure the comment by one blogger who wrote that “anyone who says that these wines look and taste disgustingly like vinegary gravy is simply missing the point!”

We were very delighted that our Château de Pot d'Or-Dure was elevated to the level of Cru Artisan Supérieur; it's a great honour and it's bound to help our sales in Japan. Next we just have to keep our fingers crossed that our other Bordeaux property, Château Fer-Mélelundi gets its long awaited promotion to Cru Bourgeois Médiocre.

Our other wine business has faced a few challenges this year. Prompted by the success of Cupcake, Menage a Trois and Little Black Dress, we decided it was time to launch a sweet red onto the US market. Making the wine was the easy part; choosing a name was much trickier. Bruce pointed out that FlipFlop had done well for the Wine Group and suggested that do the logical thing and call our Australian range “Thong”. We’d bottled and labeled a couple of containers before our US and UK importers told us they had issues about the name. Now we’re exploring other options. Most of the other cake names  - LayerCake and Angel Cake and Cake itself had all been taken, so we spent some money on registering “Eccles Cake” and “Anzac” and we’re keeping our fingers crossed. If that doesn’t work, Bruce is keen on our trying “Troilism” which his Thesaurus offered as an alternative to Menage a Trois. So far no other wine company has apparently tried to register it.

We attended this year’s Global Wine Microblogger’s Conference – GWMC – and it was a terrific event. Meeting two hundred writers of wine blogs with audiences of ten or fewer readers – the definition of a “wine microblogger” was an eye-opener for us. We’re very confident that exposing them to our latest cuvee is going to make our fortune. It’s also great that we now have a Vice President responsible for Social Media, and that 13 people (including our friends and family) have all shown that they “like” us. Next we re going to make a little music video between the vines called “Gamay Style” which Bilbo - who's going to do a little dance with some bottles - is sure will go varietal on You Tube.

Bilbo’s technical prowess was also called upon this year when an important UK wine buyer called Jan Dago said that we have to listen to consumers. Embedding recording and transmitting devices into every label of our latest vintage represented a big investment – and now we’re confronting the ongoing costs of paying an officeful of Indians to decode every word the bottles are hearing. But we’re sure it will pay off in the long run…

Distributing our wine has been an interesting process this year. Until now, in the UK we’ve been paying TesdaBurys to put our bottles on their shelves and I must say that they’ve done a great job of building awareness of our brand among British bargain hunters. Unfortunately, our accountant suggested that we might not be able to carry on doing this, so we’ve begun to explore a new option called the “Indies”. These are brilliant stores scattered across the British Isles who collectively, we believe, may be able to sell literally dozens of bottles of our wine.

The challenges of the UK drove us to look at China and we have high hopes there, especially after our discussions with Mr Fong our importer. His experience of dealing in sardines and leather glamourwear has been invaluable in helping us to build our market. Without him, we’d never have come up with the idea of faking our own wine. He explained that since it was going to happen anyway, we might as well do it ourselves. So, we’re now shipping three containers of our Chateau Lebou-Chonné AOC la Clape into Shanghai and very profitably producing 300 containers of Choteau Rebou-Chonn OOC la Clope in a little factory outside Guangzhou from alcohol, grape juice and ink.

He's just proposed that we go into a joint venture to produce a competitor to one of Gallo's bigger brands but I have concerns over the packaging. We've found some nice donkey images to go on the Bare-Ass label but people keep telling me that critter brands aren't working any more...

Wishing you success and happiness in 2013, if we make it through the 21st. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: It has become clear that some people have a) assumed that the comments above accurately reflect the opinions of the author and b) taken the letter quite seriously. This is highly regrettable. Please accept our sincerest apologies.

CRUCIAL SUPER-NATURAL WINE UPDATE - For more information on recent developments in this area read this