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A piece of whimsy that was written for, and previously published on timatkin.com
In the Wine And Novelty Corp. boardroom, the atmosphere was tense. Behind
Warner Biggereturne III, the company president, the chart on the electronic
whiteboard said it all: wine division sales had dropped for the third
consecutive quarter. Worse still, so had profits. Across the big shiny table,
sales manager, Des Parate, was trying to deflect his boss’s wrath. “The trouble
is that we no longer have the products consumers want” he said. “And that’s
true for the Fruits, the Newts and the the Cutes”.
Like most big wine
companies, since 2012, WANC had divided its products and their buyers into
three sectors. As their name suggested, the Fruits focused on wines with
obvious flavours such as pineapple, peach and boysenberry that resulted from
being made from grapes like Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Zinfandel and Cabernet
Sauvignon. Newts were the “Neutrals” mostly produced from Pinot Grigio, though
with a growing trend towards other flavourless Italian and Spanish varieties.
As for the Cutes, these were the unashamedly, female-focused sweet wines that
competed with brands like Apothic, Menage a Trois, Little Black Dress, FlipFlop
and Cupcake.
“We’ve
tried almost everything” Parate continued. “We’ve used every clone of every
variety that’s currently obtainable; we experimented with over 1000
flavour-enhancing fermentation yeasts and enzymes; we’ve roto-fermented,
flashed, egged, we’ve added gum arabic, gum chinese and gum latvian; Mega
Purple, Mega Red and Mega Tartan. I don’t know what else we can do.”
Biggereturne
glared at the dozen or so other executives around the table daring them to
speak. Finally, a ginger-haired intern called Ivor Nidea standing at the back
of the room hesitantly cleared his throat, “What…” the young man stuttered, “…
if… we… took a more… radical… step?”
Realising
that he had the audience’s attention, Nidea continued. “When you look at what
most of our customers are buying - strawberryish pink Zin, sweet, grapey
Moscato, watery white, sugary red… it really looks as though they really don’t
like stuff that tastes like wine… So, maybe we should… begin to move away from
all this focus on… grapes”
“What
are you suggesting?” asked Massy Ration, the production chief.
“Well…”
said Nidea, “I’ve looked at costs, and I reckon we could largely switch from
grapes to fruit juice, fruit flavouring and water. We’d save lots of money and
we’d give our customers stuff they’d actually prefer”
“Okay…
but what do we do about the Newts?”
“Oh,
that’s easy. We just add water. I’ve even come up with a promotional plan. We
could sell it as being L’Eau Calorie and L’Eau Alcohol…. And for the Cutes, we
just add more sugar.
A thousand miles away, the owners of Château de
Fence-Dafficher were facing a similar crisis. “It is all the fault of Sarkozy,
Hollande, Merckel, les Americains, les Anglais… fumed Henri Grette-Beau-Coup We
are finished! At the rate we are going, we will be bankrupt by the end of the
year. Our family has been making wine in the Cotes d’Arrogant-et-Chauvin appellation since
1176 but we’re struggling even to get €2 for a bottle. When the government
stops giving us €0.50 in July, we’ll be making a loss of €0.49.”
It
was then that little Marie-Mee the quiet spinster daughter who spoke in
Franglais because she was a Poste-Moderne kind of fille, finally plucked up the
courage to speak. “Papa” she said. “I have une idée”.
“If we look back”, she said, “some of our most
profitable millésimes have
been ones like 2011 when we have produced large quantités of wines that were franchement not very nice. And then, think back
to that Expo where we presented nos vins last year. The critiques who tasted them
seemed to be much more seduced by Domaine Goutdelamerde”.
“Domaine
Goutdelamerde!” spluttered the old man, “but those wines are… disgusting. Their
white wines are cloudy and orange and their reds smell of pigsties!”
“Précisement”, said the girl. “It’s because they’re
‘naturel’. People seem to like them - and pay higher prices for them. Maybe we
should do the same, but possibly going even further.”
“What
do you mean?”
“Well, instead of fermenting in silly clay pots
like they do, I was thinking that we could maybe simply dig a hole in la terre. We could be les premiers to introduce the
‘open-top-mud-fermenter’. Just think of the terroir character we could talk
about if the juice was actually in contact with the same clay and chalk as the
vines. It would also help to make it cloudier. The critiques like that, and
they’d like it even more if the cloudiness came from real earth!”
“And,”
she went on, “for our ‘Super-Naturel’ wines, I think we could be very clever
about le packaging… After all, what is ‘naturel’ about glass bottles? I think
we should revive the tradition of selling wine in sheep-stomachs, what the
Spanish call ‘bota’. If we really work at it, we can remove all the fruity
character and replace it with the intense vinegary shittiness that the
critiques so admire.”
Both
WANC and Château de Fence-Dafficher did so well from these ideas that Ivor and
Marie became superstars of the global wine industry. Inevitably one day, they
ended up speaking at the same conference. The moment Ivor, who was (as you’ll
have guessed) now owner and CEO of WANC, saw the young - well not so young
really - Frenchwoman, he was bowled over. Within weeks, the two were married
and their businesses merged and everybody lived happily ever after.
*************************
All
this is of course a fairy story, but within it, you may find just a few grains
of truth. The concept of Fruits, Newts & Cutes may be a figment of my
fevered imagination, but Apothic, Menage a Trois, Little Black Dress, FlipFlop
and Cupcake are all highly successful brands in the US. Similarly, on January
4, 2013 there was a real merger between two very different wine companies when
Winery Exchange announced that it had bought Orleans Hill. Winery Exchange, for
those who are unfamiliar with the name, describes itself as “the only
full-service, national and corporate brand, beverage alcohol company that
sources beer, wine and spirits from the finest regions worldwide… founded with
the intent of blending extensive industry expertise with cutting-edge business
practices. The result is a dynamic, fast-growing company poised to take
advantage of new trends in the beverage alcohol industry.” Its brands include
Ogio, Mrs Beachley’s Mulled Wine and Dune Buggy Moscato.
According
to the Orleans Hill website, Tony Norskog the winemaker aims to “hand craft
wines with distinct characteristics, all the while eschewing chemicals and
preservatives”. Unlike Marie-Mee, he currently seems to be focusing on
“delicious and approachable” wines under brands such as “Daily Red”, but if the
market for more “challenging” styles grows as rapidly as some sommeliers hope,
I am confident that Winery Exchange will well be ready to supply the demand.
Color Block, one of Winery Exchange’s innovative brands.
And, Dune Buggy Moscato…
Tony Norskog of Orleans Hill with some of the 150,000 cases of organic wine he produces every year.
Our Daily Red Organic, piled high in a US supermarket
This is awesome!
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