As the world of wine has continued to become more competitive, more and more regions have started to not only grow wine, but to focus on its cultivation and production in an effort to create a local industry which will bring in thousands of tourist dollars each and every year.
Temecula:
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Temecula is truly one of the most interesting wine regions in California. First, the positives are almost endless when it comes to location. Almost 30 million people live within a one hour drive of Temecula and its rapidly expanding wine region. The problem though is that those visitors largely come on the weekend and aren’t doing the wine thing seriously, so vintners are stuck with a stark choice: keep making Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot which sell well in the tasting room, or plant Italian, Spanish and Portugese grapes which might be more difficult tasting room sells, but would be better adapted to the warm (ie hot) summer temperatures in the region. How does a region balance the easy sales that come from being within an hour’s drive from Los Angeles and San Diego with the want or need to make better wine in one of California’s warmest wine growing climates?
The Rhone Valley:
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Rhone varietals such as Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre, Marsanne and Roussane have certainly gained a foot hold in many parts of the world, but their ancestral home of the Rhone Valley still struggles for acceptance in terms of French. Think about it this way, how many wine regions in France would you name before you thought of the Rhone Valley? For me and for most consumers, Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy would certainly be more at the top of their mind. For the Rhone Valley, that gives them a fairly significantly marketing challenge. How does a wine region already crafting truly world class wine, sell itself compared to more well known local competitors, especially when those competitors have been marketing themselves as a higher end choice for close to three hundred years?
Portugal:
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Portugal is one of the few wine regions in the entire world which crafts wine almost exclusively from their own native grapes. That’s a good thing when it comes to wine quality. Their dessert wine, Port is known and recognized the world over. The problem is that just about zero consumers know anything about their local grapes and even fewer could tell you that Port can be made by a combination of nine local grapes. How does a region, making good wine in the right way, break into a new part of the market when they don’t have any hope of educating the average consumer about their local grapes? How do you convince people that the same grapes which produce the dessert wine that they like so much, will also craft great table wines?
As the owner of an online wine club I can tell you that there is great wine being made all over the world. When it comes to winemaking and marketing though, unless you’re based in Napa Valley or Bordeaux, things never seem to come together perfectly!
Written by Mark Aselstine who is the owner of Uncorked Ventures, an online wine club based in San Francisco. Having fought the marketing fight himself, he can tell you how difficult it is to sell wine, let alone when you’re a winery based in a more interesting, or new location.
Marty Huggins
