In the future, I think most wineries will not submit their wines to the critics at the Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate and other wine publications. And this will not be due to the chance of getting a bad score but because those scores don’t influence their consumers. Sure, some wine collectors follow scores and make their buying decisions based in part from them but most wine consumers could care less about scores.
In today’s market scores are only important within the trade where distributors use these as sales tools when convincing restaurants and retailers to carry a wine. Since smaller producers don’t receive as much support from distributors these days, they are increasingly turning to consumer direct marketing in their sales efforts. As wineries strive to connect directly with customers online, more will choose to sample wine bloggers.
The latest winery to go down this path is Sonoma’s Rodney Strong Vineyards with a pre-release sampling of their new Rockaway Cabernet to a few wine bloggers, myself included. I think this effort will get some attention in the wine industry not because this is something new — wineries such as Stormhoek and Twisted Oak have been doing this for years — but because they chose to sample bloggers before established wine critics and the wine is an allocated, mailing list only offering.
Sampling programs are effective in gaining awareness of a new brand quickly or exposing an existing brand to new consumers who increasingly are turning to the internet for their information. Google “Rockaway Cabernet 2005” today and you’ll get two full pages of positive reviews from several leading wine bloggers. If they had chosen to sample established wine critics, they would have no coverage in place 2 weeks before the wines’ general release. And because both Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate are behind subscription logins, search engines will not pickup their reviews when posted weeks or months later.
Not only does Rodney Strong get immediate coverage before the release of this $75 wine, they also are inviting a discussion about the wine directly with their perspective customers. I think this is a trend we’ll see other well known and boutique producers follow once they see the results here.
More information about Rockaway can be found here and my review, with links to the other bloggers involved, here.
Photo by Joe Roberts, the 1 Wine Dude
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The thing that made Stormhoek such a compelling story was that it delivered surprisingly good value in it’s price category. Although South African wines had a market position, particularly in the UK, Stormhoek wines tasted more like they came from Australia or New Zealand. European bloggers began posting about these wines and the next year similar results were realized as the brand was introduced to U.S. consumers.
