Wine labels will do it. How many times have you bought a wine because of its label? I know I have. Be it creative or just familiar, labels can make or break the wines sales. And I will admit right now that I have bought some ridiculously designed and named wines. There was ‘Bitch’, which had a pink label in black lettering. Don’t get me wrong, it was well priced and a quite enjoyable Grenache from Australia. Why did I buy it? Because my friend and I thought it was funny. A few weeks later I was back in that same wine store and I witnessed the same scene, two friends walk up the counter to purchase their wines and see ‘Bitch’ conveniently located at the register. The one friend turns to the other and starts laughing and they immediately pick it up and add it to their pile. Smart product placing.

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On a recent trip to the Benicassim Festival in Spain, I purchased a pair of quick-dry camping pants from Titanium for the trip. Walking to outside the festival grounds and sitting on our back-packs whilst waiting for the campsite to open, we took the opportunity to crack a bottle of Rioja we’d got on RENFE (a quick note on RENFE – if you’re on the site and can’t select English you need to select the drop-down labelled Seleccione su Idioma to make it so, which means you have to speak Spanish to get the site into English, go figure!)

Red Wine is a perfect libation for festivals – primarily because it doesn’t need to be kept cold; it doesn’t lose its fizz and if you’re drinking wine locally produced its dirt cheap and super-good. Within minutes of popping the cork however I’d managed to spill the Rioja on my new pants and was questioning the merits of wine in a situation where a shower is hard to find… when suddenly, with a splash of from my water bottle – the wine was gone. Brilliant! Wine proof pants – what more could a young millennial wine-lover at a music festival wish for? I reckon marketing the pants specifically as wine-proof and selling it at Bonnaroo could be a good gig.

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When I started working in the wine business in the summer of 2007 I knew a few things about wine. First it was exponentially better to drink than the Natural Light my contemporaries were imbibing at the time. It provides a great way to meet women and convince them you’re more sophisticated than you actually are. And finally there was something I desired to learn about wine culturally, historically and socially; anyone can order a martini and look good doing so but in the world of wine you are constantly finding out new and interesting things. Yet for all the knowledge I thought I had gathered nothing was more humbling than going to work in a wine store, where the people above you spent most of their lives buying, selling and learning about wine. From my time with them I’ve learned a lot about spotting good wines.

First of all, labels mean absolutely nothing, so when you go to buy wine don’t even look at the front label ignore it, there is more useful information on the back like a good importer. In this era of opulence and visually stimulated purchasing, Louis Vutton and Cadillac, take a more refined and dare I say classier approach. I am reminded of the movie Tommy Boy with the late great Chris Farley. Tommy is selling Callahan Break Pads; one of his retailers says there isn’t a guarantee on Callahan’s box. Tommy says you can put a guarantee on shit and its still shit, same thing with wine – creative picture means the winery spent all the money on a design and not the juice. Like a guarantee vs. the actual product. There can and often will be a cute picture on the bottle but the juice, more times than not, is still absolute Swill (a colloquialism used to describe wine not worth drinking). Read the rest of this entry »

LABEL CONTEST – whoever submits the best photograph or personal design that serves as inspiration for the next Grape Thinking Selection will win an iPhone.

Fill in your contact info and submit a photo that you think captures the essence of a certain country or place. See examples below.

Examples:

This article is ridiculous –  Wall Street Journal (requires a subscription, so I put a clipping at the end) the WSJ has the most interesting articles on wine. Anyhow, check out the bottom article ‘man buys $700,000.00 of wine in one shot’, basically for anyone in today’s society, if they save a little bit of money or live close to China-Town, almost anyone can get their hands on designer labels. In fact you can get lookalikes that are as good aesthetically as the real things, from Rolex to Tag Heuer, Diesel to Armani, designer labels don’t command the respect they used to. My friend who works for a Hedge Fund in New York (he’s the one I drank Zinfandel with in Central Park) says that most of the hedge fund managers (these guys are like 26, they worked for Goldman Sachs or Lehman Group for 4 years after going to Wharton, and then started managing their own funds, they’re all , intelligent, self-made and loaded and 3 years away from being 30) don’t use any brands. Its all about going back to the roots, they purchase antique solid gold watches and get their furniture at Sotheby’s.Capitalism has made luxury brands so accessible, that the only thing left for people to do if they want to stand above is to go backwards. These guys are looking for unique and rare… and they’re not a minority. Practically any male or female over 25 with a graduate degree in commerce (usually capped by an MBA) that works in LA, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta or Boston fit into the group. You don’t need any knowledge to purchase a label, you just need to be a sucker for advertising on the front pages of any glossy. Designer brands are passe. Wine is the new bling. Read the rest of this entry »