It is possibly no coincidence that in the same week that the world’s top wine ‘experts’ head to Bordeaux to evaluate the latest “vintage of the century” from 2009, that Naked Wines has chosen to update the concept for more modern times.

The annual Bordeaux en primeur scramble sees wine writers, retailers and other influencers run from winery to winery on a glorified “Chateau Crawl” tasting each of the top wines to rate them WELL BEFORE they are released.

“Let the customer decide how good a wine is, how much it is worth, and IF they are prepared to pay in advance for an allocation”

Do the Chateau offer this for fun? For education? For marketing? No, it is all about points, prices and sales. The global demand is such that the judgement of the visitors, plus the ego and history of the winery, helps to set prices for bottles that will only leave the winery years later then probably rarely be drunk and many spend decades being sold by one investor to another.

It is a shame. In principle the idea is a good one: Let the customer decide how good a wine is, how much it is worth, and if they are prepared to pay in advance for an allocation of that wine, to lock-in some discount on the final retail price.

Interestingly, regular consumers CAN start to do some of this, and not be restricted to Bordeaux either. Naked Wines has created a “buy early, pay less” system that means that the earlier that consumers are willing to commit to buying a wine, the greater the discount they get on that wine. They have even already selected a small number of wineries, some of them well know names (such as Teusner Wines) to launch with, and they do not cost £200+ a bottle.

It ticks a lot of boxes for me on The Wine Conversation: it focuses on unusual wines with unique stories, it engages consumers with the wine process (which inevitably includes distribution) and it still gives them a unique price advantage (i.e. discount).

I do worry about how many wine consumers are really willing to part with their cash in advance, when the wine could take months to arrive and they have to buy a case, but it is a great start.

I also wonder whether the discount being offered is really attributable simply to removing risk and some of the costs of sale (it amounts to a 40%+ discount in some cases), but if the consumer is satisfied that the final retail price is real, and that they really are getting a discount and offering help to wineries, then maybe the model will become established.

We might be seeing something very new in wine buying here, it could be fun to be part of it.

Disclosure: I am a Naked Wines customer and I have already “invested” in one of these wines

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I should first point out that I have never read any other Robert Parker book, magazine or web forum (beyond a few glimpses). I will readily admit that the part of the wine business that he normally focuses on, and they way he does it, have little allure for me.

Much as I love wine, and much as I’d love to drink mature quality wines from Bordeaux, Burgundy, Rhone, Napa, and so on, I am not a collector of wine ‘experiences’ or points, and I have a limited budget I would rather spend on my family than on such wines. My interest in wine is much more cultural and prosaic.

So, when I was offered a copy of a new Robert Parker wine guide to review by the publishers, I almost automatically said “No!” However, I was intrigued by the title (and flattered to be asked), so I accepted on the basis that I wouldn’t guarantee to publish anything, … and I almost didn’t.

The guide arrived very quickly and I immediately started to leaf through it. Robert Parker’s “Great Value Wines” (seriously good wine at remarkably fair prices) does seem to be my sort of book in theory. Imagine having such a resource?! Great wines at reasonable prices (which means under £20). Superb shopping list ideas and a list of wines to recommend to friends looking for advice.

The country introductions are OK (short and generic), details about regions is limited or non-existent, but it immediately became obvious something BIG was wrong.

This book has a major flaw. It is a book.

Robert Parker has made a career, and considerable riches I’m sure, from minute assessment of wines that need to be tasted and retasted for every vintage and at different stages of their development, mainly so a certain part of the market, the investor, can decide on the ‘value’ of the wines without ‘wasting’ them by actually drinking them. Imagine!?

So, how can he possibly publish a book about specific wines that does not contain any vintage information? Each wine, listed by producer by country, sounds great, but has only one tasting note which apparently relates to any year it might have been made.

[update: don't get me wrong, I think vintage differences in modern and larger volume wines are overstated, but Mr Parker makes his living from this]

The problem, of course, is that this is a book.

It takes months to take a finished manuscript and complete the printing and distribution of a book so as to get it in the hands of consumers. If you are writing a novel that is not much of a problem, but if you are writing about wines that are available now, then it is. Today most wine available is ‘current vintage’ only. Unfortunately for book publishers, this has a tendency to move faster than they do.

Robert Parker is not alone in this as Matt Skinner admitted in November. Skinner was accused of having ‘recommended’ specific wines from vintages he could not possibly have tasted, for the same reason – they would be available when the book was published, not when it was written.

The ‘Great Value Wines’ solution was to include some generic sort of tasting note or description and remove mentions of any vintage, although the results are a little artificial (and peppered with evidence that these were, at one time, notes on specific wines).

If only … this were a website!

This book has the feel of someone’s tasting database, extracted, filtered, with the vintage field removed, and then printed. It lacks cohesion.

Unfortunately it was probably more useful and easier to navigate in a database format.

However, the same data, posted online, could be a great introduction to these wine. What the web could do is link thirsty consumers to pages that offer greater details and differences of each vintage tasted by Mr Parker and his colleagues, updated regularly, and from there to retailers, producers, bloggers, consumer reactions, etc. No need to reprint, just update.

Now THAT would be worth paying for.

Unfortunately I don’t think the paper version is. Sorry!

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I’m always on the look out for new ways to explain wine that inspires people to look at wine differently and maybe choose to explore it further. I can’t say that I expected this introduction though:

“Wine is one of the most influential forms of biotechnology. …

The use of yeast to make fermented beverages such as wine is possibly the earliest form of biotechnology, according to Patrick McGovern, who has pioneered the use of biomolecular archaeology to reveal how wines were made as long ago as the Neolithic. This biotechnology has evolved a great deal since the earliest known vintages were fermented seven millennia ago in Hajji Firuz in the Zagros Mountains of Iran.” [read more here]

The New Scientist magazine has teamed up with local wine merchant The Colchester Wine Company, to create a tasting case for readers, and used great creativity to present the wine in manner relevant to the audience (although quite how many will really approach their next bottle as the outcome of a biomolecular science experiment, I’m not sure!)

By the way, if you are interested in this link, check out Jamie Goode’s excellent Wine Science book

Hats off to those involved, and do let me know how sales go!

Note: It is a little ironic of course if you consider the “WHO” headline on the New Scientist site itself of course:

Thanks to Bob Young (@SOCOACH) for the tip!

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A quick post to point you to the results of the fun wine and food experiment I helped to organise yesterday for Casillero del Diablo, the well known Chilean wine brand.

I’m always looking for interesting new ways brands can promote wine and reach out to new audiences, and when I had the opportunity to create an event for a wine brand like this I knew it could be amazing. The team at Cube put on a great event at The Kitchen run by Michelin-starred chef Thierry Laborde, and my role was to document, host and share some of that event with the wider world.

The event itself was really made a success by the three bloggers who were invited to taste the Casillero del Diablo wines and come up with dishes to match them – then cook them in time for a taste-off with the judges: winemaker Marcelo Papa, chef Thierry Laborde and Carol Emmas from Harpers. The three bloggers were Signe Johansen (@scandilicious), Linda Williams (@goodshoeday) and Louis Villard (@spiltwine).

I managed to use a whole range of ’social’ tools on the day, but the star was really Posterous – an amazing tool for combining your event content. Check it out! Visit the site to see the videos (using Qik from my mobile), audio interview (using AudioBoo), photos (using Flickr) and the twitter stream (using ScribbleLive) – all toold you should definitely consider using too.

Enjoy!

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Despite the lack of updates on this blog, I have actually been working feverishly on interesting wine-blog-related projects over the last few weeks, so much so that I have rather neglected this place. Here are just a few of those projects – they are a lot of fun, but I also think that the participants, including myself, and the wine business, are learning a lot from them too.

L’Anima wine challenge

I’ve been working with this amazing Italian restaurant to help shed a little light on Italian wines, grape varieties and also into the process of adding wines to a wine list. For more details, check out the wine social media site I put together for the #lanima project with Gal Zohar, sommelier at L’Anima and Dan Coward from Bibendum.

Tesco Wine Fair

Working with video is fun and useful, but this is a very different medium and experience makes a big difference – both in front of and behind the camera. I am working with a friend of mine at double-barrelled.tv to learn more about this. This week we made our first attempt on behalf of Castillo San Lorenzo for a Tesco Wine Fair promotion.

European Wine Bloggers Conference & #ddmsummit (Drinks and Digital Marketing Summit)

Lots of developments in the planning of the EWBC, a project I am VERY excited about this year, but in part because of this, I have now also been invited to share my thoughts on the influence and potential of social media (or Digital Marketing) for the WHOLE drinks industry, not just wine, at the #ddmsummit being put together by Cube and The Drinks Business. More on this soon.