Wine myths #2768: "the liquid in the bottle is all that matters"
Wine is a slave to its shibboleths. It's time to slay one. We move on to Product in The Wine Marketing Masterclass drawing on René Girard, Martin Heidegger, and Shrek.
Words of profound wisdom from Zimbabwe’s superstar sommelier and winemaker Tinashe Nyamudoka.
In fact, so wise that anyone thinking about buying a winery should have Tinashe’s tweet tattooed on their inner eyelids. And on their children. And broadcast to them five times a day - at Fajr, Zuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha - from a minaret erected for the purpose within the winery itself by a particularly loud muezzin.
Making good wine is easy. Getting people to say it’s good is even easier. (*Vinfluencer klaxon*). But selling it is hard.
It’s a little known fact that getting a new wine listed in several restaurants and shops was originally one of the challenges of Hercules. It sat between slaying the Nemean Lion and stealing the apples of the Hesperides. But “selling wine” was dropped when King Eurystheus admitted he was “just joshing” with Hercules, and only wanted to give him challenges that were vaguely achievable. Like capturing Cerberus.
This is the latest installment in a COMPLETE MBA course in wine marketing. For just $10 a month. (A full wine MBA costs up to €30,000) you’ll discover sell more wine, more profitably, to more people. And to catch you up we’ve already covered a LOT, with multiple sessions across Market Orientation, Market Research, Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. We’re now tackling PRODUCT - the first of the 4P’s.
In a minute we’ll have the paywall. For the juicy stuff, be sure to…
Why is selling a bottle of wine so hard? I’ve been doing it for thirty five years (I know, I don’t look old enough) and there seem to be two big reasons:
There is a LOT more wine than there are people to drink it all
Almost nobody gets what a “bottle of wine” actually is. Or at least, what it means to the people who you hope will drink it.
The Labours of Hercules is a made-up story that contains a great deal of truth. The notion that “the only thing that matters is the liquid in the bottle” is a wine trade truism that’s entirely mythical. But its popularity means the wine business is filled with people talking endlessly about “the liquid”. (Sidenote, if you consistently refer to wine as “the liquid” you are brain-dead with ghastliness and I spurn you with my toe. Stop it. It makes you sound like a photocopier salesman from Reading.)
Selling and marketing wine is not about letting people know how good it is. Like Tinashe says, that’s the easy bit. It’s about creating desire. And desire comes from somewhere else. I am very much like Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, and most of Silicon Valley in that I’m a big fan of French philosopher René Girard:
Unlike our needs, which make themselves felt in our body without any help from third parties, our desires have an irreducible social dimension. Behind our desires lurks a mediator or model who most often goes unrecognized by others, including the person doing the imitating. As a general rule, we desire what those around us desire.
We like stuff… we desire it… because other people do. Or we believe other people do. People - real or imaginary - that we admire. Of course wine people will now sneer. They’ll scoff at this and say “well yessssss” in a drawl. “That’s fine for fans of Kylie Rosé. But I’m a serious, authentic wine lover. I think you’ll find I’m not influenced by so-called ‘role models’”.
Girard had your card well and truly marked:
Desire is not mimetic only in mediocre individuals, those whom the existentialists, following Heidegger, branded as inauthentic, but in everybody without exception, even in those who appear the most authentic in our own eyes, namely ourselves
(from "All Desire is a Desire for Being" by René Girard)
Yes, you too are subject to mimetic desire. In case you don’t believe me, here’s Martin Heidegger looking at you, branding you “inauthentic” while drinking a bottle of his favourite local wine.
Enough philosophy. How can a better understanding of what the “product” is in wine help you sell more of it? For more money? To more people?
Well for this we must turn to another great philosopher, Shrek.
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