My Wine Education

Dream Job: I Need Your Help to Get It

What a week!  First the redesign, then the Cincinnati.com news. Now I've got one more bit of news, but this one requires YOUR help. A lot of your help.

You don't have to donate anything except about a minute of your time to click on something safe. I think you'll get a chuckle out of the whole thing too.

Murphy-Goode Winery is offering a 6-month, $60,000 position to someone who wants to promote the winery via social media. They'll even provide you with a rent-free home in Healdsburg. Seeing as how I'm a wine blogger and a social media consultant, it seems amazingly up my alley. I want this job. Really bad.

In order to get this job, I had to create a 1-minute video. I thought about embedding it below, but really, I want to drive you to the site to vote. You get a screen cap instead.

So many people seemed to just sit and talk about wine. I think wine is part of the job, but understanding social media and marketing is more important. So I tried to tell a story, and I used the Wizard of Oz to do it. Of course, it's also an excuse to dress up like Dorothy.

WinemeDineme readers will notice a guest appearance by Julie as the wonderful Glinda the Goode Wine Witch. The video was shot at Harmony Hill, so my HUGE thanks goes out to Bill, Patti, & Evan for letting us traipse through the vines and borrow their dog. Kevin, his brother Steve, and Steve's girlfriend Sarah round out the cast. Filming was done by recent foodie blogger, Bryan.

I created an accompanying web site at http://www.rainbowgoode.com. It's fun because it hosts the extended version (after all, it's hard to tell a story in a minute) and the blooper reel. The blooper reel still makes me laugh. Dogs are fun to work with ..

On the RainbowGoode site, you can view the various ways I'm trying to market the video, trying to drive votes. I am using every bit of social media I think is relevant - from my LinkedIn groups to this blog, from Facebook to Twitter. I picked up some Google AdWords and grabbed some bit.ly URLs. I'm amazed at the things that were available still. I'm also not discounting traditional media, sending press releases to everyone I can think of. Want one?

I'd love to make the Top 50 folks, and hopefully, the Top 10. At the very least, maybe I'll land a social media job of some sort from all this effort. But in order to do any of that, I need your votes. The contest ends June 19, so vote soon, vote often, and tell your friends!

More Specific Information on Riesling Labels

According to this article in Decanter, the International Riesling Foundation has proposed that a "taste scale" appear on every bottle of Riesling. This is to help consumers identify whether the wine is sweet, off-dry, dry, and so forth.

Of course, you can tell now - or at least get a general idea - by identifying whether a Riesling is a Kabinett, Spatlese, or Auslese (see my definitions in this post). There is a lot on a German wine label - type, regions, and percentages of residual sugar.

This is part of a move, I believe, to make German wine labels more approachable. Last year, we were quite taken with the inexpensive Clean Slate Riesling. It was the first German bottle I'd encountered with an approachable "graphic" label. It's one of the reasons we bought it, as we gave several bottles to our non-wine-drinking friends.

This is also part of removing the common misconception that Riesling is just a sweet wine. By specifically calling out how sweet or dry the wine is, the Internal Riesling Foundation hopes to dispel that myth and help grow Riesling sales. (Riesling is currently the fastest growing market of white wines in the US.)

What do you think of the idea of a tasting scale added to bottles of Riesling?

Earth Day: Design Your Own Bag

This isn't wine related, per se, but I think we can loosely tie it to food, and definitely tie it to Earth Day on Saturday.

Have you noticed (or purchased) an eco-friendly shopping bag from your local grocery store?  I know we've purchased some from both Kroger & Remke's. We even bought holiday themed ones at Christmas and wrapped our gifts in them. Of course, although Kevin & I love the idea of these bags, it doesn't mean we're not constantly forgetting them either at home or in the car.

Kroger is launching a "green" initiative online. You can design your own reusable shopping bag in a new contest. If your bag design wins based on online votes, you could win a $500 gift certificate to Kroger. In addition, if you submit your Kroger plus card number when you submit your design, you'll receive a free reusable bag the next time you visit a store.

Find some free time today and design a bag! The more bag designs the better - and happy Earth Day this weekend!

Tryvertising and Wine

One of the awesome things about Twitter is that it's a great link-sharing tool. Kevin, from Strategic Public Relations, found this awesome tidbit and immediately shared it on Twitter. Now I'm bringing it to you.

In Paris, you can now sample wine as you might sample perfume. In fact, the packaging is eerily similar. The trend of letting a consumer try-before-they-buy is called Tryvertising (the Apple Store is a giant example of this), and why shouldn't it be applied to wine?

In spirit, it's no different than attending a free tasting in a wine shop. I've also read of other wine shops where you can purchase samples from fancy machines, which is a great way to try that wine you could never afford to purchase. These tube-shaped bottles, because they factor in the look and feel of packaging, take the concept to a whole new level.

WineSide offers both sweet and classic wines in patented, flat-base glass tubes with screw tops carefully engineered to protect the wines' flavour. The sweet wines—which include Sauternes and Muscat, for example—are available in 6cl tubes, while the Pomerol, Chateau Neuf du Pape and other classic wines can be purchased in 6cl or 10cl sizes. WineSide's collection represents a range of appellations and producers; tubes are available individually or by the box, which can be chosen to provide an introduction to a variety, year or region. Kicking off retail sales, the products are available exclusively at Colette in Paris this month.

I rather like this as something I could take home with me, try it when I want, and return later to purchase a bottle. If I were a large conglomerate, such as Constellation Group, I'd jump on this to market many of my wines, across wineries, at one time.

Chasing the Butterfly

Kevin met Edouard Vaury at the Cincinnati Wine Festival a few weeks back. Edouard, of OWS in Miami, represents Chamarré and was kind enough to provide a pair of bottles for review. In honor of the great weather lately, we started with the Chamarré Sélection Dual Varietal Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc. The wine is not yet available in our area, so we're not entirely sure of the price point, but we know it is intended to be an affordable wine. We cover both the marketing and the wine in this post, but you'll have to follow the jump to read the whole thing.

The Marketing
Chamarré (pronounced sha-ma-ray) is a fantastic example of French wine using creative marketing and trying, if a little belatedly, to compete with the cute-label-critter wines of the world. It's a great look at how one group of vintners is trying to combat the Yellow Tail Effect. The vintners represent every major winemaking area in France. Their grapes are drawn together by Renaud Rosari, winemaker for  Chamarré.

Chamarré is targeted for the wine drinker who wants an inexpensive but quality wine - from France. Their logo and labels all effectively use a butterfly.  I recently learned that all logos should have a deeper meaning. I suspect the butterfly is a representative of the changing world of French wines and rising up, full of color, to take on the challengers. That's just a creative guess though. Don't quote me on it. Chamarré means bursting with color, bursting with flavor, in French.