London International Wine Fair and Distil

(l to r: Cyril Necker, Steve Raye, Eugen Schwartz)
This was my first experience at the LIWF, and also the first time they’ve separated the spirits booths from the wine show into a separate hall. Overall, I’d give it a positive review. While traffic is significantly less on the Distil side, the consensus among exhibitors I spoke to was that the quality and focus of the attendees is pretty high. So, less traffic, but more valuable leads.



I’ve seen a number of clients and friends including Cyril Necker of byNecker---Girl liqueur; Eugen Schwarz from Oval Vodka; Dale Sklar of Wine and Spirit International. with Hapsburg Absinthe and the European HQ of MHW and the U.S. Drinks Conference in London; George Rowley of La Fee Absinthe; Emmanuel Solinsky, Nancy Little and Veronica Lamb of Walders Liqueur fame, Marc Charles of DBI and James Steiner of Cutty Sark. I also met with David Rose of The Drinks Business and Chris Boaz of Just-Drinks, both of whom are sponsoring the U.S. Drinks Conference. And surprisingly had literall run into Dave DeBoer on the street at Canary Wharf on Monday. Dave and I worked together at Heublein, and had a chance to catch up. He left Conn. for the vineyards of California, and has been heading up international sales at Delicato Vineyards since. Sphere: Related Content

Breakfast in Britain

What is it about food in the UK? Overcooked beef,watery eggs, (and oh by the way, the portions are so small!) And yet, they make spectacular beer. Go figure. Sphere: Related Content

Greek Wine and why Long Tail Isn't Yellow

In conjunction with our client All About Greek Wines, I had a great meeting with a group of Greek wineries and importers in New York Friday. The primary focus of the presentation was the development of an ecommerce concept and system. It was great to see everyone's eyes light up when they "get" the concept of virtual inventory through the Beverage Network database and the 50+ retailers for whom they provide the e-commerce functionality. If you’re interested in more detail, check out the excellent article (and headline) Ian Griffith wrote: The Long Tail isn't Yellow. Sphere: Related Content

Tequila!

(l. to r. Pablo Miguel Musi, Jeff, Eucario Gonzalez, me and Joaquin Segura. Pedro Quintanilla not shown because he took the picture!)
We had a great meeting with the folks at Senor Frog's in Cancun last week. And though the sun was shining and the Caribbean was an achingly aquamarine blue, we engaged in a marathon indoor, no window, 12-hour session that can be summed up by the headline "GYST" (paraphrased for publication as Get Your Stuff Together). Suffice to say though, the extension of the restaurant chain brand name of Senor Frog's with a line of tequila makes eminent sense. A critical question we're wrestling with now is what is the right retail price for the brand. What do you think? We invite you to comment with your opinion...just click on the blue "comment" linke at the bottom of this post and answer three questions:
1. How old are you?
2. Are you aware of Senor Frog's restaurant?
3. Would you expect a Senor Frog's tequila (100% agave!) to be priced above, same as or below Cuervo Gold? Sphere: Related Content

Social Media Marketing: Working with Wikipedia

As we get more involved with social media, we've learned three very important things:
1) You have to play by the rules
2) You have to know the rules to play by them
3) The rules are always changing

Recognize that Wikipedia is a third party source. That means that it does NOT publish original information, only secondary information tha is referenced or validated by some other first party source. For our clients that means we need to get the trade press to publish what we would like included in Wikipedia and then we can reference it.

Wikipedia should not be looked at as a tool to generate links or traffic. ALL links on wikipedia are rel=”nofollow” meaning they are NOT counted as a link by Google or the other search engines which use links as part of their algorithm. No follow links are internal to the site they’re on.

There is a Wikiproject Food and Drink which is an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles on food and drink on Wikipedia. If you are interested in editing pages related , you need to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Food_and_drink where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion

Making Contributions to Wikipedia guidelines:
-Don’t write it yourself
-Don’t directly edit it yourself
-Don’t hide/be anonymous/or use a fake persona
-Start at the talk page, Introduce yourself and identify your affiliation on the talk page and ask for permission to do things
-Make your edits suggestions via the Talk page and let others do the posting

Newbie Mistakes
-Don’t use a promotional username (e.g. with your brand or company name in it)
-Copyright violations/fair use of photos
-Conflict of interest…don’t write about yourself
-Not clearly understanding what defines a neutral point of view.

Use the system to your benefit by following the rules and participating.
-Let your audience do the marketing
-Content spreads virally because of open copyrights
-Participating can build your reputation
-Things learned on Wikipedia can be applied elsewhere
-Become a part of community/forum, answer questions, interact with editor, donate images, report problems, building goodwill and obey social norms
-Do not badmouth competitors and withdraw from personal attacking.
-Only secondary knowledge can be posted (has to be published somewhere else before going on Wikipedia) and info has to be referenced
Sphere: Related Content

Wine E-commerce

In spite of the recent Costco et al. verdicts, e-commerce’s time is coming in the industry. As many of you know I’ve been a passionate advocate of DOING SOMETHING NOW rather than waiting for the perfect solution to magically appear sometime in the hazy future. That said, Mike Roth of Beverage Media and I had a very interesting conversation on the subject and I’m even more convinced that their network of retailer websites is the place to start. Following the philosophy of "Get the Free Stuff First" and "Use Other People’s Money" it is really a no-brainer. It’s an existing network of ecommerce solutions to add value to the BevMedia database in NY, NJ, MA, CT and several other states. The brilliance lies in the fact that to begin the process, all a supplier has to do is provide the content (and hey, they say Content is King right?...more on that later), and the retailer can sell out of the distributors' virtual inventory. It’s the “Long Tail” concept served up to suppliers with the vision to recognize the opportunities ecommerce has to to address the inequities of the US three-tier system for smaller, poorly distributed brands. To that end I had some great conversations (well, I talked they listened, does that still count as a conversation?) with a couple of producers…Yanni Papagiannis from Fantis Foods Inc, one of the major Greek Wine importers (Tsantali et al wines), a perplexed but interested group of wineries exhibiting under the aegis of the Madrid Chamber of Commerce . Sphere: Related Content

Be Part of the Conversation

We’ve heard a lot of people repeat the Web 2.0 cliché that “Content is King”. But the new thinking is that Content is not King, Context is. The internet has evolved in stages over the last 10 years from “Surf” to “Search” to “Find” and now the challenge is to “Filter”. We can get a massive amount of relevant information in a nanosecond…Great…now how do I winnow out of that only the information I need?

That’s why BAT is working so diligently on developing our Social Marketing capabilities. Our client brands’ consumers are seeking out and talking with others of like minds…in blogs, in newsgroups, through RSS feeds, community tagging tools such as Digg and deli.cio.us, social networking sites like Facebook and more. These are the places people are going (those people?..they’re us!) because we’re learning that we no longer need or are limited to looking to published authorities for guidance, but are finding more relevant and trustworthy information knowledgeable peers (think Wine Spectator being dethroned by Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library TV)

So here’s the message marketers in this brave new world need to get…Be Part of the Conversation…With or without you, the conversation is taking place. The choice then is to participate and help shape it, or ignore it and let it shape you. Sphere: Related Content

WSWA musings: On the "liquor guy look"

Have you ever noticed that liquor guys look different from everyone else…even without the badges we seem to stand out, maybe it’s the slicked back hair, tan faces, $3,000 suits and a penchant for “shooting the cuffs”…well, I’m just sayin’… Sphere: Related Content

“This Guy Told Me He’s Best Friends with Harvey Chaplin and he can get me…”

Many of the newbie foreign suppliers we saw at WSWA seem to sing this same song to us on our first meeting. They’ve met some random guy trying to sell them on the guys’ relationship with Harvey Chaplin (or John Magliocco or Vern Underwood or…) He promises to not only get a meeting, but imply that it means Southern is not only going to take on the brand, but also focus the entire 30 state operation on developing the brand for you, (even though it might be a direct competitor to the bread and butter brands from the big boys).

Well, in spite of the WSWA’s public rhetoric to the contrary, distributors do not build brands; it’s the suppliers’ responsibility to do that. And the only sure way I know to get the attention of one of the major distributors is do something Marty Wolinsky and Dave Eickholt used to pound into my head: Focus, Focus, Focus. And in today’s Bev Alc industry, that means: start small and targeted, concentrate your investment and energy in a few markets, and build sustainable, repeatable, noticeable and measurable success founded on retailer support and consumer pull. THEN you can go to a distributor and present a fully integrated support program that’s scaleable. The key is to demonstrate that you have done it, not that you’re going to do it. Sphere: Related Content

WSWA observations: Don't Paint the States

I guess we owe an acknowledgement (or perhaps an apology) to Ron Lepow of Glazer’s. He used the metaphor of offshore suppliers thinking they can just “paint the states” at the US Drinks Conference in London last year, and evidently it really struck a chord…so much so that he told me he keeps hearing it come back to him third and fourth hand. By Don’t Paint the States he means don’t look at the US Bev Alc market as one market; it is really 51 different markets (don’t forget Montgomery County). One strategy will not fit all but it is a pretty good recipe for failure.

New suppliers trying to get in to the U.S. market need to recognize it’s far different than the EU. In fact our friends from the former Soviet Union countries tell us the US market is more complicated to navigate than the Communist bureaucracy, but they could at least manage their way through it with “gifts”. Sphere: Related Content

More on Absinthe

There was only one Absinthe exhibited at the WSWA show (Mythe) and we were quite surprised at the dominance of licorice in the flavor profile. The folks there told us that the category is being consumed not only with the two rituals, but also as shots, mixed with Red Bull, and a depth charge in beer (A-Bomb). I think we’re gonna see this new generation of absinthe drinkers take ownership of the category in ways even our most creative mixologist friends like Robert Plotkin, Tony Abou-Ganim and Brian Van Flandern can’t even imagine. Ah, to be young again! But seriously folks, I think we’re going to find better acceptance of the authentic “Bohemian” style. It’s inherently more mixable because it doesn’t hit you in the nose with a 2 x 4 of licorice flavor. Sphere: Related Content

MHW is a New Products Juggernaut

Even thought we work with John Beaudette on a number of products I never really appreciated the range and scope of the new products with which MHW works. From historic brands like Combier’s Triple Sec (wow, was that stuff good!?) to creative new concepts like Kai, a lychee flavored vodka from Vietnam, he’s put together a portfolio that really demonstrates that the future of new brand development is with the little guys. John, I think it’s time for you to get a bigger table in MHW’s conference room. Sphere: Related Content

Absinthe is HOT!

I just did a keyword search on the liquor category and was flabbergasted to see so 4 variants of Absinthe in the top ten:
1. martini recipes
2. buy absinthe
3. martini
4. chocolate martini
5. absinthe
6. absinth
7. martini recipe
8. absinthe alcohol
9. whisky
10. lime martini Sphere: Related Content

Vermouth...a bit of history you probably didn't know

Vermouth, which was originally made using the flower heads from the wormwood
plant, takes its name from the German "wermut" ("wormwood"). Aside from absinthe, other popular liquors, including vermouth, Chartreuse, and Benedictine, also contain small amounts of thujone. Sphere: Related Content

Absinthe...a relatively unknown footnote

Here's an interesting bit of believable mythology regarding the history of Absinthe. In the 1840's during the Algerian War, the French soldiers commonly suffered from dysentery. The Army's solution was to issue opium to the troops because one of its side effects is constipation. But opium was bitter, so they also issued Absinthe to help them make the medicine go down easier. Absinthe also has some anti diarrheal properties of its own. But the soldiers figured out that a "spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down" and they put the opium on a lump of sugar, poured cold water over it through a slotted spoon and "Voila" a tasty beverage, the "louche" effect, and regular bowel movements. Well, anyway, that's the story Sphere: Related Content