If I didn’t already know an industry legend who had the alias ’silver fox’ - then I’d bestow the title on Jay ‘North-Slope’ Youmans. If one generally thinks of the term MW ‘Master of Wine’, perhaps there is the inclination to think of the caricature portly connoisseur in a bow tie, with a red nose, spouting forth pomp, bombast and arrogance as he lords his knowledge about wine like a Vet with a Purple Heart above everyone he encounters.

Of course this is an outdated vision and though many patrons of the wine industry may fit the above description, by and large the industry is rife with cool, open minded, centred and all round amicable characters - and Jay Youmans is certainly no exception.

In the first hour of meeting Jay we didn’t talk about wine for a second - and instead he gave me the what’s-what about college basketball (which faired me well in many future conversations); chatted about the team he coached and told me about his children. It was only a little later that I learned about the arduous and rewarding path one must travel en route to being worthy of having the title ‘Master of Wine’ bestowed upon them. Jay is one of a handful of Wine Masters in the United States - which puts him in a unique position, the saying ‘in the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king’ comes to mind - and by this measure, MW’s have two eyes. To this end, there can be no doubt that all MW’s carry a depth of the industry that few of us can even fathom (Wine Spectator journalists included.)
If Gary Vaynerchuck is a poster-boy of the potential for wine critics that pack as much enthusiasm and charisma as a national radio-jockey; then Jay Youmans is the perfect example of the youthful and princely sophistication that exists in the industry.

His bi-monthly magazine, I-winereview.com is packed with objective and unbiased wisdom - and it would be a great honour if Jay (who runs much sought after wine education courses in DC) could weigh in on Grape Thinking from time to time to share some valued insite.

To the Wine Community at Large:

I write to you as a firmly established member of what is typically called “Generation Y” and I have a bone to pick. Mainly it is a result of a recent phenomenon in the community, one I like to refer to as the “dumbing down of wine.” It seems to be an increasingly popular opinion that in order to bring wine to younger and newer audiences, wine needs to be brought down to “our level”. Unfortunately for the marketers it is almost instinctive by now that we will reject most things that people attempt to target to us. We like to adopt things ourselves. Look at the successes and failures in mainstream viral marketing. Most things that succeed do so because young people want to have them, not because they were told they need to have them.

Wine doesn’t need to change the way it is, but it does need to change the way young people are told about it. Some believe that wine has to be trendy or cool or fun or marketed like beer and hard alcohol to become popular with young people. They point to trends in marketing in music and magazines and tech gadgets and tailor their wine approach to these same tactics. The problem is that they are missing the ways in which wine has a competitive advantage.When it comes to young people, wine will never win a competition with beer or hard alcohol on trendiness or shock value or sex appeal. It’s like marketing a horse by telling people its a cow because you think cows are what people want.

I’d like to let you in on a little secret about young people. Just around the time we reach legal drinking age we also start to have a desire for sophistication or a desire to be seen as an adult. We’ve done a lot of moving on from our teenage years and, contrary to popular belief, the majority of us are not a bunch of binge drinking, hard partying, pierced, and tattooed hooligans as we are portrayed in the press. The majority of young people today are smart, ambitious, inquisitive, and above all we’re sophisticated and discerning consumers (even if we’re not yet, we like to think so). This is where wine can compete. Make us feel sophisticated, after all this is one of the ways it is marketed to adults. Wine is a complex and beautiful drink with a great history and a great culture. This is something a lot of the Millennial Generation would love to learn about but the marketers don’t think we want to learn the story. Sure we have our idiosyncrasies and like cool stores, but most of all we want to be treated like the adults that we are. We don’t like to be talked down to, we are willing to ask if we don’t know something, and we certainly don’t like it when older people feel they have to dumb stuff down for us.

Truthfully, members of Generation Y shun wine because:

1. the price point of good wine is a bit high
2. no one has really attempted to market wine to us in the middle ground (Meaning someone needs to meet the Millennials with a good wine at a decent price and speak to us at a level somewhere between wine kindergarten and hoity-toity wine college).

I feel I may be getting a bit drawn out, but for now I’ll leave you with this:

• We hate when marketers treat us like we have no attention span or sophistication. Speak to us like the adults that we are and please please stop the race to the bottom when it comes to marketing wine to Millennials.
• Stop dumbing it down to broad-reaching food pairing suggestions and one flavor wine descriptions. We are interested and we want to learn. If you want to sell us wine then be willing to teach us and to take time with us. Part of wine’s appeal is it’s complexity, let’s not lose that for the sake of selling out.
• Finally, if you want to integrate some of the things we enjoy like social networking and other technological concepts, why not get a member of our generation to help you. Please don’t have a member of an older generation try to create products for us without our input. Remember how cool you thought some of the things your parents created were?

I would like to say that I do appreciate the strides that are being made in the wine world. Hopefully with a little input from young people the incredible culture that is wine can spread even further.

-Vino Bandito

The community value of food & beverage went to new heights at the first ever Food Network Awards this past Sunday night, which was actually part of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival back in February. Although it seems silly to glorify food, the show was more about glorifying cuisine and cooking and how it brings us together. Plus, with awards like “Icy Innovations” and “Tasty Technologies”, I kinda got reeled in.

The award that I found most interesting was “Not Your Grandmother’s Food of the Month Club.” The nominees were cool food club delivery services that ship a variety of tasty treats direct to their members’ doorsteps. The Z-club from Zingerman’s won because it delivers a wide variety of foods and creates a sense of adventure for its members. Self-described as a premier food club that a hungry, adventurous food-eating nation has fallen in love with, the Z-club provides a random assortment of exciting new foods from fine olive oils, cheeses, and meats to exotic sweets such as Calabrian candied orange peels covered in chocolate and Australian sweet dried figs. Looks like they’re only missing one thing.

The other big nominee was The Grateful Palate, which most of us know for its imports. It was up for its Bacon of the Month club, which is a little odd given its quality wines. I don’t know though, do bacon and wine match well? The other foods that they offer, however, look absolutely delicious. Check out this Fork & Bottle review of a Grateful Palate Breakfast Combo.

A smart company, with an already established brand like Grateful Palate should feel really confident about their position right now. As the logistics become well-oiled (I like that phrase), consumers are going to tap into the opportunity to have food and wine shipped direct to their doorstep, especially if it is exciting new stuff from different places. Even more, what if we could pair this service with recommended packs personalized to each member and based on their unique tastes? And what if we could send them recommended recipes, ingredients, and wine for that night? Could be fun.

Also, guys, your Grateful Palate imports page is practically non-existent (right) and the only place I can find your wines online is The Jug Shop. What’s going on? You’ve got a great reputation and have awesome wines. Share them with us.

I once heard a winemaker say ‘you can’t make a Ferrari out of materials only fit for a Ford.’ (though similiar has been tried) Fordist mentality relies on abundance of resources, production lines and rapid turnout, and in many cases, especially in floundering economies, fordism can squeeze out the craftsman, who takes greater care with less material to provide a superior product.

It is little wonder then, that New Zealand, with its renowned natural magnificence and limited space that by nature rules out the very possibility of mass-production is the home to many ‘wine Ferraris’ if I may call them that. However, unlike Ferrari or many other limited goods, everyone can afford New Zealand wine. New Zealand Wine Distribution Company is a true testament to the harmony of the country, in that it is a consortium of winemakers who band together to export their small parcels of wine in a single consolidated container. Through them I’ve had the diversity of being exposed to a side of New Zealand that I hadn’t really found through conventional methods. I’d just thought of New Zealand as cat’s pee, pink grapefruit and limited production Pinot Noir that’s hard to come by.

But would you believe that some of the finest Gewürz, Riesling and Pinot Gris I’ve sampled this season have all come for New Zealand?

What New Zealand does to Sauvignon Blanc is geo-gastronomic (if I can coin a phrase) proof of terroir, and the proof is on the palate.

Of course, it would be cruel to wax too lyrically about NZWC because they’re not in the US yet. In effect these wines are too limited in production, and at current the cost of coming to market in the USA is just not feasible for many other such producers. And unfortunately, until there’s a better way for these wineries to market and sell their wine more effectively, the US oenophile who can’t afford to travel will never get to experience them.

So I won’t talk too much about it… for now, you can just go down to Kroger and Publix and buy the same wine that some stressed out smokes-a-pack-a-day jaded corporate buyer has selected for you and every other Joe in the country to taste. But don’t worry, it won’t be for too much longer.

MOG is one of the newer communities to have arisen and it’s dedicated to music and features profiles of musicians like Ben Gibbard. Unlike MySpace, which has become slightly commercialized and is used by every petty marketer to invite people to parties or sell cell-phones, MOG is strictly for music. What I like about the site is the ability to see as well as listen to what other people listen to; there’s a MOG-O-METER which reads all your most recently played iTunes tracks, and then it makes recommendations of what you should listen to. Better than that, you can actually listen to music on other people’s pages for free, without downloading it.

Calwineries.com is a perfect example of how such brand innovation has stepped out of the music-only sphere and can be applied to wine. The formation of a community is exactly what the industry needs, wine people like talking, and so there are discussion boards, there’s information about any California winery you need, and one can even find emerging industry heavyweights such as Pinotblogger weighing in, which makes for a promising and powerful voice to be addressing this emerging wine community. Josh@pinotblogger.com has really opened up communication, with the recently launched Podcast and by going so far as to publish his cell-phone number on the blog, there’s no doubt that such graceful transparency is the future of wine marketing, especially for wines like Capozzi, and Stormhoek, and Vilafonte, which have all made unbelievable use of the online channel in building brands.

However, my feeling is that many California Wineries already enjoy a voice, and it’d be great if the conversation could be expanded and was between California and the world, rather than just California and California. Thinking about it this morning while reading The Pour where Asimov had quite recently spoken about various Natural wines, and linked through to a particular Rioja winery-site which enables you to do a cellar door tour, I couldn’t help but thinking that there’s a bigger picture here. Focusing on California when you have the entire world to talk about is to look too closely at the grapes when there’s an entire vineyard (to plagiarize seeing the wood through the trees.)

Grape Radio had a fantastic Podcast a while back from a Pinot Symposium, and wine-makers from Peay Vineyards and around were all discussing Pinot Clones and Swan, which had been gotten from Burgundy. However, the same clones have also gone to South Africa, New Zealand and Oregon, and it would be much more interesting to hear a world symposium where top growers held a tasting and related experiences of the same clone in completely different continents, let alone terroir? In real life it would be expensive to organize, but if the discussion were held online, where winemakers could freely exchange comments on a single discussion board, not just wineries from California, but wineries from across the globe, much interest could be sparked and a lot could be gained.Long term, it is not only an opportunity for foreign wines to get share of mouth in the US, but it’s also for Californian and US wines to get mind-share overseas. The best known Californian wine in the UK is Gallo, and if you want to find Frog’s Leap or anything from upstate New York you simply can’t, whilst you can find wine from Uruguay or Argentina quite easily in any London store.

Capozzi and Stormhoek, though from different countries entirely, have a lot to learn from one another, but at the moment there isn’t a platform to do it on. Grape Thinking, as many of you have guessed by now, will be that platform. In the coming months we’re going to launch an international wine community, where oenophiles will not only be able to affiliate themselves with global wineries, but they’ll be able to purchase the wine and review it themselves. Israeli Wines, a particular passion of mine, amongst others, will be given a platform to not only market themselves on the same platform as Australia and New Zealand, but because its digital there will be no fights for shelf-space or case-displays. Grapethinking will be the ‘digital vine’ connecting global vineyards, winemakers, bloggers, restaurateurs and wine lovers into the first global digital cocktail party where wine, opinions and dreams can be shared.