There seems to be an increasing number of ads for fancy wine in the first section of The New York Times. Some tout the awards they have recently won. Most are conveniently available to be shipped for $50-300 a bottle.
One ad lists several reasons why it deserves its premium price, including (paraphrasing from memory)
we play music at the vines at dawn and dusk, a process proven to improve quality, increase sweetness and reduce fungus
our wine is shipped from France to the US in refrigerated ships, guaranteeing it is as fresh when it arrives as when enjoyed at the Château
To which I think, sounds unlikely, and they don’t seem to refrigerate all the expensive wines they sell at local stores, but maybe it helps, or helps premium sales.
So, my questions:
1. Are there other good examples of unusual claims selling wine or similar products?
2. Is it all marketing, or partially or fully true? is there some stuff to the fluff?
3. Do you attach any importance to numeric ratings for wine or liquor? “Steve. com gives Thunderbird 2018 a rating of 93%!!!”
“Our unique varietals are handpicked by teams of magical elves on holy days, choosing only the finest grapes from the sunny side of the hill, each individually blessed by the Pope before being lovingly decanted in a process wedding traditional knowledge with only the finest gemstones”…
A $300 bottle of wine is largely wasted on me. I love box wine. As long as a wine is dry, I’ll be happy. I have a friend who is a serious oenophile. He gave me a very expensive bottle of wine as a gift and it was a pain in the ass to consume. The cork was difficult to remove and crumbled a bit. The wine was fine, but the expense was constantly on my mind. I was calculating how much a swallow of it cost.
I once made 12 gallons of merlot. After aging six months it was very good (to me and several friends). A few bottles got stashed away behind our rack. I found them ten years later and my expert friend drank a bottle with me. He was impressed.
Playing music for the vines? Gimmick is my call. Then again, I used to talk to my cannabis plants thinking maybe my exhaled CO2 would help them. They thrived, but there wasn’t a control group. Maybe playing music is something that the workers enjoy and they do better work?
I have no claims to being any sort of wine connoisseur, but I’m very fond of the stuff and have some familiarity with the common varietals and the characteristics of the major wine making regions. At best, I can distinguish between good, excellent, and mediocre wines in the price range that I can generally afford. With that said, herewith my answers …
Not that I can think of offhand. Most claims tend to stress the history and reputation of the grape cultivation and the specific wine-making expertise of the winery. Sometimes special techniques are mentioned, which I may or may not consider relevant.
Playing music to the vines sounds like such pure BS that I find it hard to believe anyone actually seriously makes such a claim.
The “refrigerated ships” claim may have some merit, but not for “preserving freshness”. If they actually do this, the more accurate claim would be “climate controlled”. The cargo holds of ships may undergo cycles of temperature changes that might degrade fine wines, but above all, subjecting wines to excessive heat can be damaging. Both of the above are the basis of “wine cooler” storage cabinets which, again, are really climate control systems. The only time wine needs to be refrigerated is if and when it’s necessary to get it to the correct serving temperature. On a side note, red wine is often served slightly too warm, and white wine straight out of the refrigerator is typically too cold.
It depends entirely on who the rating is from and my prior experience with them. One thing to watch out for is wines bearing stickers with high ratings or awards that in fact were earned by a completely different vintage. It’s a deceptive but notoriously common practice. The quality between vintage years can be remarkably different.
I don’t know how serious the claim that they play music is in reality. But in the advertisement, they go so far as to give it a trademarked name. “Using a process known as”…. Something pretentious I did not try to memorize. Vinsonics™? Okay, now I believe it makes a difference.
Although it seems a ludicrous idea, consider in high school French class they made us read a story (Sanctus) about fields of wheat singing jingoistic hymns as the thresher cut them down, knowing they would be used to make patriotic bread. The French occasionally have a weird sense of humour. However, I am not in a position to criticize this.
The wine claims here are pretty outlandish, but “puffery” in advertising is an established and protected principle in law and is found just about everywhere.
I’m not a wine expert, though I have an ex-bf who was a winemaker (whose wines did win awards), so I’ve drunk a lot of wine. I like a decent wine, and I find that a lot of the cheap ones don’t taste good to me.
It was brought home to me a few Christmases (well, maybe five) ago. My BiL had been gifted a nice bottle of wine by one of his bosses. He (the BiL) didn’t drink anymore, and my sister wasn’t much into wine, so he opened the bottle for me. It was very easy drinking. I finished the bottle. Then, he opened another bottle he’d bought himself and was much less expensive. After the good wine, it was noticeably not good. Not in the sense it had gone bad, but it just didn’t taste good. I didn’t finish my first glass.
THE PASSIONATE WINE MAKING AND UNIQUE TERRIOR OF BORDEAUX Select limestone plots for complexity and an award winning Bordeaux wine making team.
ORGANICALLY GROWN GRAPES No Colors. No flavorings
MUSIC TO THE VINES At dawn and dusk music is played to vines - a scientific process called Genodics - Proven to make fruit more plump and more resistant to fungus etc.
HAND PICKING Our grapes are hand picked with stems attached to prevent premature oxidation and keep the wine as fresh as possible.
DIRECT PRESSING Pressing with stem still attached and protected with dry ice to get the maximum freshness and taste of the fruits.
MIS EN BOUTEILLE AU CHATEAU (Bottled at the Château) Not bulk wine, only wine we care for the entire season and we oversee the entire process.
REFRIGERATED SHIPPING Traveling from France to the USA. Auguste Rosé is shipped insulated and refrigerated, it arrives fresh as if you were sipping it at the Château.
Best Wine of the Year (by Quality) 2023 at Paris Wine Cup 2023 Best in Show by Varietal 2023" at Paris Wine Cup 2023 Gold Medal 93 POINTS