Tasting red wine en primeur is not for the faint of heart or faint of palate. Wine tasters participating in Bordeaux’s annual spring “futures” marathon go long and go hard. They must push themselves physically and mentally. Tasting schedules can be gruelling, demanding ~14 days of heavy lifting and one hundred plus Grands Crus Classé…
The Future of Futures: An En Primeur Newbie’s Wine Week in Bordeaux
Sometimes, the wine gods smile down on us from on high and good things happen. In my case, that good thing was news that my wine blog post on social media adoption in Bordeaux had been awarded the wine and technology top prize in the 2019 Millésima blog awards. It was paragraph two of…
Canadians in Napa! Steve Matthiasson: Farmer, Viticulturist, Winemaker & Guardian of the Galaxy….aka Grape
The 2017 Matthiasson Rosé. Photo credit: Matthiasson Wines Did I happen to mention Steve Matthiasson, venerated winemaker, chief viticultural steward and all round humanitarian at Matthiasson Wines, grew up on my street in Winnipeg, Manitoba, CANADA? It’s true. Napa’s guardian of the grape is indeed Canadian, spending his early years on Queenston Street, just around the…
Bordeaux’s Château de Reignac: a Case Study in Risk and Reward – PART 2
In a region with over 7,000 chateaux, it’s hard to find an estate offering a truly unique selling proposition. Quality is the attribute most Bordeaux producers hang their hat on. But how are you going to convince audiences of your quality when all 7,000 of your competitors are making the same claim? You start by…
Bordeaux’s Château de Reignac: a Case Study in Risk and Reward
If you’re of a certain vintage – or a student of advertising – you may be familiar with the seminal 1962 advertising campaign for Avis. The car rental company summed up their ‘customer promise’ in the pithy advertising tagline “We Try Harder”. Of course, consumers everywhere wondered try harder than whom? Without saying as much,…
Château Margaux in the Digital Age: There’s no Looking Back
Many years ago, before I started studying wine, I had an opportunity to drink a Château Margaux at an advertising client lunch. I declined, because I knew my associates would expect me to say something pithy about the wine, and the weight of that expectation was crippling. I could describe the colour, but after that,…
Bordeaux’s Château Cos d’Estournel: A Digital Future Guided by the Past
“Is the wine as good as the architecture?” asked my professor-of-architecture friend when I sent him a photo of Bordeaux’s Château Cos d’Estournel. “And then some!” I say, as I attempt to absorb a lecture on “Saracenic style” – a mix of Indian, Islamic and classical architecture, a result of the British colonization of…
Bordeaux Breakdown: Do the Big Châteaux have Social Savvy?
You’re a prestigious, classified château in Bordeaux and you sell 90% of your wine without lifting a marketing finger (en primeur, anyone?). So why would a region with centuries old traditions embrace social media platforms? As it happens, the itinerary for my inaugural trip to Bordeaux was decided by a Twitter post exploring that very…
Culmina Family Estate Winery: The Triggs of the Trade
I don’t think it would be a stretch to describe Culmina’s Sales and Marketing Manager, Sara Triggs as a tour de force. Like Gordon Fitzpatrick who you met in my last post – Sara is a second-generation winemaker, and like Gordon, a descendant of Canadian winemaking royalty. Sara’s parents are Don and Elaine Triggs (see…
Second Generation Winemaking Families: Fitzpatrick Family Vineyards Sparkle
Kiefer Sutherland, Kate Hudson, Angelina Jolie, Rashida Jones…….Sara Triggs? Gordon Fitzpatrick? What do they have in common? Some serious star power and a lot of familial fame. In the next two posts, you’ll meet the sons and daughters of industry legends who have stepped out of their parent’s shadows to carry on a family tradition….
2018 Experts’ Tasting Profiles Niagara Peninsula’s Stunning Range of Cab Franc
For too long, Cabernet Franc has been the “other” Cabernet. Too green, not enough power, too little backbone, they’d say. Yes, it’s the vineyard workhorse, yes, it offers the best disease resistance, yes, it’s cold hardy, earlier ripening and the trusted player in the blend line-up, but rarely…. rarely, was that enough to make Cab…
Taste the Place: The Terroir Symposium & the Terroirnomics of Local
Terroir – muses Jay McInerney in his book, Bacchus and Me – is essentially the Burgundian inspired word for ‘dirt’ and dirt, he argues, is really just a proxy for ‘location, location, location’. Whether it’s the wine we drink or the food we grow – location and dirt are indeed at the root of all…
