Tablas Creek Vineyard Blog

An Independence Day look at progress in direct shipping since Granholm v Heald

On the day that Granholm v. Heald was announced in 2005, there were impromptu celebrations around the country, stories in the national media about how the Supreme Court had sided with wine lovers and struck down restrictions on interstate wine shipment, and general euphoria among small and medium-sized wineries who rely on direct shipping.  A closer reading of the decision in the ensuing days produced a more nuanced view, that the Supreme Court overturned a certain type of state protectionism and that the real-world consequences of this decision were likely to be on balance positive to wineries and consumers wishing to order wine from these wineries.  Readers might be interested in a detailed analysis of the Granholm v Heald decision I wrote for a newsletter back in 2005, which I later expanded on this blog.

Slightly more than three years later, the results are complex.  The net effects have been to allow more people in more places to receive wines direct from wineries, but the impacts have been far from uniformly positive for wineries and their customers.

When the Granholm decision was announced, we could ship to the thirteen states with reciprocal shipping laws.  These states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin) allowed wines from the other twelve reciprocal states, with the stipulation that those states also allowed their wines.  Geographically, they were clustered around the West Coast and the upper Midwest.  None (with the exception of West Virginia) was near the East Coast or the South.  The total population of the reciprocal states comprised just under 30% of the US population.  The benefits of this system were that, as long as you were shipping to someone in one of these states, you needed to do very little compliance work and (outside of California) did not need to charge for or remit taxes.

Now, three years post-Granholm, we can ship to 26 states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming).  We expect to receive approval to ship to Georgia within the next month. These 27 states comprise nearly 70% of the US population, and most of the rest border on at least one state to which we can ship wine.  Our only "landlocked" states (where no bordering state allows direct shipment) are Mississippi and Rhode Island -- two of the smallest wine markets in the country. 

Note that if you look at a shipping map such as the one published by the Wine Institute (in conjunction with ShipCompliant, which we'll hear more about later), you'll see 36 states listed as legal shipping states.  The discrepancy between their number and ours comes because of the varying levels of restriction and cost that states impose on wineries wishing to ship.  Some (like Arizona and Massachusetts) restrict us from shipping because we're too large.  Some (like Louisiana and Indiana) prohibit wineries from shipping if they also have a relationship with a distributor in the state.  Some (like Kansas and Rhode Island) allow you to ship orders placed while the customer was on-site only.  Others (like Hawaii and Connecticut) have such onerous reporting requirements that the business we could do does not justify the expense.  Finally, the District of Columbia has such a low monthly limit (one quart per month) that shipping there is not practical.

This variability by state is a large part of the downside of the proliferation of state direct shipping laws post-Granholm.  By and large, states have taken advantage of the portion of the Supreme Court decision that allows them to recoup the taxes they would otherwise have collected from an in-state sale of the same wine.  Some states (like Texas) have made this relatively simple by applying a uniform state-wide tax rate and then distributing the revenue internally.  Others (like New York) require that we collect the precise tax that would be charged at the point of delivery.  So, in addition to any state taxes, we need also collect county and city taxes, and remit these to the appropriate agencies at the schedule they dictate. As you'd expect, this can be a nightmare.  Different jurisdictions require reporting -- which can range in complexity from relatively simple to exceptionally detailed -- monthly, others quarterly, others annually.  At Tablas Creek, we have one person in our office who specializes in compliance.  She spends about one third of her time on this, and we receive additional contributions from our Controller.  The overall cost of the time they spent (in salaries and benefits) probably approached $20,000 last year. 

The main cost to consumers is that (with the exception of the three remaining reciprocal states) we are now required to collect and remit taxes on the wines that we sell.  The 21st Amendment that repealed prohibition gives special authority to states to treat alcohol differently from other products.  However, the Supreme Court has held that the Commerce Clause prohibits states from collecting taxes on most out-of-state sales.  For example, you don't pay taxes on a book you order from Amazon.com unless you live in Amazon's home state of Washington.  The Supreme Court last weighed in on the collection of taxes in interstate commerce in the 1992 decision Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, and affirmed the earlier rule that required a company to remit state taxes only if it has a "nexus" in that state.  The decision looked specifically at a mail-order business, but it has been held to apply equally to Internet commerce.

Yet, the new direct shipping laws nearly all require that wineries collect and remit taxes on their sales.  I think it's interesting that I can't distinguish how this conflict between the 21st Amendment and the Commerce Clause differs materially from the one ruled on in Granholm.  Yet, when the states' Attorneys General argued in Granholm that they had a "legitimate local purpose" in collecting taxes on the sales of wine within their borders (as a justification for prohibiting untaxed out-of-state sales) Justice Kennedy specifically rebuts their concerns by suggesting that wineries remit taxes.  From the court's opinion:

Licensees could be required to submit regular sales reports and to remit taxes. Indeed, various States use this approach for taxing direct interstate wine shipments, e.g., N. H. Rev. Stat. Ann. §178.27 (Lexis Supp. 2004), and report no problems with tax collection.

This imposition of formerly-uncollected taxes amounts to a surcharge of between 6% and 10%, depending on the location where the wine is delivered.  On the volume of sales even of a relatively small winery like us, this adds up.

You might well ask how a really small winery, with little or no staff, can hope to navigate this labyrinth.  It is a real challenge.  Some small wineries have simply abandoned shipping to the non-reciprocal states, and therefore seen their market shrink rather than grow in the last three years.  However, a handful of companies specializing in compliance have moved in to fill the void. We use what is probably the market leader, ShipCompliant, and it has made the process much easier.  For a fee of a few hundred dollars per month, we filter our sales through their software and have state and local compliance documents generated automatically.  Of course, there have been other costs in setting up and integrating this system with both our Web front-end and our accounting back-end systems.

Another hidden cost to consumers has been the erosion of rights to receive out-of-state shipments from wine retailers.  The Granholm decision specifically addresses wineries, and many states have taken the (in my mind, constitutionally indefensible) position that it was not intended to apply to other sellers of wine.  The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America has been tireless in the face of public ridicule and judicial rebuke in opposing any expansions of direct shipping privileges, and the newly formed Specialty Wine Retailers Association has only recently begun mobilizing to protect retailers' shipping rights.  Meanwhile, several states, most notably Illinois, have stripped their consumers of the rights to order wine from out-of-state retailers.

Finally, as a conclusion, it's worth noting that my initial idea in writing this article was to find relevant sections of the Declaration of Independence, and its spirit of rule by and for the people governed, as a way of exploring the various impacts. Looking at the Declaration's text, I decided that idea was overblown. Yes, I'd love to be able to ship a bottle of Mourvedre to Maryland, but I don't think that the fact that we cannot should encourage us to dissolve our system of government.  The US Constitution (which, after all, specified the mechanism of government rather than the justification for it) seems a better guide.  The most relevant?  The wisdom of the founding fathers, who in the Commerce Clause (Article I, § 8, cl. 3) reserved for Congress the power to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States".  It's clear that states, given a sliver of opportunity, find justifications for imposing and collecting taxes and for favoring businesses licensed by and in that state.  One can only imagine how fragile the federation of states would be, and how discouraging it would be for business in general, if every product had to navigate the same patchwork of regulatory challenges that producers of wine face.

A Library Wine Club?

For years, we've been struggling with how and whether to create a second wine club.  Right now, we're one-size-fits-all.  Each member of our VINsider Wine Club receives the same selection of wines in each shipment.  We have at times toyed with the idea of creating certain customization of shipments, and always retreated due to our unwillingness to accept the added risk of mixups that doing so creates.  And, we think of our club as really an introductory sampling of our wines.  We rarely include more than one bottle of any particular wine in any year, and have felt that a principal goal of the club is to introduce our members to wines that they might otherwise have overlooked.  Club members who love a particular wine can always order more, and we don't want to burden anyone with lots of bottles of something that may not be to their tastes.

The benefit of introducing a wine through a shipment to our club members was driven home to me today when I showed around a couple of club members and, at the end of our tasting, pulled two of our Vin de Paille dessert wines -- the Vin de Paille white blend and the Mourvedre-based Sacrerouge -- out of the back.  They commented that they'd always seen the dessert wines on our order form, but because they hadn't received them in a shipment (we don't make enough to send even one bottle to each club member) they hadn't ever felt comfortable pulling the trigger and ordering.

The one wine that we've always struggled with how to share has been our Panoplie.  It's an elite wine, really the best that we can produce in any vintage, and is priced accordingly.  It's $95 retail, and even with the 20% wine club discount, it's still an expensive wine.  We absolutely believe that it's worth the tariff, and the press that the wine has received (the most recent 2005 got a 94-96 from Parker and a 94 from Tanzer's IWC) supports that.  The wine sells out, even with a 2-bottle order limit, within weeks of its release.  Still, as we price our club shipments at 20% off of the retail prices of the included wines, its inclusion in a shipment puts pressure on the price of that shipment.  We keep the shipment within our promised range of $150 to $190 by selecting other, less expensive, wines to complement it.  Nevertheless, we receive a handful of comments each spring from VINsiders who challenge why we include such an expensive wine in their shipment.  Our explanation always has been that we feel, if we can include the very best wine we make to all our club members while keeping the overall shipment price within the range we promise, it's a net benefit to them.  Most accept this explanation, although one or two decide each spring that the club no longer suits them for that reason.  I think I saw four or five responses in our recent canceled member  survey (I wrote on this with respect to wine shipping costs a few months back) that listed this as a primary reason for cancellation.

The Panoplie has spurred our search for a second club -- with our initial thinking that we should try to create some sort of "elite" club where members would receive some special wines otherwise unavailable to "regular" members.  The problem was that, with the exception of a few dessert wines, VINsiders already get all our best wines.  Taking wines away from them to give to an elite club seems wrong on lots of levels, and to take us dangerously down the road of taking our club members' loyalty for granted.  I don't ever want to think of our VINsiders as just "regular".  Other wine clubs are what we call "hostage" wine clubs, where you have to buy increasing amounts of wine you don't really want to get the good stuff.  I hate that model.

So, we think we've hit on a solution, and I'd love any feedback any current members (or, for that matter, anyone) has.  We have been saving 200-300 cases of our signature Esprit de Beaucastel red and white wines from each vintage since 2003.  We had always vaguely envisioned using these if we were to have a disastrous vintage and be unable to make an Esprit de Beaucastel.  But, we think we've hit upon a better idea.  We would create a library club, available only to current members (but optional to them) that gives its subscribers the opportunity to receive a shipment each year of wines that we've aged at the winery and think are at or nearing their peak.  This solution seems much more appropriate for who we are and for the sorts of ageworthy wines we try to make, and seems to provide a real benefit for its members without taking anything away from our VINsiders.

What do you think?  Please share.

An update on corks, screwcaps and consumer preferences

In the late-March post Consumers choose... cork? I reported on the the results of the first six weeks since we'd offered on our online order form the option of choosing between cork-finished and screwcap-finished versions of our 2005 Cotes de Tablas.  I was surprised that of the first 21 orders we'd received, 15 had chosen to order the cork-finished version.  I speculated that the reports of widespread consumer acceptance for screwcap-finished wines, at least for red wines, had been exaggerated.

In a very thoughtful comment, a reader named Russ suggested that I might have influenced customers' choices simply by putting the cork-finished version first on the order form.  I agreed to switch the order of the two wines on our online order form, and have been meaning to report back on the results in the three-plus months since.

Russ may have had a point.  Since early March, we've received 135 orders that have included the 2005 Cotes de Tablas.  Of these orders, 56 (42%) have selected the cork-finished version.  62 (46%) have opted for the screwcapped version.  And, perhaps most promisingly, 17 orders (13%) have included both cork and screwcap versions of the wine.  This is a much more promising outcome than what we'd seen in the initial 21 orders, and it's great to see a significant percentage wanting to recreate the experiment for themselves.

It also strikes me that the initial sample size of 21 orders was too small to conclude much with any degree of assurance.

On a related note, the more that we taste the screwcap-finished version of the Cotes de Tablas, the more we appreciate the vibrancy and freshness that it gives the wine. It does seem that, at least for Grenache-based reds, screwcap offers an appealing option, and barring any unexpected developments in the next 8 months, our plan is to put the entire production of the 2007 Cotes de Tablas in Stelvin screwcap.

Our conclusion is probably not too surprising; in our experiments (which I wrote about in the summer 2007 post Corks and Screwcaps: Not an open and shut case) we've  consistently preferred the vibrancy and freshness of the screwcap finish for our aromatic whites and our Rosé, while preferring the softer, sweeter mouthfeel of the cork finish for our Roussanne-based whites and our Mourvedre- and Syrah-based reds.  The Grenache-based Cotes de Tablas, always a lighter, fruitier red, falls somewhere in the middle, and seemed to be the right red wine on which to experiment with screwcaps.  And, we are enjoying the evolution of the wine under cork as well.  But, when we're equally happy with cork and screwcap, the argument of avoiding a thousand or more TCA-tainted bottles (about 3% of a wine with 3000-case production) becomes overwhelming.

Tannat, Heart Health and Longevity

Is it possible that we make the single healthiest California wine?

In the last year, we've seen a growing trickle of requests for our Tannat, often from people who are not our typical wine consumers.  The most recent of these was a request from a gentleman in Mississippi (which is unfortunately not a state to which we can ship) asking for whichever wine we make that contains the highest percentage of Tannat.

Tannat is a thick-skinned grape native to south-west France that makes wonderful dark, dense, smoky wines renowned for their ageworthiness.  We imported it to Tablas Creek in 1996 thinking it would be a good blending component.  It turned out to be too dominant to play a minor role in wines based on other varieties and as a result we pulled it out of the blends.  We have been producing a small amount of one of California's only Tannat-based wines since 2002.

Do I think that the Mississippi gentleman is a Basque transplant who has had to leave his sources of Madiran at home?  It doesn't seem likely.  Neither his nor the other requests we've received ask for wines that have the flavor profile of Tannat.  Instead, these requests appear to be driven by recent research suggesting that Tannat is the single healthiest grape to consume.

The correlation between red wine consumption and health (particularly heart health) has been recognized for some time, and burst into American consciousness following the 1991 French Paradox broadcast on 60 Minutes.  However, the mechanism by which red wine contributes to health has not been well understood, neither why red wine (and not, say, white wine or other forms of alcohol) is so beneficial, nor whether different red wines or different farming or fermentation techniques provide different levels of protection. 

In his book "The Red Wine Diet", Dr. Roger Corder (a cardiovascular expert at the William Harvey Research Institute in London) makes the case for oligomeric procyanidins (OPCs) as the source of red wine's health benefits.  Dr. Corder researches other possible sources -- the most publicized of which is resveratrol, which does exist in grapes and has been known to discourage cancer but would not be of nearly sufficient quantities in wine to be of clinical use -- before identifying OPCs as the most likely culprit.  All red grapes, particularly those with thick skins and high skin-to-pulp ratios, contain OPCs.  But, after measuring the OPC concentration of several common red wine grapes, Dr. Corder identifies Tannat as the grape with the greatest concentration.  The real-life evidence of Tannat's benefits can be seen in the surprisingly long lifespans of residents of the département of Gers in southwest France, whose local wine appellation is Madiran.  Gers contains more than double the national average of men in their nineties.  Madiran's principal grape is Tannat.  From the conclusion of an article in Nature:

"The higher OPC concentration in wines from southwest France is due to traditional wine-making, which ensures that high amounts of OPCs are extracted, and to the flavonoid-rich grape Tannat, which makes up a large proportion of grapes used to produce local wines in the Gers area but is rarely grown elsewhere."

If thicker-skinned, darker red wines contain more procyanidins, I am not surprised that Tannat should rank at the top of Dr. Corder's list.  Its skins are so tenacious that it is often difficult to de-stem, and the wines are dense, dark, spicy and tannic.  According to Dr. Corder's measurements, Tannat wines contain three to four times more procyanidins than other red wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon. 

While making one of California's only Tannats seems enough to put us in the running for healthiest wine in California, I find Dr. Corder's identification of traditional winemaking as a contributing factor to the OPC levels in French Tannats also very appealing.  If it is possible, as Dr. Corder asserts, that wines that are less processed, with longer fermentations, less or no filtering and fining, and a minimal reliance on technology exhibit higher concentrations of OPCs, then it's possible that the Tablas Creek Tannat is the single healthiest wine made in California.

We're grilling ribs tonight.  I think I'll open a bottle of Tannat to celebrate!

The challenges of running out of wine

We're not running out of wine.  Yet.  But, for the first time ever, I can see it looming. 

It's not a familiar position for me.  When we started, we made some mistakes in our marketing, the largest of which was neglecting to create a marketing plan.  We assumed that because we were associated with Chateau de Beaucastel, and we had confidence in our capabilities of making wine, our wines would sell out without us having to work at it.

Based on this assumption, we planted most of our vineyard fairly fast.  60 acres went into the ground between 1994 and 1997.  Another 20 acres went into the ground in 2000.  That meant that we grew from producing nothing in 1996 to about 4000 cases in the 1999 vintage to about 12,000 cases in the 2003 vintage.  Our marketing plan, such as it was, was to sell all this wine through wholesale without having to spend money to support the wines in the market through the traditional methods of market visits, wine festivals, distributor incentives, etc. 

We bottomed out in 2002, selling just 4000 cases wholesale while we watched inventory levels rise and knew that our production was growing rapidly.  Over the course of that year, we reinvented how we marketed Tablas Creek.  We opened our tasting room.  We launched our VINsider wine club.  And we started supporting the wines in the marketplace, visiting and working with dozens of distributors each year and participating in many more wine festivals around the country. 

And, little by little, we pulled ourselves out of the hole we'd dug.  Our total sales (wholesale and direct) rose to 5500 cases in 2003, 8000 in 2004, 11,000 in 2005, 15,000 in 2006 and 18,000 last year.  The growth was divided among the different outlets we had: tasting room, wine club, domestic wholesale and export.  Since we'd had the dubious luxury of having extra inventory of our wines from library vintages, we had lots of options for special features in our tasting room and could make selections for our wine club without having to worry that we were shorting our wholesalers of what they wanted.

Our production from 2004-2006 was a fairly consistent 16,000 cases per year, with 2004 a little below that and 2005 and 2006 a little above due to ample winter rainfall and favorable growing seasons.

Enter 2007.  The 2007 harvest was very light, and fooled us.  It followed a cold, dry winter and two years of higher-than-normal yields, and the result was a perfect formula for low production.   Our yields were less than 2.5 tons/acre, and we produced less than 13,500 cases of wine.  The wine is really good, very intense and focused (a little like 2002 was for us) but there's just not much of it.  And, the fact that we've worked through most of our back inventory in the past few years means that we're at the point that we're not going to have the wine to satisfy everyone who wants it.  With the natural growth of our wine club (we're netting about 500 new club members each year), the fact that our tasting room is up compared to last year, and the growth in demand for exports with the weak dollar, I don't see how we sell much less than 20,000 cases this year even with our moderate expectations for the domestic wholesale market in a challenging economy.  That's a lot more cases than we produced last year.

We're going to do what we can to stretch the 2006 vintage as long as we can, and release the 2008's (please, let yields be good!) a little earlier.  But, the simple fact is that we're having to make some difficult choices, particularly in whites (which were down more than reds, and which are released sooner).  Our fall 2008 wine club shipment will have 4 reds and only 2 whites for the first time ever.  We're going to hope that we can complete the fermentation of the 2008 Rosé in time to include it in our Spring '09 shipment with 2 whites and 3 reds.

I guess I should be happy about this.  Doesn't every business want to sell out of their product?  The simple solution of raising prices calls (and we will be doing that, slightly, with the next releases of our Cotes de Tablas and Cotes de Tablas Blanc).  But I have always felt that we make wines for people to drink and enjoy, not to be intimidated by because of their price or their scarcity.  And, I'm convinced that part of the reason for our success is that overall, the wines that we make provide excellent value for the people who buy them.  I'm not going to disrupt that.

But, I originally moved out here to be Director of Marketing.  How do you market when you don't have wine to sell?  What do I tell our National Sales Manager to do when any sales that he creates cause new headaches?  Or say to key restaurants or retailers who call and ask for a wine that we've sold out of except for what we've allocated to our wine club?  It will be a challenging year as we navigate this new situation of having to limit our sales to our current production and balance the demands from our different markets.

I don't yet know how this will play out.  We're going to be pulling back some of our wholesale market work, cutting down on wine festivals and letting some of our underperforming distributors slide in ways we wouldn't have tolerated in past years.  We'll protect our wine club for sure.  We aren't going to disappear from the wine scene; even wineries who are perpetually out of stock continue to show their faces and their wines periodically to maintain their fan base. 

But, I'm guessing I'll have many more opportunities to get better at telling people "sorry, we're out".  I guess that's what happens when a business grows up.

Earth Day thoughts on sustainability in the world of wine

Today is the 39th annual Earth Day celebration, and a great time to assess wine's progress on its quest for sustainability.  Wine, like any other agricultural product, has environmental impacts from its vineyard and winery practices, and additional impacts from its packaging and marketing (Tyler Coleman had an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times on wine's carbon footprint).  It's great that so many wineries are talking about their efforts toward sustainability.  It's less clear to me (as I pointed out in a post from last spring) that the actions of many of these wineries match their rhetoric.

Last weekend, we participated in the Earth Day Food & Wine Festival here in Paso Robles.  This event is organized by the Central Coast Vineyard Team, who is (in their own words) "a non-profit collaboration of agriculture and natural resource professionals with a shared dedication to sustainable winegrowing".   The event was great, very well attended and organized, with attendees exceptionally interested in how each exhibitor was practicing sustainability.  When we told the people who came by our table that we were, in fact, certified organic, many were surprised that we needed to make a point of that.  They had assumed that everyone there, or most everyone, was organic.  In fact, there were only three wineries (of the fifty or so there) who are certified.

There are lots of ways that wineries can be sustainable without being organic, and I don't want to denigrate the efforts that many of these wineries are making.  Any approach that reduces any negative environmental or social impacts that a business may foster needs to be encouraged.  I think that Brian Talley of Talley Vineyards deserves particular credit for expanding the understanding of sustainability to encompass the quality of life and affordable housing through his Fund for Vineyard and Farm Workers. 

Wine is one of the best agricultural crops, on many levels, in terms of environmental impacts.  Vines are planted and left for decades, so you don't have topsoil loss and erosion from annual tilling.  Wine grapes are generally watered very little, and with high-efficiency drip irrigation, so they're low-impact on water use or runoff.  Similarly, the best vineyards tend to be nutrient-poor, so there is little incentive to fertilize heavily.  There are very few devastating grapevine pests, so most vineyards are rarely sprayed with pesticides.  And vineyards are a sufficiently value-added commodity that once a vineyard has been planted the land is rarely redeveloped for housing or other higher-impact uses.

Still, there's a wide range of practices in the world of wine.  Most vineyards do have some pesticides applied.  Most also spray with herbicide under the vine rows to prevent competition with weeds.  Commercial fertilizers, too, see some application.  Enormous quantities of water are used in the cellar for the production of wine, as tanks, barrels and crush equipment need to be cleaned after each use.  And the environmental impacts of packaging, shipping and marketing wine are significant.

Even out in our neighborhood, you can see wineries who preach sustainability but whose practices speak of expediency.  And it's a shame.  Wine grapes have to be one of the easiest products to grow organically, as they don't require much fertilization or pest control, and weed control can be conducted mechanically (see an earlier post on organic weed control).  Winery wastewater can be recaptured and used for other purposes (as in our wetlands area).  Particularly surprising to us is that more people haven't made the plunge to get the added intensity, flavorfulness, and character of place in organically farmed wines.

I think it's great to celebrate the progress that the wine community has made in environmental consciousness, but I also think it's too bad more haven't taken the plunge to become fully organic.  And, it's high time we created objective, enforceable criteria for the designation of "sustainable" so that wineries have standards to meet and so that the designation does not become diluted into meaninglessness.

Usability Lessons for Winery Web Sites

I come at Web site design a little differently than most winery principals.  My background is in high tech; before moving out to Paso Robles in 2002 to help manage Tablas Creek, I was a Senior Training Manager and Curriculum Director at WestLake Internet Training, which developed and taught classroom-style training courses on Web development, Web design, and database management.  Near the end of my tenure there, we started focusing on some of the softer skills associated with Web development projects, including information architecture, project management, and writing for the Web.  The experience of researching and writing these classes has unalterably colored the way that I view Web sites.

The concept that we felt was of paramount importance for the success of a Web site was usability.  Usability may be an ugly, inelegant word, but the concept it represents - that design needs to be focused on helping the end user complete the task for which he or she has visited the site - is crucial.  This may seem obvious, but very few Web sites (in any field) really think about usability. The creators of Web sites have a story they want to tell, and far too many of the sites focus on that story instead of the needs of the site's visitors. 

Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of graphic designers, for whom Web design is often a secondary job after print design.  Look at the Web sites of graphic designers:  too many are totally unusable, full of design for the sake of design taking up space and download time, and missing or cryptic sign posts to crucial information (what is this designer's message?  how do I contact them?  who are their clients? what are their prices?).

The same story is true of too many winery Web sites.  Many appear to have taken their model from a print marketing piece, where information is presented in a linear fashion, and without enough attention to the concerns that too many large or high-resolution images inhibit anyone using the site.  Or, the site may be created to satisfy the story that the winery wants to tell.

I'll list some of the cardinal sins of usability.  These are ones that I encounter most often, and tailored to the specifics of wineries; there are plenty of other mistakes to be made, and the lessons are applicable to any business seeking to market itself and ultimately sell a product:

• Splash pages. These introductory pages, often produced and animated with Flash, take time to load and make users wait to even start their search for the information they need.
• Sound files on the front page. Many viewers may be visiting your site in a work environment, and presumably don't want this fact called to attention when their computer starts singing.
• Hard-to-find contact information. Most studies suggest that over 25% of visitors visit Web sites for no other reason than to get a phone or fax number, an email, or a physical address for the business.
• Too much unnecessary photography.  I'm certainly not suggesting that Web sites be text-only, or that photography does not have a place on winery Web sites.   Still, photographs are memory-intensive, and take far longer to download than text.  Only half the US population has broadband access at home.  Don't force people to wait to download big files just to get the answers they want.  Put your larger photographs in archives in well-marked locations and let the people who want to explore them do so without impacting the usability for everyone else.
• Out-of-date information. Out of date information has two problems. First, as with typos or ungrammatical sentences, you compromise your credibility as a legitimate business.  Second, people expect the Web to be constantly up to date.  If your site is not, and you force people to go to a second source (calling, for example) to get current information, you give the impression that your Web site is of lesser importance and reduce the credibility of the rest of the information contained there.
• No search option.  You may think that your navigation is clear, but different people filter information in very different ways.  Having a search option helps unite visitors with their specific need and reduces frustration.
• Lack of backward-looking information.  Many sites replace older vintages with information about newer vintages.  What about your customers who have an older bottle and want to know about it?  Remember that you're making a product that people may return to any time over the next few decades, and do your best to maintain (and, even better, update) the information on these older wines.
• Missing or inaccurate page titles. Page titles appear in the title bar of your browser and on the tabs of tabbed browsers.  They also are the primary information displayed by search engines and contribute enormously to search engine rankings.  A good page title is a headline that describes what the page contains.  A great page title also gives you information about where that page sits in the site's hierarchy.

As I can figure it, there are a handful of discrete questions that might lead people to a winery's Web site.  The site has every interest in making the answers to these questions as apparent as possible.  How well does your site do?

• How do I buy a wine I had and enjoyed?  Most wineries have order forms where consumers can go to order wine direct from the winery.  However, it's important to remember that many people don't live in states to which wineries can ship, and you may also have restaurants and retailers (or importers) interested in buying wine through the appropriate channels.
• I have a particular wine.  Is it ready to drink?  What should I serve it with?  Should I decant it?
• How do I visit the winery?
• Who is behind this winery?  Who is its winemaker?  Where do its grapes come from?
• How do I contact a real person to answer a specific question?

One technique that is always illuminating in analyzing your site's usability is to take someone not already familiar with your site and give him or her a set of tasks to complete.  Sit and watch (and take notes on) how he or she clicks around the site, but don't offer advice.  If it takes several clicks before he or she finds the information, note that issue.  It's amazing how little we analyze the sites that we're familiar with, particularly ones that we've helped create.  Watching someone else struggle is illuminating and humbling and a great source of ideas.

A few other resources that you may find helpful:

• Winery Web Site Report.  Mike Duffy has a company that focuses specifically on helping wineries design and analyze their Web sites.  I haven't used his services, and have no affiliation, but he maintains one of the great industry blogs in which he shares lots of good information for free. 
• www.useit.com.  Jakob Nielsen is the leading guru of the usability movement, and on his Web site he publishes weekly articles focusing on Web usability.  He's so extreme in his advocacy of usability over design that his Web site is very bare-bones, but his research is the industry standard.
• Web Pages that Suck.  This venerable site has been highlighting the worst of the Web for 12 years, and its content and approach are still fresh.  Check out their worst-of-the-year lists.

So... I hope this has been helpful. I'd love any comments on particular wishes people have for winery Web sites, or anecdotes of particularly good (or bad) emphasis on user-focused design.

Consumers choose... cork?

Many of you will remember my post from last summer with our take on the cork-screwcap debate.  It suggested a more nuanced approach than many of the polemics that you read asserting that one closure was always better than the other: that some wines evolved better under the more reactive closure of natural cork, and others under the more hermetic Stelvin screwcap.  It did not address consumer preference, because we've assumed that consumers more or less have become accustomed to screwcaps and make their buying decisions based on the wine's (or winery's) reputation rather than the closure.

Up through the 2004 vintage, we'd only made the decision to put our aromatic whites and our Rosé in screwcap, and leave the cork finish for our reds and our Roussanne-based whites which seem to benefit from the flavor and oxygen exchange with the cork.  That said, the red wine we've been most curious about watching under Stelvin is our Côtes de Tablas.  It's based on Grenache, which is notoriously prone to oxidation.  It's our blend of wine lots in the cellar we think will be approachable younger.  Even though they make up between 20% and 40% of the blend most years, it tends not to show the reductive characteristics of Mourvedre or Syrah.

So, with the 2005 vintage, we decided to bottle about 350 cases of Cotes de Tablas in screwcap and the balance in cork, with the idea of showing the Stelvin version only our tasting room.  We like to start experiments in our tasting room because it ensures that we're around to notice anything unexpected.  We're opening bottles every day, and can see if the wine is showing reductive characteristics or other undesirable development.  For the other 3000 or so cases, including everything we're releasing wholesale into the national market, we finished the wine with cork.

We started pouring the Cotes de Tablas in screwcap in our tasting room in mid-January. At that same time, we posted it alongside the corked version on our online order form.  I wasn't conducting some conscious sociological experiment; I just wanted people to be able to buy the closure they'd tried, wherever they'd tried it.  I figured that since about three-quarters of the people who order online are our wine club members, and an even greater proportion first became familiar with the wines at our tasting room, we'd sell mostly screwcap-finished Cotes de Tablas on our Web site.  This has not been the case.  Since I posted both versions of the wine, 15 of the 21 orders we've received that have included Cotes de Tablas have specified the cork-finished version.

Granted, this is a small sample size.  As people have a chance to sample the wine in the tasting room, I think that more people will be more comfortable with the screwcap finish on one of our red wines.  Still, I wonder if the consumer acceptance of screwcaps, even among the more-educated, more-progressive audience who orders direct from a small winery specializing in Rhone blends from California, has been a bit overstated.

Would these people shy away from the wine if their only option was screwcap?  It's impossible to know.  I suspect not.  Certainly, with whites and rosé, we've noticed no consumer resistance.  When we released the Cotes de Tablas Blanc in screwcap (exclusively) with the 2005 vintage, our monthly sales of that wine went up 30%.  Again, I don't think that this was because of the screwcap (the wine was terrific, and got some great press) but I think that any momentum it inherited from its closure was positive.  I'm suspecting that were we to release the Cotes de Tablas red into the national market in screwcap, it would get a little negative momentum from its closure.

It may just be that consumers have more background with screwcapped whites than reds.  New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs have been imported almost exclusively in screwcap for years now, and many California producers have switched white production into screwcap while leaving red production under cork.  I have a feeling that this will change with time.  Certainly, the bulk of the wine press is solidly behind the screwcap. Laurie Daniel, in a recent article in the San Jose Mercury News used the results of a Tablas Creek library tasting of wines bottled in both cork and screwcap to advance her thesis that even for big reds, screwcaps are an attractive option.

Still, I'm happy that we didn't move our whole production of the Cotes de Tablas 2006 into screwcap, as we were considering after our initial taste trials of the 2005.  We'll give ourselves another year to assure ourselves that the screwcapped wine is at least as good the cork-finished one, and give the wine market another year to become accustomed to the idea that top reds can be found under screwcap as readily as under cork.