Every now and then you get a particularly meaningful compliment...

The wine business is hard.  It may not get talked about a lot, but it is.  There are huge start-up costs, an ever-growing number of wineries which crowd the marketplace and compete for your existing customers, and a shrinking number of distributors that combine with a relentless stream of wines from around the world and make it hard to gain attention in the wholesale market.

Granted, there are positive demographics working in your favor as a winery, too.  America is becoming more and more a wine-consuming nation, which means that you aren't competing with the other wineries in your area for a pie of a fixed size; the pie is growing every year.  Liberalized wine shipping laws have put some 80% of American consumers in states we can ship to.  And Americans' acceptance of blends (and unusual grape varieties) has never been better than it is.  But it's still a challenge getting and keeping your name out there, particularly when you want, like we do, to succeed both in our direct sales business (our tasting room and wine clubs) and in the wholesale market.

So it's great to see an article like the one we received recently from Paso Robles-based bloggers Matt and Annie Browne, whose blog Hoot n Annie is packed each week with first-person accounts of their explorations into the local wine community and their insightful analysis of what works in marketing and social media.  The title of the article is Paso Robles Wineries: Tablas Creek is Doing it Right and I'm not sure I've ever read anything so nice written about us.  They are social media experts, and much of their focus is on what we've tried to do in that sphere (I was very happy to read that they thought we'd been successful) but they also talked about our marketing, our facility, our people, and (of course!) our wine. 

It's easy, I think, to fall into ivory tower syndrome as a winery.  Unless you force yourself to get out into the market, or make sure you're searching out unbiased opinions, it's easy to hear only voices that tell you you're doing great work: those are the people who tend to seek you out.  Does this mean you're doing great work?  Not necessarily.  And even if you are doing great work in one sphere (winemaking, say) it's easy to assume that success will find you as a matter of course.  We had that problem at the beginning; our initial marketing plan could have been summed up as "people will buy Tablas Creek because people love Beaucastel".  It turned out to be wildly optimistic, and we spent some dicey years in the early 2000's turning around the business side of Tablas Creek.  In 2002, for example, we sold 4,000 cases of wine and made 12,000.  That's obviously not sustainable, and we realized that our problems weren't going to be solved by a single effort.  We opened a tasting room, started a wine club, started participating in wine festivals and working with our distributors around the country, and rededicated ourselves to being an involved and committed member of our community.  We made the decision to focus on maximizing the number of customer interactions and doing everything we could to give those customers an outstanding experience that they would rememeber and would tell their friends about.  And little by little we leveraged a successful business out of the good choices we'd made at the beginning in choosing our site and making our wines. By 2006 we'd stabilized our balance sheet and were selling roughly the same 18,000 cases we were making.

But it's not easy.  And each year brings new challenges, as you work to stay true to who you are while continuing to innovate in ways that keep you fresh.  We've tried hard not ever to take our fans for granted, or to rest on our laurels.  Reading a piece like Matt's and Annie's gives me faith that it's working.  Thanks, guys.

Tablas Creek is a finalist for 2013 Best Winery Blog!

We are proud to have been named a finalist for "Best Winery Blog" at the 2013 Wine Blog Awards.  This is the sixth consecutive year we've been honored as a finalist, and we've taken home the trophy twice, in 2008 and 2011.  We'd love to make the 2013 awards a three-peat.

This year's finalists include several past nominees and two former winners, and is I think the strongest field to date. If you aren't reading them, you should: they're all compelling glimpses inside the world of a winery, from vineyard to cellar to market:

• 4488: A Ridge Blog
• The Journey of Jordan
• Been Doon So Long
• Half Full: The J Blog

It seems an appropriate time to look back at some of my last year's most memorable blog posts. If you missed them, or you're a new visitor to the blog thanks to the recent nomination, it's an admittedly idiosyncratic selection of the posts that resonated most with me, with a brief explanations of why for color.  If you're a regular reader, hopefully you'll find some old friends here.  I am particularly proud that this is our most collaborative effort to date, with great posts by several members of our team supplementing my own work. In chronological order:

• Seeing red -- and green -- in Santa Fe In which National Sales Manager Darren Delmore stakes his claim as the Hunter S. Thompson of the Tablas Creek blog. If you don't feel like you're in Santa Fe with him, check your pulse.
• When wine tasting, step away from the carafe The post that got the most echoes this year, with excerpts or links posted on scores of other social media sites and the complete article reprinted in several wine associations' newsletters. Why the buzz? We made some simple experiments that showed that when you rinse your glass with water, the next wine is diluted 7%, with some effects you'd predict and some you might not.
• Harvest 2012: The End of the Beginning I could have chosen any of Assistant Winemaker Chelsea Franchi's posts; they're all beautifully written and illustrated with her terrific photographs, and give an amazing glimpse into the psyche of the cellar. But this one stood out for how raw it was, reflecting the exhaustion and elation of the end of harvest.  Maybe my favorite post of the year.
• In which we dig ourselves a hole, on purpose Viticulturist Levi Glenn digs into the results of a soil survey on our new parcel conducted by a Cal Poly class.  If you're a soil junky, or just want to understand some of the complexity of what's there when you get below the topsoil, Levi makes this detailed, complex picture compelling and comprehensible.
• Is the bloom off the user review site rose? I take a look at the number of reviews we and some other comparable wineries around us have been receiving from Yelp! and TripAdvisor, and come to the conclusion that we're in the middle of an industry-wide slump in review authorship. It was fun to see other wineries chime in on what they were seeing, confirming our suspicions.
• Surviving consolidation in the wholesale market A preview of a talk I gave to the Unified Grape and Wine Symposium in Sacramento, in which I represented smaller wineries and shared some of the essentials of keeping yourself viable in a crowded, noisy market with an ever-shrinking number of wholesalers and an ever-growing number of wineries.
• The costs of state alcohol franchise laws  I only put up one post this year focusing on the labrynth of legislation a winery has to navigate to get its wares to market, but it was an important one and will preview, I think, the next frontier of court challenges to state-sponsored restraint of the wine trade.
• Can I get an ice bucket for my red?  A post I'd been thinking about for a while that also seemed to resonate with audiences, deconstructing the myth that red wines show best at room temperature and whites should be served cold.
• When Terroir Was a Dirty Word A recent post by my dad that dives into the surprising history of the meaning of terroir.  You may not have realized that as recently as the 1960's, it was a bad thing for a wine to taste of terroir.  I certainly didn't.

As always, the winner will be determined 50% by the votes of the expert panel of judges who culled the nominations to the five finalists, and 50% by the votes of the public.  I encourage you to browse the finalists, and if, at the end, you believe us worthy, we'd be honored to receive your vote (Vote here).  Voting ends this Friday, May 24th.

Lyricism and the Power of a Great Wine Review

The wine review is a bit of a hoary tradition, much ridiculed among the new generation of wine writers. And I get some of that. Describing which red fruit (Is it raspberry? Currant? Huckleberry?) or what herb (Thyme? Savory? Chervil?) is most evident in a wine can get esoteric, arbitrary, even twee.  And, sure, it's easy to see how someone tasked with writing dozens of reviews each day can fall into patterns which make one wine seem much like another.  As an antidote, Eric Asimov from the New York Times challenged the 2011 Wine Blogger's Conference in his keynote speech to spend the next year not writing a single wine review, instead focusing on why their readers should care about the wine in the first place.

And yet, a great review can bring a wine to life in amazing ways, turning a description of a wine's colors, flavors, aromas and textures into a character sketch that is indelibly individual.  Last week we received such a series of reviews from Nashville, Tennessee-based wine writer Fredric Koeppel on his blog Bigger than Your Head.

I've followed Bigger Than Your Head for several years, since I became aware of Fredric's work thanks to the 2008 Wine Blog Awards, for which he was a finalist in the "Best Wine Review Blog" category (this blog won the much less competitive "Best Winery Blog" category that same year).  Fredric didn't win that year, but did in both 2009 and 2010, deservedly so, and was a finalist in both "Best Wine Review" and "Best Writing on a Wine Blog" the last two years.  What sets his reviews apart from the herd?  There are several aspects, none of which make him unique, but which in total set him among the very top cohort of wine reviewers, for my taste:

• He values context, and pulls out threads that tie together all the wines, describing as accurately as any article I've seen the style and influence of Tablas Creek's people and place.
• His writing is precise.  He doesn't recycle the same few descriptors, but brings in evocative flavors one doesn't normally associate with wine (our article included the descriptors "graham cracker", "marsh grass","iodine", "briars", and "spruce").
• He breaks a wine down into color, aromas, flavors, texture, and finish, and describes each piece sufficiently that you feel you come to know a wine. Of course, this takes a certain freedom from word limits and column inches.
• He gives a quality judgment, independent from the flavors he describes.  This isn't the omnipresent 100-point scale, nor is it some similar but simplified 20, 10, or 5-point scale.  His quality descriptors are intuitive; the ones used in our wines that he reviewed were "very good+", "excellent" and "exceptional". He's also not afraid to note wines that he does not recommend, which gives him credibility with the ones that he does.
• He notes value, highlighting wines that punch above their price category.

If you need further convincing to click over to his post, here's one review I particularly loved, that I felt captured our 2010 Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc -- a wine I think is the best white we've yet produced -- perfectly. If you don't agree, well, don't go read the rest. But I think you will.

Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc 2010, Paso Robles. 13.5% alc. 2,100 cases. 60% roussanne, 35% grenache blanc, 5% picpoul blanc. Pale straw-gold color; lovely balance and poise, light on its feet with a wonderful well-knit texture with finely-honed acidity and plangent steely, limestone qualities; again, a white wine of shades and degrees of nuance, lightly spiced, delicately fitted with lemon and pear flavors and a hint of apricot; all bound with that spruce-tinged minerality. Excellent. About $40

 

In celebration of our "Best Winery Blog" nomination, eight favorite posts from the last year

I'm proud to announce that Tablas Creek has again been named a finalist for "Best Winery Blog" at the 2012 Wine Blog Awards.  The world of winery blogs has never been stronger.  The other finalists include two winery blogs I follow regularly (4488: A Ridge Blog and The Journey of Jordan) one other on which I have read several top-notch posts recently (The Kendall-Jackson Blog) and two which were new to me (Wolf Blass Winemakers Blog and King Estate Winery). One of the things I look forward to about these awards each year is getting to spend some time with the other finalists' work.

I am particularly proud that this is the fifth year in a row that Tablas Creek has been a finalist.  No other winery has been a finalist more than twice in the six-year history of the awards.  You can browse the finalists, and if, at the end, you believe us worthy, we'd be honored to receive your vote (Vote here).  Voting ends Thursday, July 26th.

This seems a useful opportunity to reflect back on some of my favorite posts over the last year.  They're organized chronologically, with brief notes on why they've stuck with me.  And hopefully, if you're relatively new to the blog, it will give you a starting point for your explorations.

• The serenity of foudres (sometimes) (August 2011). Written by Assistant Winemaker Chelsea Magnusson, this is the sort of glimpse into the inner workings of the cellar that I think makes winery blogs worth reading.  You come away feeling like you know the work... but more than that, that you know the people working, and Chelsea's beautiful photography makes you feel like you're there.
• Why Paso Robles will make California's best wines in 2011 (October 2011). I go out on a limb, partway through harvest, in opposition to a growing chorus of press suggesting the 2011 harvest would be a disaster.  And the more I taste our powerful, vibrant wines from 2011, the more I'm convinced I was right.
• A tale of two Grenaches (December 2011). This piece came out of a talk I gave at the always-wonderful Yosemite Vintners' Holidays, where I broke down the California acreage statistics for Grenache by county to tell a very different narrative than and I had been reading elsewhere.
• A closer look at Paso Robles' microclimates (January 2012). After a presentation to a visiting group of Canadian writers, I realized that we didn't have graphical tools to show the incredible diversity of Paso Robles' soils, rainfall, and temperatures. So I made some, and they show more clearly than a thousand words could why we are where we are.
• The power grab behind New York's proposed "at rest" legislation (March 2012).  Sometimes I think I should have been a political reporter, as I always enjoy the pieces that I get to write about the intersection of politics and wine.  Maybe it's the "good vs. evil" component.  Maybe it's the fact that this is one of the only times I get to do investigative journalism.  But for whatever reason, I am consistently energized by these discussions, and I think that energy comes through in this post's clarity and power.
• A great dinner, an amazing restaurant, and a wine that marks the beginning of Tablas Creek (May 2012). Probably my favorite post of the year, where Cesar Perrin and I stumble across the bottle that marks the first collaboration (in 1966!) between the Haas and Perrin families, and I discover its history. 
• Nine lessons the Kimpton Hotel Group offers wineries (May 2012). I love looking at successful businesses and seeing how their innovations can be applied to my world.  With this piece I drew nine generally applicable lessons from a group of hotels I've always loved for their friendliness, individuality, and consistent good service.
• In defense of expensive rosé (June 2012). This piece gave me the chance to address a topic close to my heart: the relative worth put on wines made in their original homes vs. those made in a similar style in the New World. Plus, it got me invited to sit on a panel tasting of rosés that included the 2011 Domaine Tempier... always a treat.  

OK, now go vote.  The awards are determined 50% by the panel of seventeen expert judges that condensed the hundreds of nominations to five or six finalists, and 50% by the votes of the public -- which means you!

Reflections on Tablas Creek's 2011 Best Winery Blog award

On Saturday, at the 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference in Charlottesville, VA, the winners of the 2011 Wine Blog Awards were announced.  One of them was us!  Thank you to everyone who voted; the award was 50% determined by votes from the public.  The other 50% was determined by the votes of the panel of expert judges who culled the list of nominees down to the five-ish finalists in each category.

The world of wine blogs is rich and diverse, and growing all the time.  The fact that speakers at the Wine Blog Awards included traditional media figures (and wine writer titans) Eric Asimov and Jancis Robinson shows just how far blogging has penetrated into the mainstream of wine discussion, and how blurry -- some at the conference would say irrelevant -- the boundary between wine writer and wine blogger has become.  As always, I learned a lot and developed some new favorites reading through the blogs of the other finalists.  And it's only fitting that Tom Wark's Fermentation won both "Best Overall Wine Blog" and "Best Industry Blog".  After all, Tom created the Wine Blog Awards back in 2007 and this was his first year eligible after handing the awards off to a nonprofit consortium two years ago.  Congratulations to all the winners.  The complete list:

Best Overall Wine Blog – Fermentation
Best New Wine Blog – Terroirist
Best Writing on a Wine Blog – Vinography
Best Winery Blog – Tablas Creek
Best Single Subject Wine Blog – New York Cork Report
Best Wine Reviews on a Wine Blog – Enobytes
Best Industry/Business Wine Blog – Fermentation
Best Wine Blog Graphics, Photography, & Presentation – Vino Freakism

I am proud that this was the fourth year in a row that the Tablas Creek blog was a finalist.  I'm also proud that the last year of the Tablas Creek blog has been more of a communal effort than ever before, including several great posts by my dad and contributions from two new authors: Assistant Winemaker Chelsea Magnusson, writing Notes from the Cellar, and Tasting Room Manager John Morris, writing View from the Tasting Room.  Each brings a different perspective to our effort to share our experiences as we make, sell, plan and reflect on Tablas Creek.

Thank you to all of you who take the time, whether regularly or occasionally, to read our thoughts.

The Tablas Creek Blog is a finalist at the 2011 Wine Blog Awards!

We are proud that, for the fourth year in a row, the very Tablas Creek blog that you're reading has been named one of five finalists for "Best Winery Blog" in the 2011 Wine Blog Awards.  We won the award in 2008 (the inaugural year of the awards) and would love to take the prize back from the 2010 winner: the always-worthy Randall Grahm, again a finalist this year.

Finalists were selected from dozens of nominations by a panel of experts.  The award itself is determined 50% by the votes of the public and 50% by the judging panel.  So, we encourage you to vote on the results... your opinions really do matter.  You can vote at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CNTK5P8

In addition to "Best Winery Blog" the categories are "Best New Blog", "Best Writing", "Best Single Subject", "Best Wine Reviews", "Best Industry Blog", "Best Presentation, Photography, Graphics", and "Best Overall Wine Blog".  And in each category are wine blogs that I read myself at least weekly.  The quality of the writing and of the journalism in the wine blogging world has never been better, and it's an honor to be able to be a part of such an accomplished, creative group of writers.

Whether or not you have been following every post on this blog, I thought that it might be an appropriate time to look back at a few of my own favorites over the past year.  In date order, with some brief notes on why I think each is worth revisiting:

• The appeal of wine in keg... and an appeal to the restaurants who want it (July 2010).  I couldn't believe how much the infrastructure for selling wine in kegs has improved in the last year.  Evidently we weren't the only wineries looking at the options and asking for help!  Of course, we still haven't figured out how to get the kegs back to us anywhere outside of California...
• A great idea by the Rhone Rangers: Pneumonia's Last Syrah (September 2010).  Still one of the best marketing ideas I've had the pleasure of being a part of.  This editorial ended up on the back page of Wines&Vines a couple of months later.
• Biodynamics and dry-farming: repairing the failings of "modern" viticulture (November 2010).  An important step in my own personal journey in understanding why the choices that we make in our viticulture matters in the way that the wines taste.
• A post-harvest round table discussion with Tablas Creek's winemakers (December 2010).  A great video filmed and edited by Tommy Oldre that captures the personalities of our winemaking team (and our winemaking dog) as succinctly as I can imagine possible.  And it's worth remembering just how unusual 2010 was.  Literally unprecedented in our experience.
• Zombie legislation: HR 5034 lurches back to life as HR 1161 (March 2011).  I love the occasional times I get to do political or legal analysis.  My belief is that the wholesalers' lobby is going to reintroduce similarly consumer- (and winery-) unfriendly legislation each year until the opposition gets complacent and doesn't raise a hue and cry.  Consider this my contribution to raising the hue and cry for 2011.
• Blending, blending, blending... and an eventual look at the 2010 whites! (April 2011).  The blending of the 2010 whites was the longest we've ever faced, and provided the clearest example yet of how our process protects us from our own biases.  I lay out all the messiness in this post.
• The Remarkable Rise of Paso Robles (May 2011).  A reflection on how Paso Robles has come as far as it has, as fast as it has, made more relevant by Stacie Jacob's announcement the next week that she would be leaving the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance after seven years at the helm.
• Investigating an Attempted Wine Scam (June 2011).  The post which received the most comments over the last year (14 and counting!) and I've heard from dozens of other wineries letting me know that they'd found this post after googling the attempted scam or attempted scammer.  Nice to know that shedding a little light on a problem can provide real help.

As always, thank you for your support.  It's an honor to have been able to do this for as long as I have.

Tablas Creek is a 2010 "Best Winery Blog" finalist!

I'm proud to announce that Tablas Creek has again been named a finalist for "Best Winery Blog" at the 2010 Wine Blog Awards.  These awards were created four years ago by the tireless Tom Wark (whose blog Fermentation is a daily must-read for anyone in the wine community) to recognize the growing importance of the blogging community on the world of wine and were this year handed over to the nonprofit OpenWine Consortium.  The awards (which in past years were called the American Wine Blog Awards) have been opened up to this year to any English-language blog in the world.

As in previous years, your votes will help determine the winners; in the final tally, 50% of the weighting comes from voting by the public, and 50% from the votes of the panel of eleven expert judges (whose names are typically revealed after the awards are announced) who culled all the nominations into the five finalists in each category.  So please vote!

The most interesting part of the process for me is always discovering the blogs I wasn't aware of.  The Best Winery Blog finalists include two other winery blogs I consider must-reads (4488: A Ridge Blog and Twisted Oak's El Bloggio Torcido and two that I didn't yet know (Bonny Doon's Been Doon So Long and Quevedo Port).  How did I not know that Randall Grahm was blogging? 

I am particularly proud that Tablas Creek is the only repeat finalist from the 2009 Best Winery Blog category.

You can browse the list of finalists, or if you know who you like, you can vote here.  Voting ends Sunday, May 30th.

An exchange with Representative Kevin McCarthy on HR 5034 and direct shipping

On April 15th, H.R. 5034 was introduced into the US House of Representatives.  This bill, written by the Beer Wholesalers of America and titled the "Comprehensive Alcohol Regulatory Effectiveness Act of 2010" [Get it? The "CARE Act"] would write into law the primacy of the 21st Amendment, which repealed prohibition, over the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, which gives the federal government exclusive power to regulate interstate commerce.  The net impact would be to allow states to write laws which allow their own in-state wineries (and breweries) to ship direct to consumers but prohibit out-of-state wineries (and breweries) from doing the same.  Read the full text here.

Of course, local wineries, and the in-state jobs that they represent, have been one rallying point for the advocates of direct shipping.  And direct shipping has been largely victorious in the nearly five years since Supreme Court ruled in Granholm v. Heald that states were not allowed to discriminate in favor of in-state interests in their alcohol regulations.  At that time, we could ship to 13 states.  Later this month, we will add Maine as our 31st legal shipping state.  The end result of the deregulation has been more choices for and lower prices to consumers, and more tax revenue to states, who have nearly all written shipping laws that require out-of-state wineries to remit state and local taxes on the wines they ship into the state.

Of course, one tier has been left out of the celebration: the wholesale tier, who in the era before direct sales collected a state-mandated markup on every bottle of beer, wine and liquor sold in every state.  These wholesalers are licensed by each state, and are often the single largest contributors to state political campaigns.  And although direct shipping of beer and wine is a tiny proportion of all sales and largely covers products that are not available through distribution, wholesalers have mobilized in force against direct shipping.  It's really amazing that so many direct shipping laws have been written in the last five years given the money and political muscle that have been lined up against each one.

With state ploys for legal discrimination being eliminated one by one in the courts (the most recent, a Massachusetts capacity cap under which all in-state wineries fell, was reaffirmed as unconstitutional by the First Circuit Court of Appeals in January) wholesalers have evidently turned to the federal government for help.  Hence H.R. 5034.

Although the bill has yet to be brought to the floor of the House for a vote, I did not want to be complacent about its prospects.  So, I wrote our local congressman, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California's 22nd District, to urge him to oppose the bill.  I assumed, given that his territory includes both Paso Robles and Bakersfield (wine producing regions) that he would be opposed to the bill.  His response suggested to me that he had not yet considered the bill's impacts on his district, and that he was taking the legislation's sponsors at their word when they said that this was an issue of states' rights.

I thought it would be interesting to post our exchange.  I have a few concluding thoughts (as well as how to contact your own representative) below the emails.  First, from last Thursday:

Dear Representative McCarthy,

We met a few years ago at an event organized by the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance about immigration issues.  This is much more pressing to us, and to every small wine producer in the Paso Robles region.  I hope you will oppose HR 5034, a bill sponsored by beer wholesalers that would overturn winery-to-consumer shipping around the United States.

The legislation is couched as addressing public safety and states' rights, but is better described as an effort by wholesalers to protect their monopoly and choke off a potential source of competition.  If it passes, it will eliminate consumer access to thousands of small wineries and tens of thousands of wines, nearly all of them with such small productions as to be irrelevant to distributors.

HR 5034 has been condemned by winery associations including the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance.  It would choke off the lifeblood of most small wineries in our area and around the country.

Please let me know how you intend to vote on this important issue.

Sincerely,
Jason Haas

I received a response this morning:

Dear Jason:

Thank you for contacting me in opposition to H.R. 5034. 

According to the bill's sponsors, H.R. 5034 is intended to reiterate the three-tier system of alcohol regulation in the U.S., and to ensure that states retain their traditional regulatory authority over alcohol distribution, which are areas that I support. However, I appreciate your concerns that the legislation could negatively impact wineries, especially small ones, in California. Given these concerns, I will closely monitor this legislation before making a final decision on this bill should it come to the House floor for a vote.

Thanks again for contacting me on issues of importance to you. If you would like additional information on services my office can provide you, my votes and positions on issues facing our nation, and to subscribe to receive periodic "e-newsletters," please visit my website at http://kevinmccarthy.house.gov/.

Sincerely,

Kevin McCarthy
Member of Congress

I responded to him just a few minutes ago:

Dear Representative McCarthy,

Thank you for your response to my earlier note regarding HR 5034.  In your response, you write:

"According to the bill's sponsors, H.R. 5034 is intended to reiterate the three-tier system of alcohol regulation in the U.S., and to ensure that states retain their traditional regulatory authority over alcohol distribution, which are areas that I support."

Please, in your deliberations, recognize that nothing currently prevents states from regulating alcohol in any way they choose.  Some states force all wine to go through the three-tier system and prohibit wine shipments entirely.  Others only allow it only for wineries of a certain size.  Others allow shipment into some areas and not others.  Others allow wineries and retailers to ship.  The only prohibition is that states not discriminate in favor of in-state wineries.  The major beneficiaries of the free trade that has resulted from the Supreme Court prohibition of discrimination have been the small wineries of California, over 200 of which are in your district.

While the sponsors of the bill would have you believe that this issue is one of states' rights, it is instead an issue of legislated monopolies (the liquor distributors) trying to eliminate their competition (your small wineries).  If you support free trade, you should oppose this bill. 

The passage of HR 5034 would likely result in dozens of local wineries having to close, the elimination of hundreds of good local jobs, and blunt the most powerful engine of the vibrant Paso Robles economy.

I hope that you will oppose this dangerous bill.

All the best,
-Jason

I find it hard to believe that a California representative, and a member of the Congressional Wine Caucus, would take a bill like this at face value.  If a representative who has a territory with such a vested interest in expanded access to direct shipping can be so willing to accept the justifications of the wholesalers' lobby, what can the prospects be in the rest of the country?

If we expect the members of Congress to see this bill for what it is -- an anticompetitive money grab by big businesses with legislated monopoly power -- we need to make our voices heard.  Please speak up!  As usual, the Web site Free the Grapes is a great resource.  Or, you can also go straight to a page where you can customize and have notes sent to your senators and representatives.  And please continue to spread the word.  There is a Facebook group dedicated to stopping HR 5034, and a quick blog search on HR 5034 turns up nearly 4000 articles, led, appropriately, by Tom Wark's full-throated repudiation of the wholesalers' claims.

Tablas Creek on "A Long Pour: Fifty-Two Weeks with California Wine"

I have noticed a backlash recently among writers passionate about wine against what might be termed the tyranny of the tasting note.  In the view of these writers, the stilted language and the inherent subjectivity of the wine review is a distraction from the real business of telling a story about the people and the places which make up the world of wine.  [One great example, quoted in a recent piece on Steve Heimoff's blog, was of writer Rod Smith, who in response to a question about what he thought about the wines in a group wine tasting, replied "I don’t review wines. I write about them".]  And I understand this clearly: there is only so much writing you can do about flavors of berries, oak and minerals.  And this is without getting into the whole debate about scoring wine.

Whether in response to the fustiness of the traditional wine review, or just a greater interest in the how and the why of wine rather than the what, I've had the pleasure to speak to several writers recently who weren't particularly interested in writing about the wines of Tablas Creek, but about the soul.  One such writer is Wayne Kelterer, who a few months back started the blog "A Long Pour: Fifty-Two Weeks with California Wine".  On this blog, he profiles one winery each week.  The profiles are done on-site, incorporate his excellent photography, and include an in-depth interview with a principal or winemaker at each winery.  I think that the care that he takes on these pieces is evident in the results.

Tablas Creek is fortunate to be the profiled winery this week, and in the profile Wayne includes a transcript of what might be the longest, most in-depth interview I've ever had published.  If you're interested in not just where we are now, but how we got here and where we think we're going, then it's a must-read.

So, go read it: Tablas Creek: The Long Road to Success

Building a successful winery tasting room experience before, during and after the visit

Next week, I'll be speaking as part of a panel at the Unified Grape and Wine Symposium in Sacramento. The panel is titled "How to Make Your Tasting Room More Profitable" and is being organized and moderated by California's most respected tasting room consultant, Craig Root.

I've spent a lot of time in the past eight years refining my thoughts on what makes a successful tasting room, and am at this point amazed to think one wasn't in our original business plan.  An indication that we're succeeding is that, according to Craig, the sales and wine club signups that we see at the Tablas Creek tasting room are roughly double the industry average.  I hope to see some readers of the blog at the seminar.  We'll go into more detail than I have here, but below are a few highlights of what I think are important things to be thinking about before, during, and after a customer's visit.

• Work to build your traffic year-round.  It's a lot easier to sell wine to people who have opened your front door than it is to sell it to people who haven't.
  • Cultivate partnerships. You are not the only one in your area with an interest in bringing people into town and giving them a good experience. Reach out to local hotels and bed&breakfasts and create co-marketing opportunities and specials that will give them a reason to be emailing their customers about you. Work with local restaurants to put together dinners that both you and they will market. This expands your base, supports your partners in your community, and ensures you stay visible. And don’t neglect the other winery tasting rooms in your area. Open houses every six months are easy and fun.
  • Encourage your supporters to come back and bring friends. You’re probably offering free tasting for your wine club members. Are you doing so for their guests? Are you offering some reward to members who refer you business?
  • Understand that your marketing (and your presence in the wholesale market) does have an impact on your tasting room. Make sure that you’re in the places where potential customers are. Go to wine festivals in your catchment area. Work particularly hard to ensure that your wines are on the lists of restaurants in your area. Know that one benefit to your wholesale marketing is spillover into your tasting room.
  • Do your part to ensure that you get editorial coverage. Most wineries think of press as principally beneficial to their wholesale marketing.  And great press does have a multiplier effect in wholesale, as the reviews you get are echoed by distributors and retailers.  But don't neglect the impact it can have on a tasting room.  When we got our last set of reviews from Robert Parker last August, our tasting room traffic rose 20% and our sales 35% over the rest of the year.  Be sure you are at least covering the basics by sending samples of all your new releases to the 20 or 30 key writers around the country a few times each year.  Total cost: around $2500 plus a few cases of wine. Possible benefits: enormous.
• Make sure that you focus on each customer interaction. I am amazed by how many people we get in our tasting room who tell us stories of other tasting rooms with disinterested servers, overcrowded tasting bars, or salespeople whose only interest is a club sign-up.
  • Have sufficient staff on hand for your busiest times.  An enormous piece of being able to ensure a good customer experience and the sales that result is having sufficient staff on hand to handle your busiest times. This necessarily means that in slower times you'll be overstaffed, but if you calculate the value over time to your business of a single club sign-up or a single dissatisfied customer who would otherwise have bought a case of wine and told their friends, the cost of labor seems pretty minor.
  • Focus on giving everyone a memorable experience. If you do so, the wine (and wine club) will sell itself.
    • A hugely successful tasting room may convert 5%-7% of its customers into club members. That means that the vast majority of the people coming through your tasting room are not going to sign up on the spot. Be careful... if you are incentivizing your staff for club signups you may be encouraging them to focus their best efforts too narrowly.
    • Sell through education and enthusiasm, and make sure that the customers know the options in front of them.
    • Every person who leaves your tasting room happy is a source of repeat business and referrals.
  • Get an impartial perspective.  Consider sending in friends or family members incognito to get a sense of what the typical customer is experiencing.  Make sure it's someone who will be honest with you.
• Be generous with the little things. Remember that your primary reason for being is (probably) to sell wine. If you focus on making money on your events or your fees, you may be doing so at the expense of wine sales. Some ideas:
  • Comp your tasting fee on a purchase. When we raised our tasting fee from $5 to $10 but comped it on any wine purchase, we found that the percentage of visitors coming to our tasting room who bought rose from 65% to 80%. Even a one-bottle purchase means that sometime in the future, that guest is going to open a bottle of your wine, often with friends, and relive the memory of having visited you.
  • Give away a logo glass. You’ll spend less time doing dishes, and your glass provides a reminder of the experience.  High-quality logo glasses sell for all of $2 in bulk.
  • Make sure that your wine club members know they are appreciated. Send them a welcome packet when they sign up.  Send a holiday card, and consider including a coupon (say, $20 off on their next order). It spurs new orders and keeps you top of mind.
  • Keep the costs of your events reasonable. An inexpensive (even free) event and an incentive to purchase while your customers are there can drive impressive sales. Adding a night-of-the-event-only 5% discount to our semi-annual wine club shipment tasting parties more than doubled our average sales.
  • Choose a wine each month to offer at a discount. This gives you something different to talk about each month in the tasting room, via email, or online (including through your social media). You can use this to focus attention on a new wine, or one whose sales are slow, or just rotate through your portfolio to raise awareness and excitement about the wines you make.
• Put yourself in a position to continue the conversation with your customer even after they leave. Don’t assume that your connection ends when your customer leaves the tasting room. There are powerful tools available to maintain and even grow a connection that begins in the tasting room.
  
  • Build and use your lists. Are you asking all your customers if they are interested in joining your mailing list?  Adding just a small percentage of your foot traffic to your email lists (let alone your wine club lists) can give you a powerful tool to communicate special offers, share information about events, and generally build an ongoing connection to your base.  And once you have added these people to your lists, it's important to contact them regularly. An email every few months, with perhaps a print newsletter a couple of times a year, is generally seen as welcome rather than intrusive.
  • Work with new media to stay connected. The tasting room is your primary venue for creating a personal connection with your customers. Social media sites allow you to extend that connection, and help like-minded consumers find and follow you, and hopefully become customers.
    • Facebook should be a part of any winery’s marketing plan. With over 300,000,000 users, a significant portion of everyone's network is on Facebook. If you are not, you lose the opportunity to remain top of mind to a huge portion of your lists (it’s also a great way to make and maintain connections to distributors, trade and media).
    • A blog (like this one!) is a great way to personalize your business, communicate your core ideas and principals, and drive traffic to your Web site. It’s probably your best opportunity to tell an extended story.
    • Twitter can spur real-time interaction and feedback with an important (read: taste-making) segment 25,000,000 strong.
  • Make sure you're a good partner. Whether you're using social media or more traditional email or print marketing, make sure you provide valuable content in addition to (and probably more extensively than) you push sales.  Of course, sales are an important result of any marketing campaign, but if you cross the line and become one-dimensional or self-serving, or you'll push away the customers with whom you're trying to build a connection.

If you are going to be at Unified, and want the more detailed version of this, as well as the thoughts from the other panelists and Craig, our seminar will be 2:00pm on Thursday, January 28th.  I hope to see many of you there!