Wine of the times

I have just returned from an openhouse to celebrate the holiday season, nursing not a hangover but the regret that I did not make a beeline for the Saint Emilion when it was still untouched. When I returned to the bar after my first Chilean white, the bottle had been consumed by the many bankers who’d gathered at the Gurgaon penthouse where the party was on. Everyone’s talking about how bankers are facing their worst time yet, but I saw no signs of panic.

Even the guy from Manhattan, who described himself as part-time playwright, full-time waiter and soccer blogger, showed no forebodings of impending doom. So, the last thing I expected was a red wine named Bailout, a Napa Valley 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon with a label that shows a bull charging at a mighty bear. I loved the humour behind the label. What they say about champagne holds good for anything celebratory in these uncertain times: “In victory you deserve it, in adversity you need it.”

Now, if Bailout is selling out— its creators are the guys at the San Francisco winery, Crushpad—it is thanks to its sales strategy. You book your bottles online—the 2007 vintage will be ready in August 2009—for $39, which is way below its retail price of $75. For every 100-point fall in Dow’s average, Bailout’s makers have promised to knock $2 off from the price of every booked bottle.

Now, that tells you two things—either that Crushpad has immense faith in the US economy’s ability to bounce back, or that it’s gambling on the future, which seems stupid in these times. But I wouldn’t be writing about Bailout had the guys at Crushpad been stupid.

Good marketing, after all, is about ideas that have relevance for the moment. I love their sales pitch: “The big guys have credit default swaps and billion-dollar bailouts. Well, we’ve got Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon—our own little piece of the bailout pie whether the market rocks or tanks.”

Brilliant! The world of wine gets tedious when you have to negotiate a rabbit warren of exotic names, keep track of vintages and hone up on your geography to be able to figure out what’s on each label. (Chassagne-Montrachet? Is it in Bordeaux or Burgundy? And what about Puligny-Montrachet?)

To end this confusion, wine marketers are conjuring up simpler labels and smarter sales pitches. It’s not for nothing that Fat Bastard is one of the most popular labels in the world. It is far easier to remember than one of those interminably hyphenated château names.

Here’s another piece of wine marketing of note. For the first time in wine history (or at least what I know of it), a wine producer (Jacob’s Creek) has tied up with a Hollywood studio (20th Century Fox). They have launched a label called Australia, to coincide with Baz Luhrman’s action-adventure of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

There was a time when Jacob’s Creek was known as Wimbledon’s top drop, for it was the official wine of the world’s greatest tennis event. More importantly, no matter how much wine critics may trash the wine, Jacob’s Creek is a name you don’t have to make an effort to remember.