Before Its Time – No Whining About Wine Show

Is it possible to be ahead of the times? May Ray, the avant garde artist believed that something was either of it time or not. Perhaps a better question is what happens when you have something that no one realizes they need? I think that’s the real point. If you have a product or service that may intrigue many but doesn’t sell, then it’s because you haven’t done a good enough job of persuading those who could use it the most. That’s the biggest “trick” in marketing. The other big trick is to get paid for what you do. Payment equals a confirmation of value. When you give something, anything, away, there needs to be some form of reciprocity. Without compensation or reciprocity the value of free is, well, nothing.

And, once people have access to something for nothing, you can’t charge them for it. Well, you can, but, it takes some strategy. The strategy is similar to the anecdote about boiling a frog. If you drop the frog in hot water, it’ll jump out. Wouldn’t you? But if you put the frog in a pan of cold water and turn on the heat, the frog will slowly get used to it. Buying requires commitment. Commitment comes from an expected consistency in the relationship. Once you have a happy customer, they’ll not only come back over and over, they’ll introduce their friends to you. The more likes, friends or fans you have, the more, as Robert Cialdini states in his best seller – Influence, social proof you have.

How could we have gone wrong? It was a simple business plan. Eat good food. Drink good wine. Meet interesting people, travel and get paid for it. Well, three out of five ain’t bad! The philosophy was as simple as the business plan. We were not wine experts. We knew more about wine than the average guy and a heck of a lot less than the real wine experts; the people who made it and sold it. We started our adventure on cable access. We had a hummable theme song that was a parody of the old Rawhide television series – swirling, sniffing, sipping… We took on the sacred cows and dumbed down wine so the average Jane and Joe could not only understand it but enjoy the process of it as well. People liked the show. Then we were asked to “bring it on over” to the local ABC affiliate in Providence, RI. We did a pilot for Public Television. We were on our way!

It all came to a crashing halt. What my friend and neighbor and the other half of the original (I’m almost positive we were the first in the country) Wine Guys came to realize is that we needed sponsors to get the show produced as a public television how-to series. Okay, we knew we needed sponsors but we thought we’d get sponsors in the wine business. Why didn’t we? Marketing 101 – if you make something too simple then the price may be scrutinized. The wine – if you make wine simple and understandable and less mysterious, you cause a lot of problems for some people. Now this was before Trader Joe’s and Charles Estate got together to give the World, the one, the only – Two Buck Chuck. You see, we were ahead of the consciousness curve. We were even approached by one of the folks who saw what we saw and made his family’s New Jersey wine business a huge really big success even though we didn’t sell him the Wine Guy name. Oh, well. And now, it seems that Seven-Eleven is launching a line of good four dollar wines in their stores, too. Even though our audience liked us, trusted us and thought we offered them something useful, the people who sold wine weren’t sold on supporting us.

I’m focusing. I’m focusing! The real problem with the Wine Guy concept was that two middle-aged guys who made learning about wine simple and funny was great until it clashed with the mystique of wine and the price structure that it supported. The cost of a bottle of wine is based on several things. One of those things is cost perception. The mystique of wine adds to the dollar value. Drop the mystique and you’ll have to drop the prices, too. Part of the mystique is that the more you pay for a bottle of wine, the more it’s worth. Yes, there are other pricing factors including the quality of the vintage, which is based on the harvest, the case yield and a bunch of other practical stuff. That’s the short version of it. Most people, women in particular, make a wine selection to drink or to give based on how attractive the bottle label is. Most guys select a wine based on price because they think price in an important indicator of quality. As stupid as that is, that’s the way the wine distributors like it. Now you’d think one of us (yeah, the guy who teaches marketing) would have figured this out - wrong! We were having too much fun swirling, sniffing and sipping to pay attention to the reality of the business. The other thing is that the closer you are to something the harder is to see it as it really is. Yes, in vino veritas – in wine there is truth – no kidding.

So here I am looking back and looking forward. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Can we, knowing now what we didn’t know then, resurrect the The Wine Guy Show for giggles or for profit? Hum, let’ see. The name – wine guys is so generic and has been glommed by so many that, well, we’ll have to rethink the name. That’ll be the first point of business. The whole wine craze isn’t as big as it was when we kicked off our first show. And, bag-in-a-box wine has become somewhat of a secretive guilty pleasure. Hey, this stuff keeps walking away with the prizes in double-blind taste tests. What now? Well, I say we take this dog and pony show back on the original trail with a couple of tweaks to the master plan – mainly – making money. The other consideration is reflecting on how many wines there are in the world and where they come from. All fifty of these United States produce wine from either grapes or fruit. There are at least fifty vineyards and wineries in New England alone.

So I think, we, the original wine guys, Mike Daigle and I (Ron Fortier), should focus on our own wine appellation (area) of these United States – The Southeastern New England Wine Growing Appellation. This is an area that stretches from Cape Cod and the Islands and on down the southern coast of Massachusetts towards coastal Rhode Island and coastal Connecticut. There is a lot to see, eat, drink and do here. We’ll become the ex officio, de facto and self-proclaimed - Vinomytes or Alvinos or, Vinificants of our own backyard. Better to be a good sized fish in a small pond versus a minnow in a big pond anyway. Ah, yes, making money is as important as having fun since, if people pay you, you must be doing something right. Maybe we offer our very own line of affordable wines, as well as, limited edition collections of the best the Southeastern New England Wine Growing Appellation has to offer. We could add to this mix, our original earthy approach to teaching anyone who’ll listen how to begin and continue to enjoy wine. We’ll go back to our plan to eat good food. Drink good wine. Meet interesting people, travel and, damn it, this time we’ll get paid for it!

Technology has come a long way since the original Wine Guy Show aired in 1992. The internet was in its infancy then. Streaming video was crude. Social media didn’t exist. And, video wasn’t as easy to produce as it is now. Please join us in raising a glass to this repurposing of the vintage Wine Guy Show concepts with a bit more focus, social media and a beautiful part of the country to play in. Based on Guy Kawasaki’s new book: Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions – if we decide to resurrect the concept, we’ll have to reaffirm our likability, as well as, the trust people had in us to tell the truth about wine and, we’ll have to work on making our product (that’s us) great! Self-aggrandizing as it may seem, our audience and followers thought we had a great product and, that we also had good chemistry. They trusted us to gently teach and guide them through the sometimes confusing and overwhelming world of wine. And to mimic what Sally Field once said at the Oscars – they like us, they really like us! Folk trusted us because we always reminded them that even if we knew more about wine than they did, we still didn’t know as much as the experts. That’s why we surrounded ourselves with people in the business. Sure, we were having fun but they had a business to run.

One question I’m pondering is whether or not we’re still viable. The other thing is that, the show was never about wines. It was about wine. The difference is that the experts deal with the minutia of the wines of the world but we dealt with wine as a metaphor for sociability. Wine was the original social medium. Wine was once safer to drink, in most cases, than water. It was central to religious rites and cultural ceremony. Wine, in our opinion, was always about the conviviality of the table. And, we think it’s needed now more than ever to get people back to the table to eat, converse and share in one of nature’s miracles. We always believed that, as someone wiser than us once said, excess is the death of pleasure. Even though the show’s been off the air since 1997, people still ask or reminisce about some of their favorite episodes and coax us to bring back the show. You can’t buy brand equity like that! With that in mind – let’s see what happens. Maybe I should call Mark Hellendrung to see how he resurrected Narragansett Beer…