Wednesday, July 25 2007

Choosing Limited Edition

I was talking with Al McGee, one of Winexpert's friendly sales representatives, the other day and he thought it would be a good idea to put out a newsletter article about how we chose the varieties for our Limited Edition kits every year. At first I wasn't sure, because the way we make the actual choice is mundane: we argue. Shoutiest person doesn't actually win, but the most persuasive case that can be made for a cool and interesting variety has to have a champion pushing for it. But the way we come up with the candidates is actually kind of neat.

For those of you who haven't tried an LE kit, once a year we make three red and two white wine kits in a very limited production run. We release them for sale (a red and a white in January, and then one a month) and they're all gone by April. We strongly encourage people to pre-order so they don't face disappointment: every year there are hundreds of folks who wait a little too long to choose, and they miss out. C'est la guerre!

Where the candidate raw materials come from is our regular brokers and vineyards. Winexpert is constantly on the look-out for cool and interesting varieties and we're especially interested in the cutting-edge of trendy wines, or in prestige grapes from cool/venerable/up-and-coming/all three growing areas. In our regular kit lines we're not exactly conservative, but we don't want to outstrip the level of comfort our customers have with their wine knowledge. On the other hand, we have to sell the Limited Edition products as something brand-new every year, so it's okay to hang out a little further on the bleeding edge.

Our purchaser, Christine, marshals all the candidate varietals from around the world, and starts pestering us in January about the Southern Hemisphere stuff--we're actually looking at next year's stuff while we're making and shipping this year's kits. It's necessary to start that early because we have to set contracts and make commitments with our growers as early as possible. It's a tough business out there, and growers and brokers are eager to get their stuff sold. If we hesitate, we lose out too!

Most of our discussions centre on what's working in the commercial marketplace. We're less concerned with what's a perennial hot seller, and more concerned with what's got a lot of buzz and notice over the last 18-24 months. One thing that might not have occurred to most people is that there has to be a comparable commercial product in all of our markets.

You see, we encourage people to learn about the new varietals we're offering in the LE by holding consumer tastings and letting folks try a commercial example, so they can see what kind of flavours and aromas it has, along with the sweetness, acidity, tannin and general tastiness. If it's a terrifically obscure variety, like for instance Sicilian Grillo, this can be tough--as good a wine as it is, not every province or state has a bunch of different Grillos for sale. We can't taste our own kit-produced wines for two reasons: first, it's pretty much illegal for us to do so in most places (Canada is right out) and we don't want to tease the revenuers. Second, the wine simply isn't ready by the time we start taking pre-orders for the kits. Not only is it not ready, in some cases we haven't made the actual production kits yet, as we wait for loads of juice to arrive from Europe or South America!

Once we narrow down the acceptable candidates to ten or a dozen the shouting begins. We gather up commercial examples, usually two to four of each, and sit down and taste them. If we're making an Australian Shiraz, for example, we need to ensure that we're representing the typical style. Often we're lucky enough to obtain wines right from the same growing regions we're sourcing our grapes and juices from, which makes defining the style much easier. Once we find our target products, we try to figure out what people are going to want the most, often a guessing game. After all, I might want to do a Kekfrankos, or a Rkatsiteli because I love those wines, but if the name sounds like a sneeze, will that hurt the chances of people liking it?

Usually by late spring or early summer we've narrowed our choices down to six or eight candidates, while our purchaser prods us to make up our minds so we can get a move on with securing the juice, and depending on final availability we settle on the five varieties and press the R&D button--after that we can sit back and relax while our high-powered winemaker, Susan Kwan and her staff go to work formulating and fermenting. Then, it's almost time to start it all over again for the next year!

Posted by Tim AT 11:29PM

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