Friday, September 28 2007
Limited Edition 2007
The last week of September means one thing to me, my Limited Edition season is here. Well, two things: it also means I've got to finish buttoning up my garden and mothballing my motorcycle for a couple of months, because I'm going to be on the road more-or-less continuously, educating Winexpert's retail partners and their staff on the varieties we've chosen for the 2007 Selection Limited Edition wines--I'll reveal* what the varieties are at the bottom of this blog entry.
For those not familiar with the program, all year long we look for the highest quality and the coolest grapes and juices we can find, and fold them into our product portfolio and our cellar. During this unending search we sometimes find varietals that stick out like crazy. Either they're kind of off the mainstream, from an under-explored region, or from such a great and wonderful growing region that we can't pass them up, but most of the time they don't fit into our regular kit line-up, either because we can't secure enough product for a full year's supply, or because we lack space in our portfolio for a new, permanent offering. Every time we put a new, permanent product into inventory we have to make room in our warehouse, print marketing materials, fill our warehouses, distributors and pipelines to dealers, etc. We make a lot of kits already!
So, instead of letting a great, cool, interesting juice slip through our fingers, we put it into the Limited Edition program. Once a year we produce five new wine kits, pre-sell them through our dealers between the first of October and the 15th of December, then we ship the kits out between January and April, so customers can pick them up and make them at their pleasure.
Five kits and four months? It's an evolution of the program. We used to do four and four, split evenly between red and white. But consumption trends in the industry showed that people are drinking a lot more red than white these days. To accomodate these folks we added an extra red. To keep from cheating people who still prefer white, we didn't take any varieties out of the line-up, so now we release a red and a white in January, a red in February, the second white in March and the final red in April. Nobody has to buy all five, but honestly, all the really cool kids do.
Off-mainstream wines have included things like Viognier and Symphony. While they've gained a lot in popularity since we first offered them as LE's, they were really obscure when we chose them. In fact, we could barely give Symphony away the first time we had it--classic story though, as soon as people tasted it (it's a wonderfully zingy, snappy white) they were looking for more. Too bad there wasn't any more!
Under-explored regions have included places like South Africa's Stellenbosch, where we got our Shiraz from one year. SA is on a marketing tear right now, and is geared up to compete with the international powerhouse exporter Australia, but for most people SA wines are not readily available.
Totally cool regions are like New Zealand's Marlborough, where we sourced Pinot Noir from in 2004. Sigh, that stuff is dynamite. I have a bottle sitting at my right elbow, scratchy hand-written label begging me to take it home and drink it (hey, some people have bobble-heads or executive toys on their desk. Me, I prefer wine.)
So next week it's retailer tasting events here in BC, then off to Atlantic Canada, then a couple of consumer events on Vancouver Island (if you're not already invited, sorry! They're invitation-only), then Ontario and Manitoba, then a three weeks in the USA--mainly consumer events there--and the full-pull in Manitoba. I'll discuss the Manitoba event in another column, but interestingly enough, the consumer tasting we do there is the second largest wine event in the province!
So, for the next couple of months I'll be blogging from airports and hotels, but I'll try to keep up. Happy winemaking, and I'll keep in touch.
* Ready? This year Winexpert will be releasing . . . three reds and two whites!
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