Tag Archives: Paul Tincknell

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Winecast 75: Paul Tincknell — once more unto the wine crisis breach

Paul Tincknell
Paul Tincknell: “We’re buying and drinking less wine, and we’re continuing to do so.”

“Some of the glimmers of hope … really aren’t glimmers of hope.”

Paul Tincknell, the blog’s official wine marketer, is even more pessimistic about wine’s current crisis than I am. Which, as regular readers here know, is saying something. Our discussion about how to solve these problems included spot-on takes about the dilemma of alternative packaging like boxes and cans as well as the conundrum of natural wine.

Along the way, we also analyzed the crisis and ways out of it:

• There’s a cultural shift about what younger consumers are looking for. Call it better quality or more authenticity or whatever, and it’s something wine quite hasn’t figured out.

• Yes, prices are too high. “No industry has ever expanded with higher prices. … Unless the industry is going to tackle this head on, we’re going to see shrinking volume.”

•  The split between Big Wine and the rest of the industry. Paul says it’s too much to ask a 1,000 case winery to solve wine’s various problems, and the biggest producers — who seem reluctant to do so — must take the lead.

• Wine marketing needs to improve — quickly. “There needs to be a consistent message,” says Paul, about what wine is and why people should drink it. Maybe: Wine is something to drink every day. It’s worked for coffee, he says.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 24 minutes long and takes up 16 megabytes. Quality is excellent (save for a short false start). Yes, this is longer than usual, but it’s not boring and I throw in a teaching anecdote.

More wine podcasts:
• Winecast 74: Dave McIntyre and what’s coming for wine in 2023
• Winecast 73: Randall Grahm and ingredient labels for wine
• Winecast 72: Denise Clarke and the progress — and challenges — for Drink Local

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Winecast 71: Paul Tincknell and solving all of wine’s problems

Paul Tincknell
Paul Tincknell: We can’t buy ourselves out of wine’s problems.

The blog’s wine marketing guru solves wine’s generation gap and offers insight on making wine popular again

Paul Tincknell, a partner in the Napa marketing consultancy of Tincknell & Tincknell, is one of the really smart people in the wine business. And I would say that even if he wasn’t a long-time friend of the blog.

He and I have discussed wine’s problems many times — the generation gap, abstinence, premiumization, its reliance on the aging Baby Boomers, and so on and so forth. So I asked him to do this podcast to offer his perspective and his solutions, and they make very good sense.

Included in our discussion:

• Wine is not like beef or milk, where a one size fits all marketing approach — “Got Milk?” — could be effective. The industry is fragmented and splintered, and not just between big and small producers, but because of pricing. Milk and beef inhabit a narrow price range; wine’s is enormous, and high-end producers have little in common with those on the lower end.

• Wine spends very little marketing, anyway, and especially compared to beer and spirits. And no, we’re not quite sure why that is.

• Wine’s approach to its customers is wrong-headed. It sells them wine to drink for special occasions, and not wine to drink because wine is enjoyable. Paul describes this as “celebratory” vs. “cultural;” that is, no one sees wine as something to drink with dinner unless dinner is a big deal — a holiday, date night, or a dinner party. So why can’t we have a bottle of $10 supermarket wine on Wednesday night to drink with sheet pan chicken? Because the industry doesn’t encourage that. It wants us to buy a $25 or $30 bottle for a dinner that takes four hours to cook and requires expensive and hard to find ingredients.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 22 minutes long and takes up 15 megabytes. Quality is excellent. Even better, I hardly interrupted, save for one rant about too complicated recipes.

More wine podcasts:
• Winecast 70: Ray DelMuro of Refresh Glass and recycling wine bottles
• Winecast 69: Nick Vorpagel and the dilemma of the independent wine retailer
• Winecast 68: Clara Klein and restaurant wine after the pandemic

Winebits 749: Wine marketing, supply chain woes, 500-year-old wine book

wine marketingThis week’s wine news: The blog’s official wine marketer sounds off on the failures of wine marketing, plus supply chain price gouging and the oldest wine book written in French

• Failure all around: Paul Tincknell has a more than a few words of wisdom for the wine business in its hunt for younger consumers – and they aren’t compliments. Tincknell, the blog’s official wine marketer, calls out producers, the Winestream Media, restaurants, wholesalers, and consolidation on his company’s blog. The result, he says, has given us too high prices – and even price gouging – and this “excessive pricing … raises the risk of purchase for many to unacceptably high” levels. So they drink beer instead. The piece is a bit long, but well worth reading for a thorough analysis of what’s wrong and how to fix it.

• Speaking of price gouging: The New York Times, dissecting the supply chain woes we’ve come to know all too well in wine, writes that shippers are gouging small companies for no other reason than they want to. “Carriers are exploiting the supply chain chaos to breach contracts and jack up rates,” says the story, also noting that a variety of experts predicted that this would happen when the federal government deregulated the shipping industry. Says one small businessman: “Contracts are not worth the paper they are written on these days. They just don’t honor them.”

• Oldest wine book: The University of California-Davis, world-famous for its viticulture and enology programs, has acquired the first wine book written in French. The school’s library bought the only known copy of “Le débat du vin et de leaue,” printed about 1515. The price was not disclosed. The book is a debate between water and wine, used to offer advice about how to live a virtuous life, a common topic during the Renaissance.

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Winecast 64: Paul Tincknell and wine’s failure to address the neo-Prohibitionists

Paul Tincknell
Paul Tincknell: We need to talk about wine and health honestly — the good and the bad.

Wine marketing guru Paul Tincknell returns for another podcast, in which we rant about wine, health, and the wine business’ failure to deal to with all those people who say wine with dinner is binge drinking.

Paul Tincknell, a partner in the Napa marketing consultancy of Tincknell & Tincknell and the blog’s official wine marketing expert, wants the wine business to honestly talk about wine’s health problems — and its benefits. Otherwise, he says, we’re stuck with campaigns that claim anyone who drinks wine will get breast cancer.

His point: Drinking is not a black and white health issue, even though the temperance movement paints it that way. And if the wine business doesn’t call the neo-Prohibitionists on their false claims, no one will.

Included in our discussion:

• Why no one in the anti-drinking movement is going after Starbucks and its 370 calorie, fat and cholesterol bomb better known as the Caffe Mocha.

• The infamous back label drinking warning, and how it does almost no good.

• That wine needs to promote moderate and responsible drinking, which is much different from the binge drinking that wine with dinners has called.

• Wine ingredient and nutritional labels in Europe, why wine in the U.S. needs to adapt the same thing.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 18 minutes long and takes up 12 megabytes. Quality is excellent. And yes, I know I didn’t properly introduce Paul, since I was so eager to denounce Starbucks. And his calm rationality throughout is a fine counterpoint to my ranting.

Follow-up: Paul Tincknell and the woes of wine marketing

More examples showing that wine marketing lacks imagination and doesn’t focus on why people drink wine

Last week’s podcast with Sonoma wine marketing guru Paul Tincknell elicited a fair amount of comment, especially since it ran at the end of the summer when most people have other things to do besides listen to podcasts about the decades-long failure of wine marketing.

As one reader emailed me: “Commercials showing people drinking grocery store wine at swank parties? People get paid for coming up with that stuff?”

Paul received some feedback, too. A colleague shared data with him about a 2009 wine consumption survey: “The results,” Paul emailed me, “are fascinating and confirm that – guess what! – people drink wine with family and friends at meals or in casual situations.” The colleague told Paul that the survey results were given to almost every important wine marketing and trade group in the country, but that, “of course, the industry immediately ignored their work.”

In other words, the business has known for at least a decade how U.S. consumers enjoy wine and the best way to market to them: Show people drinking wine at dinner with their friends and family. That hardly seems like a creative reach. (And we’re not the only ones who have seen this — check out this rant from Paul Mabray, who is generally regarded as one of best wine and consumer experts in the country).

Instead, we get epic silliness like the Kim Crawford “Undo ordinary” commercial, a long-time favorite of blog readers. And, no, it didn’t get an almost unprecedented 33 comments or become one of the blog’s most visited posts because everyone thought it was cutting edge genius.

In fact, Kim Crawford (owned by Big Wine’s Constellation Brands) seems to go out of its way to show up in these kinds of analyses. Paul sent me two especially foolish commercials; the one that made me giggle the most is at the top of this post, called “Make it Amazing.” Who knew I had sway my butt just so to be a cool, sophisticated wine drinker? The other, called “Elevate the Moment,” looks like something from a short-lived 1990s PBS series about rich people.

Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

Video courtesy of Kim Crawford Wines via YouTube using a Creative Commons license

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Winecast 38: Paul Tincknell and the woes of wine marketing

Paul Tincknell
Paul Tincknell

Wine marketing guru Paul Tincknell says wine marketing lacks imagination and doesn’t focus on why people drink wine. Which is why we get foolishness like Yellow Tail’s Roo

Paul Tincknell, a partner in the Sonoma marketing consultancy of Tincknell & Tincknell, has watched wine market itself every which way but well in his two-plus decades in the business.

The problem, he says, is simple: People drink wine with dinner, but when’s the last time you saw wine sell itself that way? Instead, we get stupid humor or faux sophistication, none of which appeals to the younger consumers who see wine as something that their parents and grandparents drink.

We talked about why this is and how to solve it, as well as how to to market wine in the face of the neo-Prohibitionists. Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 10 minutes long and takes up 3.6 megabytes. The sound quality is almost excellent, despite several problems during the recording (and my inability to remember that the Mexican beer we talk about is Corona).

More about wine marketing:
• Wine business: Watch this beer spot to see how TV wine ads should be done
• Hendrick’s gin: How to do a TV booze commercial
• TV wine ads: Almost 40 years of awful