Is Your Wine a Brand or a Label? Here's One Way to Find Out For Yourself.
There are well over a million different wines on shelves and lists. Which would be missed if they disappeared? Artificial Intelligence could help to provide that answer.
The Dutch Master of Wine and educator Frank Mulders caught my attention recently with his response to Drinks International’s ranking of ‘World’s Most Admired Wine Brands’.
“Admired by whom exactly, and why does it matter anyway?” He wrote, continuing, “And what exactly do Gerard Bertrand and DRC have in common, just to name two examples?”
The first of these rhetorical questions is eminently reasonable. Having occasionally been included, and omitted from, similar lists of wine writers/communicators, I have to agree on their click-baity and arbitrary nature. According to Drinks International, the brands in the ranking were all “voted for by a hand-picked academy of sommeliers, buyers, wholesalers, Masters of Wine and writers.” To which one could reply, and, of course, a different academy, on a different day, would almost certainly come up with something quite different.
But the same applies to the Oscars, the Grammies and the Pulitzer. And, I’m sure Donald Trump would say, the various Nobel prize committees.
Yquem vs Yellow Tail
Mulders’ second query is more interesting. What sense can anyone make of a list that includes Pétrus and Yquem (22nd and 23rd respectively), and Kanonkop and Yellow Tail (24th and 25th)?
As I’ve already hopefully made clear, the ranking is open to debate. but there ought to be no disputing that all four of these and the other names here are all brands.
Except there is.
Too many people in the industry still dislike the application of the term to those illustrious Bordeaux estates and DRC. Apparently, they are above such concepts, because being seen as a brand is considered somehow grubby and commercial.
Step outside the world of wine and you’ll struggle to find this kind of narrow-mindedness. The owners of the priciest, most exclusive and most respected hotels, restaurants, fragrances and watches have no concerns about being viewed as brands. And why should they? They understand that being a brand simply indicates that their target audience recognises their name and image, and is prepared to seek out, and most likely pay a little more for, their product or service.
In this respect, DRC and Krug (an omission from the Drinks International list of ‘wine brands’, presumably because it has bubbles) really are in the same camp as the Macallan, Lavazza and Orangina. They’re all beverages with identifiable fan bases whose loyalty contributes to their financial wellbeing. Whereas, the hundreds of petit chateau wines on sale in Bordeaux supermarkets are almost all labels. If and when the businesses are sold - assuming their vines aren’t uprooted - the price they command will be based on euros-per-hectare, the buildings, equipment and stock. Their name is worth literally nothing. and there’s no reason for a new owner not to come up with a fresh one.
Which, of course, would be unthinkable for real brands like Miraval, Château de Beaucastel or la Vieille Ferme.
Knowing your audience
The fact that immeasurably fewer people will ever experience the taste of that specific malt whisky or legendary Burgundy than the coffee or soda pop is irrelevant. What matters is that these beverages are on the radar of the kind of people who might plausibly buy them, if only once. Rather than being the producer whose name is in small print at the bottom of a Cabernet or Chianti, Prosecco or Pinot Grigio, and swiftly forgotten, if it was ever noticed in the first place.
Most wines are not brands; they’re labels.
Ask the bot
Nowadays, there is a simple way to find out which category your wine fits into: go and ask ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence bots.
Let’s imagine for example that it’s from the AOP region of Nom-Inventé. Try a few queries such as “name all the best wines in Nom-Inventé” possibly adding a few extra details such as organic status or approximate price, the market in which it might most likely be found, or the existence of a tasting room. Whatever answers you get - and I really do recommend doing this with more than one bot - irrespective of whether your wine gets a mention, you’ll probably find stuff with which you’ll disagree.
This may, of course be the result of the bot ‘hallucinating’ - making things up - but, far more likely, it will simply reflect what it found when it scoured the internet. When I conducted this exercise, for example, it quoted figures back to me from an interview I had given. (I’m not saying they were inaccurate; merely that seeing them made me wary of what I might be told about other producers’ wines).
And that’s the point. Whether you are a Côte de Nuits vigneron who believes they deserve inclusion in a list of Vosne-Romanées, or a Pinotage producer who thinks their wines are as good as Kanonkop’s, if you haven’t generated enough information about your wine, and if other people - customers and critics - haven’t said enough about it, the bot won’t have any reason to include it in a response, to you, or anyone else.
And, as the sorcery of traditional SEO becomes less and less relevant, that really matters.
Quite apart from what, if anything, the bot may have said about your wine, you should also take the time to consider what it had to say about your competitors and, indeed, about the Nom Inventé appellation. If those neighbours got more, or better coverage than you, or the region’s charms seem to have been under-appreciated, don’t shoot the algorithmic messenger.
Ask yourself why?, and what you might do to make your wine more eye-catching to a set of lines of computer code, or a flesh-and-blood human being in search of a good bottle of wine
I can’t promise that some extra story-telling effort is going to get you onto a Drinks International-style list, but it might just help to make your wine, whatever its style and price, more of a brand, and less of a label - and an easier product to sell.