In the rolling hills of Tuscany the Frescobaldi family has been making wine for 30 generations and some 700 years. Yet, it was only in 1995, when the family aligned with the Mondavi’s, America’s first wine family, that a cross-continental collaboration was borne in Montalcino, an area within the Tuscan region famous for its Brunello, a 100% Sangiovese wine.
Luce della Vite, meaning “Light of the Vine,” is the resulting winery even as gyrations in the Mondavi family business have blunted the initial collaboration of the two families in jointly creating a world class winery. Now run exclusively by the Frescobaldi’s with investment from Michael Mondavi (and imported to the U.S. by Michael Mondavi’s Folio Wine Partners), their flagship wine, sourced from 29 DOCG certified acres, the 2006 Brunello di Montalcino, has been awarded a perfect 100-point score by James Suckling, former European Bureau Chief for Wine Spectator, now leading his own wine project at his eponymous web site.
This introduction would be apropos of nothing besides ornate wine writer affectations were it not necessary to create the milieu for what is an interesting convergence of issues in the wine world.
Encapsulated in this one wine, from an Italian wine family, formerly aligned with the scion of American wine and imported to the U.S. by his son and given a perfect 100-point score by a former critic with the Wine Spectator, many of the contemporary issues of the wine world can be examined and pondered…
Consider:
• A 100-point score
Is there such a thing as a perfect wine? I’ll leave the question open-ended while noting that my own scoring only goes to 99. In the realm of subjectivity, can something like wine or art achieve perfection?
• The fallibility of wine criticism
Stephen Tanzer, another notable wine critic, gave the same wine 92 points. Wine Enthusiast scored it 93 points. Robert Parker’s Italian wine critic (and recently anointed California reviewer), Antonio Galloni, gave it a 90. While a 90, 92 or 93 is a good score, the difference between a 93 and a 100 certainly points to a margin spread that provides more questions than answers about the wine.
• Crossing the digital divide
Suckling, ex-Wine Spectator, is out of the paper magazine business and running his own web site with subscriptions, a business that is less than a year old. He has lived in Tuscany for a number of years and knows Brunello wines well. However, anointing 100-point wines isn’t something critics do lightly or without thought. So, when he declares that, “The 2006 vintage for Brunello di Montalcino is the new benchmark…” is he genuinely reviewing the vintage and the region’s most notable vintner or is this his attempt at market-making relevance akin to Robert Parker Jr.’s declaration of ’82 Bordeaux as “superb” when others weren’t as bullish?
• Critical scores affect on inelastic pricing
While so-called “cult” wines get a bad rap based on their stylistic profile, the reality is that prices are high because of scarcity – more people want to buy it then there is wine available to buy. Suckling’s 100-point score for the Luce Brunello is oft-repeated on numerous retailer web sites where the retail price has been raised from a suggested retail price of $89.99 to an average price of $127 based on Wine-Searcher.com data. Meanwhile, the 2005 Luce Brunello is being discounted and has an average price of $84 based on Wine-searcher.com data. It should be noted, that save for Suckling on the ’06, both wines were reviewed consistently with scores in the low 90s.
• A global style
It’s interesting to note that Suckling’s tasting note for the Brunello called it, “…A wine with soul.” Meanwhile Antonio Galloni noted, “The sheer concentration and depth of fruit are remarkable, but ultimately this comes across as a heavy, labored Brunello with limited finesse.”
So, which is it? Is it a soulful wine or one with limited finesse? The U.S. has the largest global appetite for Brunello with some reporting that upwards of 25% of all Brunelli produced is imported to the states. Given that, is the Luce Brunello made to appeal to more of a fruit-forward palate that is often found in the U.S., a style of wine that Wine Spectator and Suckling have lauded in the wake of Robert Parker, the so-called, global style?
Summary
I’ll save the full review of the wine for my Forbes.com column…in the meantime, I’m reminded that the conversations about the people, personalities, ideas and issues in the wine world are often as interesting as what’s in the glass and that’s certainly the case with the 2006 Luce della Vite Brunello di Montalcino, a 100-points for interest and conversational fodder and less for the actual wine. For me, that’s just perfect.
Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/perfection_in_a_bottle/
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Australia, a wine darling in the U.S. for most of the past 20 years, fell prey to Newton’s Law of Motion and the coloring of the bruising from the tumble down, in addition to being black and blue, is also yellow and black.
Aside from grappling with a myriad of structural industry and world currency issues, the Aussies have also had to grapple with the fact that their number two import market, the U.S., has had its wine cognoscenti turn their back on the perceived plumped up juice from Oz, a fact that was contributed to in no small measure, I believe, by the ubiquity of Yellow Tail – the inexpensive, redolently sweet, duotone in taste and packaging wine brand that grew case sales 3180% from 2001 to 2008, as reported by the New York Times.
To mix metaphors, where perception is reality, one bad apple (Or three if you count Yellow Tail category imitators as well as Robert Parker, Jr.’s legacy proclivity for Mollydooker) has spoiled the bunch, at least in the minds of wine influencers.
Tom Steffanci, President of Yellow Tail brand owner W.J. Deutsch & Sons, noted to Shanken News Daily (SND) in April, “…It’s so important that we never compromise on quality…you can’t fool consumers on quality…” However, wine tastemakers don’t think much of the Yellow Tail quality nor are they often shopping in the $6.99 price category.
Consequently, the brand that begat a category casts a pallor over an entire country’s wine. As one Australian wine marketing rep recently told me with a deep sigh, “This is the toughest job in the wine business.” A job, by the way, that includes aggressively trying to market Australian wine as being borne of terroir and regionality, a job, indeed, that evokes salmon swimming upstream into the waiting maw of a hungry bear.

Yellow Tail’s sales have plateaued in the last two years at 8.3 million cases and recent statistics from Australian wine export reporting indicates that total Australian volume to the U.S. dropped 19% in the year ending in June. This makes sense given that Steffanci indicated to SND that the brand represented around 40% of Australian wine sales in the U.S.
This subtext leads to an interesting question, one I’m sure the Australian wine marketing folks would also like the answer to: Is Yellow Tail a declining brand, victim of the “Derision Decision” – the point in time where something grows to such popularity that it transcends ‘hot with cachet’ to ‘not cool,’ a victim of the cultural zeitgeist?
Or, is Yellow Tail’s stagnant growth merely a mindshare issue alleviated by some marketing?
The answer to that question may be an indicator to when the overall category of Australian wine sales might recover, at least from a perception perspective which can lead to a sales recovery in the upper reaches of price tiers, not anchored by their mates in the $6.99 category.
Doubtless, it’s not schadenfreude to suggest the Australian wine marketing folks might not be terribly upset if Yellow Tail shrunk from its ubiquity and, by proxy, it’s mindshare that equates to, “Australian for wine.”

Already, some East Coast liquor and bottle shop sales data (IRI provided by Wine Australia) shows that Australian wine priced $15.99 to $19.99 was up 24% in the fiscal year ending in June.
This rooted in reality but still hypothetical question of whether the Australian category is tethered to the relative misfortune of Yellow Tail in order to makeover perceptions is especially interesting given that 85% of every man, woman and child over the age of 21 is expected to see at least one Yellow Tail marketing message before the end of W.J. Deutsch’s fiscal year in March of 2012.
I guess we’re about to find out…
The New York Times (NYT) recently highlighted Yellow Tail’s new advertising and marketing campaign. With a shift in positioning from the nebulously adventuresome, on the go-oriented and short-lived, “Open for Anything” to the equally nebulous, but brand reinforcing “The go-to,” Yellow Tail is attempting to incrementalize and grow their flat case sales.
Brands face this conundrum all the time in the brand growth cycle. Explosive growth doesn’t always remain so and brands enter into an inevitable maturity phase: Do we push growth along or innovate? The unspoken question being, “Do we milk this sucker or do we take a left turn and try to reignite growth?”

At least for now, Yellow Tail is taking the safe route. In the words of Renato Reyes, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Deutsch, as quoted in the NYT’s, he said Yellow Tail as, “The go-to” is “trying to own ‘occasionality’” and be, “the spine of (consumer) purchasing behavior.”
A look at their media mix indicates that their digital activity is skewing female with its current focus on the young female movie Bridesmaid on Facebook in addition to late night television with its young male audience and lifestyle channels that hit a broad, culturally literate, age-spanning audience. Apparently, Yellow Tail is going for reach in trying to hit a mass segment of people that are likely wine-interested, but not wine enthusiastic (see all the creative here).
By trying to be the “spine” of wine purchasing behavior, they’re trying to create brand loyalty, notoriously difficult to achieve in wine, but akin to regular purchasers of any other consumer goods where repeatable familiarity drives business.
As Reyes noted to the NYT’s, if every Yellow Tail consumer makes a purchase, “One more time, that would represent 10 percent growth.”
Incrementalize.
In my opinion, this audience traded up a price level to Malbec and Moscato, but that’s anecdotal and definitely beside the point.
Meanwhile, an industry hangs in the balance… or does it?
Some tastemakers are coming back around to Australia as evidenced by a recent story by Jay McInerney in the Wall Street Journal where he noted in a similarly themed article about Australia’s current wine misfortune, “I’m ready and willing to revisit Australia.”

Likewise, the Dean of working wine writers, Dan Berger, recently confronted Australian wine (mis)perceptions head-on using a “young wine blogger” as his foil (likely a Slats Grobnik-like writing device) where he made the case that the best red wines in Australia, “Are balanced and age nicely.”
So, where does this leave Australian wine that doesn’t have a kangaroo? Is it wearing a bumblebee colored hairshirt, casually waiting for one brands decline in order to catch its next wave of momentum? Will Yellow Tail find additional green, continuing to leave fine Australian wines in the red? I suspect the answer is no. But, regardless of Yellow Tail’s sales, and even if re-emergent, Newton’s Law of Motion also states that when a force is directed at an object it accelerates in proportion to and in the direction of that force.
Inexpensive plonk and marketing campaigns aside, I suspect that Yellow Tail and Australian wines of character can co-exist and the real force that is starting to accelerate are the U.S. wine influencers and tastemakers, the progenitors of the, “Derision Decision,” who will soon direct their energy on the good in Australia and not their perception of the bad.
That’s a force (and trend) worth watching and one that Newton, also a wine drinker, would approve of.
Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/will_yellow_tail_find_more_green/
Source: http://www.winecountrygetaways.com/napablog/may-is-bocce-month-in-wine-country/