Label Suggestions for Wine Imports Into America

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It’s tough to get wine sold, anywhere, any time. But, it’s especially difficult as an import or export.  Here’s some suggestions if you’re looking to sell some wine in America.

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, Mark Aselstine with Uncorked Ventures. I’m going to hold this up so you can get a fairly good look at it, so yeah. It’s a Chianti from Italy, and no, I don’t sell it in my wine clubs. One of the interesting things about the wine trade and one of the things that I try to really do a good job about is not falling into the confirmation bias trap. So confirmation bias, which I think most of you are probably familiar with, it’s if you do the same thing, and you say the same thing, and you experience the same thing over and over, you start to think that that is the experience and that is the way a certain thing is supposed to happen. And so when it comes to wine, if I only were to drink Napa Cab every day, then if I drank Cabernet Sauvignon from say Bordeaux or say from Washington state, I might say, “Wow. This isn’t very good, because this is not what I was used to.” They’re perfectly fine wines, and they’re great wines of course. Bordeaux especially is probably the trendsetter in the industry, but it’s different than Napa, so it really bad or worse, or is it just different? And so that’s confirmation bias.

And so one of the ways that I try to fight confirmation bias as somebody who buys wine for a living is that I try to experience wines from different regions both as far as different varietals but then also different winemaking styles and try to talk to people that have different opinions about wine than my own. And so I found myself drinking a bottle of Italian Chianti, and Chianti, if you’re not familiar, is made from Sangiovese most of the time. I’ve done a couple of Sangios in wine clubs over the last few months, so I wanted to check in on an Italian version of the varietal around the same price point as my entry level Explorations Wine Club. And so one of the things that comes out in some of this conversations when I meet vintners or winery owners or small winery owners from overseas when they’re here in the United States, especially in San Francisco, trying to hock some of their wine or trying to find distribution relationships is they often say, “Hey, can you come look at this bottle? What do you think? What do you think about this?” And maybe not quite as relevant for me as it would be for somebody who owned a physical wine store where you’d have to go in the front door et cetera, but I can make some suggestions.

So like the United States, Italy and most of the other wine producing countries in the world have very strict rules and regulations about what can be on the label et cetera et cetera, but one thing that I think a lot of international folks drop the ball on is that there’s not rules saying you can’t give them all this information. I’m going to flip this around, and I hope you can get a good look at it, so you can see on the back, so you’ve got on the top, there’s a little mission statement. It talks about the family. It gives the information on the winemaker. As you go down a little bit, you’ll see food pairing suggestions. You’ll see the exact type of grapes that are in the wine. I think that’s really important actually because most of these European wine labels, they’re Chianti … If you don’t know what Chianti means, and you don’t know that it means a certain percentage of Sangiovese involved, and they have got all this other information on the back, and I think this is really kind of [inaudible 00:02:45].

If I was going to show somebody a wine label and tell them, “This is something that was made well for the United States. Here it is.” So the front label, there’s not a whole lot they can do about it, but the back label, they give people a whole lot of information. It’s clearly been written in English not written in Italian and then translated, and it gives people everything that we would look for if I were to write a wine club newsletter about it, but it also gives people, if you’re going to grab this on the store, you would look at the back. You would know exactly what you were getting, and I think that’s the main problem that so many Americans run into is they don’t know enough about every single wine region across the entire world to know exactly what they’re getting just by the fact that it says Chianti and the smaller subregion.

And so here it is. Folks have done a nice job with this, and I think they’ll see sales, and they’ll see more placements because of that. So once again, Mark Aselstine with Uncorked Ventures. Hope everybody’s having a good day.

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