Your customer purchased your 2009 Viognier and raved about it to their family and friends.  Great!  But will you be able to produce one similar next year when they come back for more?  From grape growing to customer visit cycles, creating stability is one of the biggest agricultural challenges and in turn, marketing challenges facing small wineries.

Rothschild can get $1200 a bottle on its best years.  Sounds amazing, right?  Well, let’s take a closer look.  These “best” years – when the weather has been perfect, disease and insects under control and the grapes exceptional – happen only 5 out of 25 years, or 20% of the time.  From these few great harvests, only the “best of the best” grapes are pulled aside to make these rare great wines.  This fine selection only represents about 5% of all the wine Rothschild makes, leaving 95% behind for the bulk of their wine sales or to sell to other wineries.

But you say you don’t have the Rothschild name, the state-of-the-art vineyards and equipment, nor the luxury of waiting for these exceptional years to come around?

Well then, let’s check out another winery we all know, Ravenswood.  Have you noticed that the year on their bottle of zinfandel doesn’t make a difference?  You know what you are going to get when you open a bottle….despite the year, whether it was a great harvest or not. Is every bottle of Ravenswood Zin the same? Of course not. In fact, every year the specific blend used to create their zinfandel is different. It has to be! To create a wine that is similar year-to-year, one that their customers can count on, the winemaker has to blend differently to compensate for the differences in each harvest.  Fruit from several vineyards and from many varieties are blended in different percentages each year to create a wine that is similar over and over again.  Ravenswood’s motto is “no wimpy wine.”  Note, it does not say no wimpy grapes or vineyards – just that the finished wine will not be wimpy.

Similar does not mean the same, but …

As head winemaker for Premier Wine Blends, I’ve learned that crafting a quality wine is part art and part science and that reliably blending an artistically styled wine year after year can be done, but it takes critical skill.  Your odds for success are much better if you build customer loyalty through a community of passion for your wines. I’m interested in hearing about the blends your customers have come to love and depend on.  Please share your challenges and triumphs with us!

Remember, most of the great wines of the world are blends.   There’s a reason for that!