These emails may even contain more than a grain of truth. In support of that truth, wine sellers often use the opinions of well-known people and publications, at least when those opinions are supportive. Indeed, the more supportive they are, the more likely they are to be quoted. So, an email inbox full of these offerings does, in my mind anyway, raise the question of just how often particular people / publications get cited. Moreover, I have wondered whether the USA and Europe quote the same people to the same extent.
To answer these questions, I have used two sources of information. The data for the USA come from Bob Henry (a business school-educated, ad agency-trained wine marketer based in Los Angeles), who has long used Gmail to archive email-blast offerings from many of the leading US wine merchants (they are listed at the bottom of this post). I searched through the 14,403 emails from late 2006 to April 2017. The data for Europe are my own, which I collected from April 2017 to March 2018, totaling 1,728 emails. These came from merchants in Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (they are also listed at the bottom of this post).
The results are shown in the following table.
Emails Publications Wine Advocate Wine Spectator Vinous Wine Enthusiast Decanter La Revue du Vins de France Falstaff El Mundo Vino People Robert Parker James Suckling Stephen Tanzer Antonio Galloni Neal Martin Jancis Robinson James Laube Ian D'Agata Bettane & Desseauve Tim Atkin Jeff Leve Daniele Cernilli |
USA 14,403 7,212 3,802 879 510 431 8 2 2 6,890 1,209 1,143 1,015 447 118 94 36 7 6 4 2 |
Europe 1,728 45 127 3 45 75 0 87 0 1,107 66 0 13 2 10 6 24 0 0 0 0 |
Not very surprising, is it? [Note: I did search for other publications and names, but drew a blank for them.]
The Wine Spectator has had around 350,000 paid subscribers, while the Wine Advocate has had 40-50,000. In both cases these are likely to be predominately US residents. Mind you, the subscription penetration rate of habitual US wine drinkers is likely to be <1%. However, in the matter of marketing wines this is what the retailers have, and the Advocate is usually noted to out-perform the Spectator, in terms of quotability. However, this is only true in the USA. In Europe, the Spectator, the UK-published Decanter, and the Austrian Falstaff magazine appear to do better.
For individuals, Robert M. Parker Jr has been the world's wine guru for several decades, although his influence may now be on the wane. Perhaps he has been under-performing, since he only made it into 48% of the US emails? After all, he made it into 64% of the European emails! However, note that the US wine stores may mention either Parker or the Advocate (his former newsletter), whereas the European stores focus almost solely on the man himself, when quoting wine opinions.
Indeed, other than Parker, the European emails do not cite many critics at all. This is in marked contrast to the US emails, where at least three other people get quoted 5-10% of the time. This may have something to do with the fact that most of the critics are based in the USA, even if they do comment on wines worldwide.
The profession (or sport) of quotable wine criticism was developed in the USA — in Europe, there are far fewer critics whose commentary is worded in a manner likely to help sell a lot of wine. Indeed, the most quotable information is usually a quality score, and many of the European critics eschew the art (or sport) of scoring wines. For example, Jancis Robinson may well be "better known than Robert Parker Jnr, at least outside the US", but her wine notes (and lack of scores) are not the stuff that advertising copywriters dream of.
This, perhaps, is the situation in Europe — there is no reason why the local critics should be helping to advertise wine, as opposed to helping consumers identify desirable wines. So, the critics are not providing quotability. The US critics, on the other hand, are very much doing so, and are thereby being cited more prominently in their homeland. Parker and his Wine Advocate have provided the archetypal selling points (ie. quality scores), along with the Wine Spectator. It will be interesting to see what happens under the new regime at the Advocate.
You may also ask yourself why sites like CellarTracker are not quoted. After all, approval by a community site should, in theory, encourage other consumers. Perhaps it has a lot to do with the fact that the scores are averaged across a number wine drinkers, and are therefore lower than those of individual critics (a score of 89 will not sell a wine but 90 will). More importantly, perhaps, the scores do not accumulate until after the retailers have started selling the wines (post hoc scores will not sell wines but a priori ones will). This suggests that the critics will continue to wield power, at least in the world of wine marketing.
The emails came principally (but not solely) from the following stores.
USA:
Aabalat Fine & Rare Wines
Calvert Woodley Wines & Spirits
Golden West Wines
Hi-Time Wine Cellars
K&L Wine Merchants
Post Wines & Spirits
The Rare Wine Co.
D. Sokolin & Co.
Wine Access
Wine Cellarage
Wine Exchange
Wine Garage
Europe:
AporVino
Bernabei
eBuy Wines
Enoteca d'autore
Nickolls & Perks
SangiShop
Sicilstore
Superiore
Vinello
Vinissimus
Vinoteket
Vintjansten
WineFinder
XtraWine
Hi there. How can you compare USA and EU with such a big difference of checked emails? And the number of retailers seems also quite low to me.
ReplyDeleteHej! I have treated both sets of data as being samples. Sample bias is more important than sample size, so your second question is the more important one. A different set of stores may produce different results, of course. However, this is simply a blog post, not a research paper. If I was writing the latter, I might do things somewhat differently.
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