In a recent post I summarized some dialogue about the wine industry’s slow adoption of
social media. Many speak of the need for engagement, and I wondered if the problem lays less in social media per se, and more in a general lack of appreciation for customer engagement.
We need to serve, not just produce.
Allow me to articulate that point a bit further. As our economy shifts from manufacturing to service and consumption, it has equally shifted the way in which we ought to interact with our customers. (I say shifts because the US, as of 2009, was still the largest manufacturer of goods globally, but the rate of increase has virtually been stagnant since 2006 as other countries rapidly pick up the slack and the US share of manufacturing has decreased since 1970. Look no further than IBM as a proxy to the shift). Add the changes in the method of purchase and brand exposure, and the onus is ever more placed on the company to educate and engage their end consumers.
Has the wine industry really ever done this very well? I submit that we have not, particularly Continue reading
Donelan Recipes: Risotto and Shrimp paired with Cuvee Moriah
Risotto is like winemaking. I love preparing dishes that provide flexibility and freedom within a standard framework. Cooking is not unlike winemaking, where principles are applied similarly to each variety and vintage. But within each vintage or variety, there is plenty of room for creativity and nuances based on the producer’s choices. Risotto is such a dish.
During winter, we love making dishes that are hearty, go well with red wine, and stick to 
your ribs. Risotto is such a dish and yet paradoxically seems lighter and less exhausting to the palate than something like Beef Bourgone (another favorite). With a big salad and good crunchy bread, risotto makes a wonderful mid-week dinner on its own (even if usually served as a primo). My favorite Donelan wine to enjoy with this dish is the 2009 Cuvee Moriah. Its bright red fruit, herbs-de-provence characters along with its supple, firm structure pair so comfortably with the lighter flavors but rich textures of the risotto.
Risotta confines you to the stove once you begin preparing it, which can make serving it for dinner parties more difficult. Since we always find our friends in our kitchen regardless of the dish, what difference does it make! Much of the chopping and prep can be done in advance, though once you start cooking you’ll be locked in.
The following recipe is adapted from Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef and my Father’s methods Continue reading
Social Media in the Wine World: poor customer engagement?
I (Tyler) wonder whether the growing concern with the wine industry’s slow adoption of social media is a social media problem per se, or a historic problem of poor customer engagement. Kid Napa does a good job summarizing a recent discussion on the issue, though it also has been tackled directly by others such as Alder Yarrow, Steve Heimoff, and Joe Roberts.
Before adding my wrinkle as a winemaker for a small, boutique brand I’ll summarize 
well-outlined positions that are perfectly valid, and often perfectly correct. Joe Roberts notes that wineries need “engagement innovation…[or] the single most innovative outreach platform ever developed in the history of the human race – the Internet – to directly engage the people who buy their shiz” (emphasis mine). I agree with the principle, we need to engage our customers, and yes the internet is a key tool.
However I will add that many of our customers “who buy [our] shiz” don’t use social media. That’s right; our big buyers who drive the majority of our sales are not the ones engaging with us through social media. Perhaps industry ambivalence to social media is because we are not alone in this fact. We still engage the buyer in other ways and we utilize social media to engage our future customers, who are likely to use social media as another way to engage with us. It’s a matter of current versus potential customers: both are needed, both are valuable, and both desire to be engaged.
Providing ballast to Mr. Roberts, Steve Heimoff points out in “Hey Joe, lighten up on the social media thing” that winemakers are busy enough with countless other responsibilities and that adding another serious time drain is unfair. And while Gary V may be shouting “just wake up sooner, work more,” not all of us have the power to get 26 hours out of a day. Steve is correct; we do have many other tasks that drain our ability to drive the social media megaphone of the winery. That said, winemakers may need to locate the same passion and persistence in this arena that they do during harvest: overworked and overburdened as we may be, we have to roll up our sleeves and knock it out of the park anyway. No one is better positioned than we are to funnel information from site to cellar to customer. We ought to be the teachers: of the story, of the philosophy, of the vineyard, of the wine, etc. And while it can be tiring to take on these multiple roles all in one day, no more hiding behind your barrels and work orders! It is the appealing part about being a winemaker: multidisciplinary work!
Alder Yarrow, as is his tendency, brings an amount of sensibility and rationality to the discussion – as well as a good deal higher word count! He accurately points out that using social media is a necessity but that there are tools that can help wineries mitigate the size of the conundrum. Mr. Yarrow acknowledges that it’s work, but insists that it’s the right work to be doing. He’s right, and emphasizes Mr. Robert’s point in a more constructive way.
And for my wrinkle? Working with Joe Donelan – who until recently never used a computer – has taught me the lifetime value of the customer. It may have taken a bit to convince Joe of the importance of Twitter, but he has always understood the value of engagement (“engage, educate, and entertain!” he says). All the writers outlined above used the word “engagement.” But perhaps we should peel the onion back further; maybe the problem is not only a hesitation to work with social media but also a systemic problem with engaging customers.
Could it be that a historical lack of engagement (and maybe I’m being unfair) is partly to blame for the dearth of social media adoption? Haven’t consumers, until very recently, primarily been engaged with wineries through retailers? It seems the residue of an old manufacturing based economy is that we are slow to become energized in directly engaging customers. We are not the only industry that has been slow to realize that the U.S. is no longer a manufacturing-based economy but service-based economy. We are no longer just “suppliers” providing goods for some anonymous end consumer. We are service providers. At Donelan we are fully engaged in this process, even with the majority of our buyers, albeit not solely through social media. We write notes, we email, we call, we tweet, we post, we “like”, we serve our customers and anyone else who desires to learn about wine and our passion. In short, we “engage, educate, and entertain” at every opportunity.
If you’d like to engage with us, please click here!
Donelan Video: Tasting Donelan Obsidian Syrah at Obsidian Vineyard
Here is some unedited video of a tasting Donelan Winemaker Tyler Thomas did with the folks from Vinecrowd. Learn about what makes this wine so special, how to open a wax bottle, and how well this wine will age. Join the Donelan Community now, its free!
Originally filmed for Vinecrowd.
In vino veritas: how do we distill truth in making wine?
People love the phrase “in vino veritas”–in wine there is truth. But I wonder sometimes whether “in vino scientia” holds as well. Is there any true knowledge with wine?
The goal of obtaining more knowledge about wine growing is to use it to optimize our viticulture and enology to ensure we are making the best wine possible each vintage (not as some seem to think to increase technology and sameness in wines). In my time in the industry, I have observed a contextual approach to “knowing” and understanding. People tend to believe what they have experienced at their site, their winery, or in their lab, and often are skeptical of other insights.
While both the industry and academia can play a vital role in obtaining understanding, both have pitfalls. For example, science is extremely valuable and responsible for much beneficial technical knowledge. It can, however, be esoteric; difficult for research to integrate all true possibilities that affect a certain outcome, and disregard feedback from the industry. The scientific problem is often posed as one specific condition, but initial conditions of juice–or the condition of finished wine–rarely have only one element that may cause a problem.
The industry provides experience, empirical data, intuition, and is the cog of wine Continue reading
Crushed Chronicles – notes from the intern: Red Red Wine – the ubiquity of music in winemaking.
Want to find out what a wine grape harvest really is? Follow our intern, Sarah Green, as she chronicles her experience as a first time cellar rat. This entry highlights the beginning of the ubiquity of music in the process of winemaking.
Do you really know all that goes into producing the glass of wine you ar
e sipping? I didn’t either, and could music really be one of those elements? You bet.
It must be something about the acoustics in the cellar. All those hard surfaces – stainless steel tanks and cement floors – and cavernous spaces with ceilings high enough to store barrels six-high and tall stacks of cubic fermentation bins four-high. Or maybe it’s something about the long hours and the loud noises and the sweaty brows and bloody fingertips and the calculated distractions it takes to enjoy all of those.
No matter how you look at it, it’s hard to imagine the cellar without music. Music must be Continue reading
C.S. Lewis can Teach us about Writing a Wine Tasting Note.
While reading C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to my sons, I was struck 
by Lewis’s description of wine. It’s toward the end of the story; the big battle has been won and Aslan the great Lion King is touring the Narnian countryside with a singing, dancing, joyous Bacchus and his revelers freeing the once oppressed Narnian creatures. They come upon the house of an ailing woman and Bacchus offers her a pitcher of water from an old well. Lewis writes:
“…but now it was not water but the richest wine, red as red-currant jelly, smooth as oil, strong as beef, warming as tea, cool as dew.”
While this may not strike you as an appealing wine, I appreciate the simple and broad way that the description captures a wine’s greatness and emphasizes its role. I agree with New York Times wine columnist Eric Asimov who a while back spoke of the “tyranny of the tasting note.” He observes that people feel pressured to “understand” a wine by dismantling it. This obligation to deconstruct the wine into “bee pollen” or “sexy smoke” detracts from the wine’s foremost purpose: pleasure. Don’t be intimidated by the tasting note or the need to create one. While understanding individual elements of a wine might be a sufficient condition to increase your pleasure, it certainly is not a necessary condition. Learning about wine is important, but writing a tasting note and understanding great quality are two different endeavors. Increase your pleasure by decreasing your anxiety.
This is not to say that tasting notes are useless or negative. Indeed, the desire to talk about what delights us seems inherent in our nature (I can go on for hours about my wife, my children, and baseball). How else can I tell you about Donelan Cuvee Christine Syrah except by attempting to tell you what in particular I enjoy in the wine (a seamless balance between cherry licorice, clove, cardamom, and silk)?
Yet I wonder if broad, overarching descriptions that carry an elegant simplicity and convey context communicate quality and pleasure more successfully? Our Rosé descriptor merely says “fresh, pink, delicious.” When I evaluate whether we’ve produced a very good wine or a wine of greatness, I don’t examine whether it has notes of cherry, or clove, or bee pollen, or any other specific descriptor to make my conclusion. I look for overall complexity, depth, texture, mouth feel, and the persistence of the wine as a whole after your sip. These elements in the right proportions (enough, but not too much) make up the greatest wines.
So in the context of merrymaking and good people, spring’s warmth or Narnian creatures, C.S. Lewis teaches us what we need to know about Bacchus’s wine: it delivers richness, smoothness, strength, warmth, and refreshment. Fill my glass with more that I may fill my belly and draw my pleasure!
Originally written and published for Smart Tastes.
Donelan Wines Video: our philosophy of wine production.
Learn a bit about our approach and how we think we can make better wine.
A production of Donelan Wines and Smiling Tiger Video
It is What It is, or what a tired sports cliché can teach us about tasting wine with a Critic
It is what it is. The use of this popular cliché swelled in sports only a few years ago. I’ve heard it less recently (though “vanilla,” describing the unexciting nature of play calling or a baseball lineup, is on the rise to my dismay) but there was a period where “it is what it is” was it. I (Tyler) recently came across a 2008 article by Douglas McCollam exploring the phrase in sports and, as an amateur philosopher, I appreciated a reference to John Locke’s use of the phrase!
I have always interpreted the axiom as: what has happened is beyond control at this point, so let’s move on. John Locke was using it in reference to exploring the essence of a thing. Most athletes use the phrase to avoid saying more than they really want to about a situation that has already occurred.
Reporter: “What did you think of your coach making that call to end the game?” Athlete: “It is what it is, we didn’t win the game.”
I reflected on the phrase recently on the occasion of tasting with noted wine critic Antonio Galloni. This is the fourth year in a row where Joe Donelan and I have been fortunate Continue reading
Donelan Musings: Sondra Bernstein of The Girl and The Fig talks 2009 Venus Roussanne
The restauranteur Sondra Bernstein is the passion behind some of my (Tyler) favorite local haunts in Sonoma County. We are regulars at the Fig Cafe in Glen Ellen (I live right down the street), frequent The Girl and The Fig on the Sonoma Plaza and have enjoyed my experiences at ESTATE, also in Sonoma (you can explore all three with the link). One thing we love about The Girl and The Fig is their passion for Rhone-inspired wines. The entire wine list is comprised of varieties that originated in the bounty of the Rhone Valley in France.
Recently Sondra who seemingly has boundless amounts of energy to juggle all her activities found time to write about the Donelan 2009 Venus, a blend of Roussanne (90%) and Vigonier (10%) on her blog: Rhone Around the World, a Girl’s Obsession with Rhone Wine. The description of the wine is superb:
The 2009 Venus exhibits crisp, fresh, delicate but impressively intense notes of lychee nuts, caramelized citrus, spring flowers, fresh pears and honeysuckle. Medium-bodied with lively acidity as well as an exotic perfume and a dry, zesty style, I would recommend drinking it on the early side because of its exceptional aromatics. Great dry finish and a minerality on the back end.
However one of my favorite parts of the post is Sondra’s brief history of Bennett Valley, the source for our wonderful Roussanne. Read her whole post here and be sure to try the Venus!