The Washington Wine Commission has finally recognized that locals drink wine and wants us to uncork more locally produced bottles. They've come up with something called a World Class Value Pass, a sort of "Yes in my backyard" promotion that saves money on purchases of local wine. (Download is here.) Tie-ins with next month's Restaurant Week, discounts on wine purchases at tasting rooms and retail stores, even a smart-phone app. The Wine Commission is spending $100,000 to support the campaign, the first time it's promoted Washington wine in-state.
Meantime, a fanfare, please, for the delegation about to disembark: celebrity visitors like the sommeliers at Michael Mina (the San Francisco restaurateur, eyeing the former Rite Aid space at Fourth & Pike for his first foray into the Northwest), a for the half dozen or so of Master Sommeliers, for the guy who buys wine for Costco. They're coming to visit on Sunday for a weeklong visit that includes meetings with grape growers and wine makers as well as hands-on experience in the vineyards cellars. The ulterior motive, explains Gary Werner of the Washington State Wine Commission, is to harness some of the $750 million in buying power represented by the 45 visitors. Give them a pair of secateurs and turn them loose on the semillon, and you've made a lifelong fan of Washington wine, the thinking goes.
It's an excellent approach to new markets (and new sales):invite the opinion leaders to your house and pour the good stuff. Cornichon leaves tomorrow for two weeks in France, invited for just that reason: to see and taste what's new in one of the undervalued sub-appellations of Bordeaux and, the following week, what's tastiest along the Upper Rhine Valley (Alsace, southern Germany, Switzerland). Then, at a trade show sponsored by the French Tourism Promotion Agency, I'm on a panel evaluating the French response to wine tourism. The notion that you need to educate wine buyers back home might seem a bit, well, foreign to the Europeans.
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