Thinking Yellow

We've been visiting wineries and vineyards in Collio these past few days, an appellation in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeastern Italy, on the border with Slovenia. Our little band of wine writers was invited by the local consorzio, the association of Collio wine producers. Their numbers are relatively modest a mere 100 or so wine-producing members, another 80 growers, a production zone of only 3,500 acres (one tenth the Napa Valley). Still, they produce seven million bottles a year, and the first thing you learn about marketing is that it isn't the number of acres you harvest or cases you ship but bottles you have to sell, one by one.

Seven million times a year, someone in the world has to forsake all others and drink a wine from Collio.

So Collio has done what many others have: hired advisers to supplement their own marketing efforts. On the domestic side, the campaign for one indigenous variety, ribolla gialla, was simple: "Think Yellow." The yellow Porsche belongs to Marco Primosic, vice-president of the Consorzio. Big success.

What can else we do, they wondered, to make the vineyards themselves a more enticing destination for Italian and nearby European visitors? Germans, Austrians, Slovenians, Swiss. Once they're here, they'll drink our wines and become ambassadors for the region, the thinking goes. One suggestion, championed by chef Josko Sirk of La Subida (the region's best restautant) and winemaker Edi Keber (a bluff gent with fabulous wine and a taste for avant-garde art, but no website): "self-drive" scooters that would allow tourists to zip around these picturesque hills.

The consorzio sponsored the project, and over the past year five dozen Vespas, painted bright yellow, have been parked at wineries and agriturismos (farmhouse B&Bs) around the Collio production zone. "Collio on a Vespa" has its own website and multilingual maps, collioinvespa.it It's a terrific site, by the way.

The scooters have been a big hit, and the concept has been imitated in other wine regions. The consorzio's agency hired a famous photographer and art director, Oliviero Toscani,
who'd done the (controversial but successful) Benneton campaign to create an ad for Collio. The image would also be used to brand the new Vespas.
Toscani didn't disappoint: his ad is simultaneously witty and whimsical, sexy and scandalous. What the headline says is: "The only white I love."

To puritanical, politically correct American eyes, the campaign might appear both awkwardly racist and clumsily sexist, not to mention the whole drinking and driving thing. Although the US is the number one export market for the winegrowers here, the campaign is for domestic consumption only, so it probably doesn't matter. What was it that Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation? Doesn't matter.