Does the wine industry do a lousy job marketing to women? That’s what this article in the Oregonian says.

“[T]he corporate wine world has got it wrong when it comes to marketing to women” is the conclusion, and the article offers plenty of supporting evidence, most of it anecdotal. There are all those dumb brand names that are supposed to appeal to women: Little Black Dress, Girly Girl wine, White Lie, and they might have mentioned Bitch wine, with its pretty in pink label.

The article also draws a sharp line between the way men and women shop for wine. Men, who are “more likely to be posting on eRobertParker,” will “bring in their Blackberries and look up Spectator points.” Women by contrast “come in [the store] by themselves…Their attitude seems to be more, ‘This is what I really like and that’s why I want to drink it.’ It’s really more about ‘me time’ rather than getting another 95-point trophy to show your friends,” says the owner of a Portland wine bar.

The article cites some female wine marketers who give advice on how to target women. “Emphasize the ‘elegance’ of wine…Advertise the activity, not the object…How about showing women cooking together or sitting at their book club, socializing and enjoying wine…”.

I asked my Facebook friends what they think of the industry’s marketing to women, and the replies came in fast and furious. “The wine industry does a crap job of marketing to everybody. Women just get an extra dose of crappy,” said one, a man. A woman, who sounds like she had a lot of pent-up feelings, wrote, “Overall the wine industry does a TERRIBLE time marketing to women. We are treated overall like second class citizens or as if we are attempting to enter an all male social club. I’ve actually had wine merchants say to me ‘Wow, not many women know what they are talking about when it comes to wine.’ Really? Really? Maybe if they would shut up and freaking listen to us, they would understand how ridiculous that statement is.”

Another woman summed it up: “Women don’t buy on points, first of all (the ‘mine is bigger than yours’ doesn’t work). And women don’t like dumbed down wines (less calories!) or ridiculous targeted names (girly girl? give me a break). This is why tastings are important, because women seem to buy what they like and in order to do that, they must have a reference.”

I thought about the women I know who buy wine. They’re mostly strong and independent, and can hold their own with a bunch of yakkity guy wine snobs. But maybe that’s just the women in my life. It does sound like there’s a problem out there, especially considering that women drink most of the wine consumed in the U.S.

If there is a certain anti-woman snobbism in fine wine shops, I can relate to how women experience it. I remember how awkward I used to feel when I went into Draper & Esquin, an upscale shop in the Financial District. This was back in the Eighties, when I was getting into wine. I was ready to buy (not the most expensive bottles, but still), I was curious and had questions, and I longed for the clerks to make me feel welcome. They never did. Instead, they made me feel like I didn’t belong there. You can communicate a lot through body language, and theirs was basically: get lost. As a result, I never bought a single bottle at Draper & Esquin, which eventually closed down. Gee, I wonder why.

I haven’t yet addressed the issue of HR 5034, now going through the U.S. House of Representatives, because it seemed complicated, and I didn’t want to take a position until I understood the details.

I wanted to try and see this from the distributors’ point of view. There may be a case in favor of restrictions on alcohol sales of the kind they’re trying to push through in 5034. After all, alcohol isn’t your average consumer product, it’s a drug. If it gets into the wrong hands, it can cause lots of pain. So I didn’t want to have a kneejerk reaction and just say, “All distributors are jerks,” even though my initial instincts were strongly in favor of direct shipping. Sometimes, instinct needs to be tempered by informatio, and gathering information takes time. In the end, though, I’m coming out against 5034, because the arguments in favor of it are very weak, and they don’t stand up to intellectual scrutiny.

Most of what I knew about 5034 came via Tom Wark, who’s blogged extensively against it at Fermentation. As Tom explained it to me, 5034 was a sort of end run around the Supreme Court’s famous 2005 Granholm v. Heald decision, in which SCOTUS said (I’m paraphrasing) states cannot prohibit wineries from other states from sending in their wines to consumers, if those same states allow their own wineries to disseminate wines. It was a basic issue of fairness, but also seemed to comply with the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3) of the U.S. Constitution, which gives the Congress — not the separate states — the power to regulate interstate shipping.

That was a good development, especially for smaller wineries, who had found themselves locked out of the distribution system. The smaller wineries wanted to be able to ship their wines directly to customers anywhere in the country, especially in the age of the Internet; and Granholm v. Heald seemed to give them that right (although when I interviewed Ken Starr, who successfully argued the case, he told me it would be many years before there was unfettered wine shipping across U.S. states, and boy, was he right).

Tom also explained to me that 5034, if enacted, “would give states the ability to enact discriminatory bans on wine shipping,” reasons too complicated to get into. Bottom line, according to Tom: “The law encourages and will result in states… passing bans on direct shipping that cannot be challenged in court.” (Disclosure: Tom is the paid executive director of the Specialty Wine Retailers Association, which is very anti-5034, and so he’s not exactly unbiased. But I am.)

I always operate on the theory that you can figure out what’s up with an issue by seeing who’s for it and who’s against. So who’s in favor of 5034? Let’s start with the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America. In a press release last April, they “encouraged members of Congress to support state-based regulation of alcohol and look beyond the mischaracterizations and misinformation being circulated” by its opponents, like Wark and SWRA. They took a states-rights position — the kind that conservative red states always take when they want to be discriminatory — and said 5034 would “place the burden in litigation where it should be: on the plaintiff challenging a state alcohol law.” That’s pretty much the same flimsy argument that opponents of Brown v. Board of Education used in the 1950s: the Federal government doesn’t have the right to desegregate public schools, and if a black family doesn’t like a school’s admission policy, they can sue that school board in court. If not for Brown v. Board, we’d still have segregated schools today.

WSWA also argued that 5034 doesn’t violate the Commerce Clause because it “does not expand state legislative or regulatory authority into what is currently and appropriately federal jurisdiction.” This seems to me to be disingenuous, an Alice-through-the-looking-glass playing with words. WSWA says that the Federal government, through agencies like TTB, FTC and FDA, remains free to regulate alcohol “in such areas as labeling, advertising and food safety.” Okay, but if the Feds can regulate in those areas, why can’t they regulate interstate shipping? Totally bogus argument.

Finally, WSWA asserts 5034 “does not favor any segment or tier of the industry.” Puh-leeze! Everybody knows 5034 favors wholesalers. Who’s kidding whom?

Who else is in favor of 5034? Well, there’s the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA), whose position is a carbon copy of WSWA’s (and for similar reasons). Then there are 5034’s backers in the Congress, about 100 of them. There’s ample evidence that WSWA and NBWA have contributed boatloads of money to their supporters, as for instance here and here and, especially, here, where you can draw direct lines between WSWA’s main contributors (all the big distributors) and individual congressmen who are beneficiaries of its largesse (and by the way, this isn’t a partisan issue: Democrats and Republicans alike take campaign donations from WSWA and NBWA).

So what we have is a collection of odd bedfellows lined up in favor of 5034: wholesalers, distributors, and the politicians who take their money to run for election or re-election.

Now, who’s against 5034? Like I said, there’s Tom Wark and his Specialty Wine Retailers Association. No surprise there, since their members are smaller wineries and merchants, and their slogan is “wine without borders.” Also against the bill is Free the Grapes!, which is a leading group in favor of direct interstate shipping of wine; various state legislatures (including the New Jersey Senate, where my cousin, Sen. Loretta Weinberg, voted to open up interstate wine shipping); the Wine Institute; Family Winemakers of California, and many congressmen from wine-producing districts, including Rep. Mike Thompson, who represents the North Coast.

For me, the good guys are against 5034 and are in favor of the free, unfettered shipment of alcohol, to and from adults, throughout the 50 states. Isn’t that as it should be in America — isn’t that as Thomas Jefferson intended? I don’t want to say those in favor of 5034 are bad guys, because I’m sure they’re good people who are simply trying to protect their economic interests, same as all of us do. But I’m siding with those trying to defeat 5034. It’s a bad bill. Please call your Congressional representative and urge him or her to oppose it.

Two things that happened lately have made me think about how the law as its currently written allows wine brands to cloak themselves in absolute secrecy concerning where the stuff in the bottle actually comes from.

Over the weekend I went down to my local Cost Plus, as I sometimes do, to hang out in the wine section and talk to the guy who works there. He was explaining why some bottles are priced at $X.97, where others are $X.98 or $X.99. The .97s are closeouts. The .99s are the regular price (reminded me of when Don Draper said, on Mad Men, “Whoever invented .99 cents was a genius!”), and then there are the .98s. Those are the most interesting category; they’re mainly wines that Cost Plus bought, out there on the open market, then labeled with their own made-up brands.

First off, you’d never know that these are Cost Plus brands unless you asked; each brand has a different name and a different label design (although all the labels are similar enough in style to suggest they were designed by the same hand). Secondly, you’ll never know who actually made the wine, or where the grapes were grown. Take that Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. Was it made by a well-known Napa winery that couldn’t sell it at their usual price because of the Recession? Lots of wineries don’t want to reduce their prices, because if the economy ever rebounds, consumers who are paying $12.99 will resist paying the $40 the wine cost before the Recession. So these wineries will sell off their wines to an outfit like Cost Plus. Sometimes (the clerk told me), the wine is in the bottle. All Cost Plus has to do is remove the old label and put on the new one.

The consumer is often the beneficiary of this, of course, since she stands to get a $40 bottle for $12.99. But wouldn’t it be nice to know who actually made the wine and where precisely it’s from? I think so. But as far as I know, there’s no law, federal or California, that mandates such transparency. There should be.

The other thing that happened was that I got an email press release from a new brand, which I won’t identify because there’s no need to. Suffice it to say it’s a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. After touting the wine (which I have not had), the press release said, “There are several intriguing mysteries about the wine—one of which is that the winemaker’s name will not be disclosed. In addition, the exact vineyard sources for the Cabernet grapes will not be divulged.”

Well, I emailed the people back and asked why they couldn’t divulge the winemaker or source, and the answer was: confidentiality agreements. Whoever made the wine evidently had a say in whether his or her name could be associated with it. Ditto for whoever owned the grapes.

I can understand why a winemaker or winery would not want it to be known that they’re basically dumping unsellable wine at bargain basement prices. On the other hand, I think consumers have a right to know where their wine comes from and who made it. Maybe most consumers don’t care. All they want is a tasty glass of wine at a good price. But surely, some consumers desire to know this information. I do. Do you?

Just when we thought the U.S. had rounded the corner of the recession, there are renewed fears of the notorious “double dip” (or, more colorfully, the “dead cat bounce”) of the economy’s performance. The Dow Jones stock index has fallen more than 1,000 points since April, triggering a new mood of gloom. Financial problems in Europe seem to be the proximate cause of the problem. Not being an economist, I’m not in a position to analyze what’s going on; not even the economists agree on the causes. But “recovery,” whatever that is, does seem agonizingly slow. Not only is the stock market in trouble, unemployment remains stubbornly high. Banks still aren’t lending; people still aren’t spending. It all adds up to what Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times this past weekend, calls “the new pessimism” in America.

Friedman casts his gaze over the economic landscape and perceives some pretty dire things. Consumer prices continue to fall, leading to the prospects of deflation. I used to think deflation was a pretty cool thing, as it would make the things I want more affordable. But no; Friedman calls deflation “really bad news” because it “tends to perpetuate an economic slump, because it encourages people to hoard cash rather than spend, which keeps the economy depressed, which leads to more deflation.”

This isn’t particularly good news for the wine industry. I sometimes look back over the last twenty years here in California in total wonderment. How have these thousands of wineries all have managed to survive? Somebody should write a book about it. The top-of-the-head answer is that the 1990s was a time of such economic boom that almost any winery owner, no matter how lame, could make money simply by riding the expanding economic bubble.

But just behind the shiny surface of that bubble, there always lurked a troubling spectre: debt. Winery owners are no different from the rest of us. They have debt; the only way they can pay their bills is to sell product at a profit. So what happens when “people…hoard cash rather than spend”?

Krugman himself doesn’t have an answer. He suggests he’s in favor of Stimulus II, but acknowledges it “would have no chance of getting through a Congress that has been spooked by the deficit hawks.” Short of that, all he can come up with is “hope [which] is not a plan.”

I doubt if many California wineries have a plan, either, to ride out the next several years, which Friedman says could resemble Japan’s infamous “Lost Decade” of the 1990s. Many are hoping that the Internet and direct shipping will come to their rescue, but of course, it won’t. Others play the old game of reshuffling their sales and marketing teams, but that increasingly seems like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Some strike off in the direction of new varieties they hope will excite consumers: Nebbiolo, Trebbiano, Pinotage. Others place their hopes on labels that jump off the shelf, or cute proprietary names. Winemakers travel more than they used to, schlepping from city to city to meet with clients, trying to persuade them to buy a case or two. If it’s Wednesday, we must be in Cleveland! P.R. agents court writers like Romeo crooning to Juliet on her balcony. Stores try to figure out how to position wines so they sell, what names to call the aisles, what to put in the window to lure shoppers in. The big wine companies are bringing in experts from other industries with a proven track record of sales. Everybody’s trying to game the market. It’s crazy.

It’s tempting to predict that, if anyone survives, it will be the big wine companies like Gallo, Bronco and Constellation, because in the past, they always have. That’s probably true, especially with private companies, which don’t have to satisfy shareholders and thus can steer a more controlled course. But we’ve seen big companies hit the ropes. (Hello, Foster’s! And does anyone remember Heublein?) Then I think of the thousands of small family wineries, from Temecula to Placerville, Salinas Valley to Mendocino, Lodi to Lompoc, and I really have to wonder if they’re going to make it through America’s Lost Decade. I hate to sound gloomy, but I am. There are also lots and lots of really nice wines from foreign countries that cost much less than even mediocre California wines that tend to be high-priced. Why would anybody pay more for less? There’s nothing deader than a dead cat bounce.

The conventional wisdom — and it was taken very seriously all the years I was coming up in wine — always was that a winery’s suggested retail price (SRP), which was determined by the producer, was going to be higher than the price consumers could find it at retail. That was because wineries did not want to compete with their own retail accounts by undercutting them on price. That rule was ironclad: thou shalt not undercut your own retail accounts!

I thought that still was the case until yesterday, when I ran into Marcus Graziano. He’s the owner of Capitol Cellars, a retail establishment in Roseville (Placer County). Marcus not only sells wine from his store, one of the best in the Sierra Foothills, he also supplies private buyers throughout the country with ultrapremium wine. And according to him, ever since the Recession, wineries are “destroying retail relationship” by undercutting prices on their websites, usually to their club members, by as much as 50% off SRP.

This really pisses Marcus off. The first thing he told me is that “The wine business is all about relationships.” That traditionally meant that wineries understood the role of retailers, which was not only to sell their wines, but to help promote them, and thus form over time a solid friendship based on mutual interest. The merchant hand-sold the wine, and made a little profit on it, while the winery was able to deplete merchandise through the store.

“But now, they’re screwing me!” Marcus says, passionately. “When Nickel & Nickel is giving more off on their website than I reasonably can, it makes me look like the bad guy.” Same with Rosenblum and Bighorn. “Grgich Hills’ sales guy stopped by to make an appointment to taste,” Marcus says. “I pulled up their website and saw a huge discount, so I told the guy, ‘I have no interest in working with you. I think you guys don’t care about my business.’” The same thing had happened with the Nickel & Nickel account. “I called them and talked to their hospitality person, and explained my situation. She completely understood — but she said she doesn’t write policy.”

Marcus estimates that up to 40% of wineries are massively discounting on their websites.

Marcus is frustrated. His business is still doing okay, because for every winery that he longer does business with, there are others “who still support us.” He mentions Ghost Block and Pahlmeyer, in particular, as producers “who get it. They don’t want to screw me or any of their producers by discounting their wine.”

Still, Marcus seems a little spooked by the times. Direct-to-consumer is the Holy Grail among producers these days, what with the distribution system impossibly choked and dominated by a few giant companies, consumers in a stingy mood, and the future bleakly uncertain for many. The light at the end of tunnel, wineries feel, is direct-to-consumer, especially club sales.

But Marcus warns that that light may be “a disaster.” Wineries need retailers and will for a long time, he asserts. Proprietors who think otherwise — who don’t want to take the time and energy to form and maintain retailer relationships — “are lazy. They don’t want to work with us. They’d make more money charging full retail to their clubs, instead of ruining us.”

Marcus sees his own light at the end of the tunnel. “At the higher end, which is where we work, consumers are returning to speciality wine shops, who appeal to their needs and tastes.”

I’ve tried to penetrate the conundrums on this one. One the one hand, I can understand why wineries would look to DTC as a way out. If you can heavily discount to stimulate your club sales, that must look awfully attractive to beleaguered owners. On the other hand, this discounting has to be hurting merchants, and merchants are a winery’s friend. Like Marcus says, it is all about relationships. So I’m not sure what the solution is. This seems to be just one more example of how topsy-turvy everything is in the wine industry these days. The old paradigms are disappearing, and what will replace them, nobody knows.