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The world of wine can be as daunting as Hollywood. As a sommelier, my experience with movie-making was non-existent until a few months ago, when my memoir was published and I was thrown into a storm of agents, producers, showrunners, and option agreements. The labyrinthine process of adapting a book for the screen made me a fish out of water, and with money as the only common language between parties, I came to understand why so many authors take the check and walk away from development.
I empathize with the fact that the business of wine is just as confusing. But from the outside it seems that many of you celebrities-turned-winemakers have what most wineries only dream of: seemingly unlimited resources coupled with over a million followers on Instagram, where one post about a bottle equals thousands of dollars of sales. In my career as a sommelier in New York City's Michelin-starred restaurants, I’ve had the honor of serving many of you, and I think it’s important to recognize that some of you do have great taste in wine. How then were you bamboozled into putting your name on a wine that I cannot imagine you actually drinking yourself?
In 2020, there are now dozens of wines made by your fellow actors, athletes, musicians, reality television personalities, and even former porn stars. While some of my sommelier brethren take pleasure in criticizing the flavors of your wines ("fart wine," "flabby," "dirty") in a public forum, I instead would like to offer an alternative: Let us help you. It is obvious that there are a few crucial things your business manager or winery partner failed to mention about the process of making and selling wine, and a sommelier wouldn’t hesitate to bring you up to speed on them.
Wine is often compared to art or music but in actuality, there is nothing else like it. Unless you’re in northeastern Brazil, wine is only made once a year and, for a variety of reasons, it can express a taste of terroir, a somewhat mystical term that describes a sense of a place. The simplicity of this notion is what makes it so sacred. Many of the wines that we see you celebrities attaching your names to seem to avoid exploring this idea of terroir, and instead fall prey to marketing teams who favor the lifestyle categories of wellness and luxury, as viticulture and vinification methods take a back seat.
Celebrity licensing deals run the gamut from clothing lines to home goods, even to marijuana, so wine was bound to enter into this business venture equation eventually. As such, your managers and marketing teams are looking at it purely as a way to further squeeze money from your household name. But you cannot birth a wine with the same qualitative trajectory as you can, for example, a T-shirt brand or a scented candle. In fact, the more volume of wine you make, the less of a chance it has of being any good. Big brands that peddle commercial juice (you know the ones, like Barefoot and Sutter Home) clearly illustrate this. If someone tells you that they can grow your wine label into a multi-million dollar company, that should be an enormous, Burgundy-soaked red flag.
There is a saying that in order to make a small fortune in the wine world, one must start with a large fortune. The unfortunate truth in this is that true vignerons, everyday craftspeople who tend to their grapes, create out of passion rather than any motivations of wealth. As the poet Wendell Berry famously wrote, "Eating is an agricultural act," a notion that also applies to wine, its fleeting quality reliant on the unpredictability of Mother Nature. Monetizing wine as a "brand" happens when no adequate research has been done to understand what quality wine even is, or the social repercussions of why and how it is made.
Starting a winery could be an opportunity beyond profit. Global warming is directly affecting grape growers around the world. Imagine if your collective brand power advocated for greater sustainability in our industry, when currently almost none of you do. To start, you could discontinue any weighty glass bottles you currently use for your wines. As Eric Asimov noted in The New York Times, "The environmental cost of heavy bottles, from their production to the carbon cost of shipping them, is high." Instead of supporting behemoth wineries that have some of the highest carbon footprints in the world, you could build sustainable, zero-carbon facilities that use solar energy and minimize water usage. Simply saying your wine is "organic" or "clean" isn’t a revelation when most good wines use this as a bare minimum requirement.
Then there is your potential for inclusion of marginalized persons—some of you even fall into such categories yourselves—when few women and BIPOC hold positions as winemakers or winery owners. Consider the impact you, a celebrity with considerable influence, could make if you placed such candidates in these coveted positions. By the same token, be careful when your press releases say that you are "hands on" at the winery. Does that mean you know how many of your vineyard workers aren’t being paid equitable wages?
Finally, many of you have publicly condemned President Trump’s policies, yet privately you partner with large-scale distributors who are some of the biggest donors to Trump’s political campaigns, and who make more money off selling your products, which in turn benefits Trump. The wine world is made up of small businesses: wineries, importers, distributors, retail shops, and restaurants. Many of these are on the brink of failing due to the pandemic, coupled with the 25 percent raise on European wine tariffs (which Trump has threatened to spike to 100 percent). You could help these businesses petition, or use your resources to directly appeal to your representatives. For those of you who have wine projects in the U.S., you could choose to partner with growers who farm locally and responsibly, instead of large corporations that obfuscate the reality about additions of MOG ("matter other than grapes") in the winery and pesticides in the vineyards.
Do the research. Partner with small businesses, farmers, sommeliers who champion quality, rather than people out to make a quick buck off your name. I know that many of you have good hearts and only the best of intentions in choosing a creative—and complicated—venture such as wine. Please, make wines that we are all proud to drink.
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