Eliminating Wine Marketing BS
Have you ever noticed how every wine region is known for its "distinctive terroir" and every vineyard is farmed with "sustainable practices" that create wines of "unique character?"
Seriously. Every one. Go look at any winery website.
Here's a sample blurb from a CA Pinot Noir bottle:
"Blank Vineyard is our Estate Vineyard. It was established in Blank-Year in the heart of the Blank Region of the Blank AVA. This region is know for its distinctive terroir, where conditions demand patience and reward with finesse and flavor. The vineyard is farmed with sustainable practices and comprised of Blank Clones/Varieties/Soil-types/Slopes/ETC, each adding unique character to this rich/elegant/special/delicious/excellent/ETC wine."
I literally took this off the back of a bottle of wine, with minor tweaks. Just fill in the blanks, select your terroir-variables and adjectives, and voila! you too can sell wine with utterly meaningless drivel.
Of course it's true that nearly every patch of earth will produce wine that tastes somewhat differently from wine from any other patch of earth. Uniqueness is inherent in terroir. But this universal uniqueness means that it is neither individually special nor meaningful to our consumer choices.
And what exactly does "sustainably farmed" mean? If you are certified sustainable (SIP - or one of the myriad other approximations of sustainable certifications like LIVE, Salmon Safe, Napa Green), you can still use carcinogenic chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. So where do you fall on the spectrum of stainability exactly?
If you aren't talking about your viticulture in specifics, I will bet big money it's because you use some of those carcinogenic chemicals on your grapes... like RoundUp. "Sustainable" is a virtually meaningless buzzword and should never be confused or conflated with Organic or Biodynamic.
Also, how was the wine made? What was added to grapes in the winery? Does the use of terms like "hand-crafted" or "natural" or "clean" or "low intervention" or "with excellence" really tell us anything? Nope.
We all know that marketing is sales, and sales is spin, and spin is nice sounding BS. What's the big deal?
Behind every meaningless buzzword used to conceal status quo chemical agriculture and highly manipulative winemaking from you is the belief that you are not much more than a mindless consumer.
The onslaught of meaningless marketing slogans like “sustainable” “natural” “clean” and any number of claims about the “specialness” of vineyards is overwhelming. We are overwhelmed with the number of choices and the responsibility to make good ones, and we feel powerless to make better choices.
In fact, this stream of marketing BS seems to be intentionally disempowering by concealing real information that could be used to make valuable judgements about drinking wine responsibly.
Wine producers make it extremely difficult to find out what kind of viticulture they practice, what they spray on their vines, and what they add to their wines… usually because they have something to hide.
It has become easier for us to believe that our wine choices don’t matter in any bigger sense… that they’re purely a matter of taste.
We started Centralas because we refuse to believe that wine drinkers are shallow, mindless consumers.
We believe that you can make the world a better place by the kind of wine you choose to buy.
You likely care about the environment. Our connection to it and to each other has never been more obvious than in 2020, faced with fires and heat events that exceed any that have come before, in the context of a global pandemic. Yet most wine is still produced with chemicals known to cause imbalance and destruction of the environment, and then sold as a “natural” product.
It’s unacceptable that the majority of our wine choices today force us to support chemical agriculture that destroys the world and opaque production practices that turn wine into a mystery “wine beverage.”
We know too much now to pretend like our consumptions choices don’t matter.
Centralas wine is only ever made with grapes grown without synthetic chemical sprays or fertilizers (usually certified organic practices or better), and eliminates marketing buzzwords through winemaking transparency, so that you have an easy choice to drink delicious wine while feeling great about supporting a healthier world.
Yes, this is a shameless plug, and that's my point. We clearly tell you the vital information that all wine producers should be shamelessly willing to tell you:
A. How exactly were the grapes grown, and
B. What exactly did you add during winemaking.
That's really all we need to know. The rest is B.S.
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Buy Good Wine Without Supporting BS Here
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