Ryan ChartrandWine tickets: $30, Gas to the event: $10, Wine Flair: Priceless.
What is Wine Flair? It is small colorful badges with a sticky adhesive on the back, perfect for sticking on shirts, chests, you name it. Wine Flair is the newest and greatest marketing scheme wineries could ever have thought of.
Take a whole bunch of adults and get them to have a couple of drinks and suddenly, everyone wants to put stickers on each other. You walk around and see someone with the “buffalo” sticker and suddenly, you are grabbing your friends and recruiting them to actively pursue the Buffalo winery. You are not actively seeking the blue ribbon winning Pinot Noir of “buffalo winery,” but once you have a sticker, you are an candid audience for whatever the wine maker would like to tell you about Buffalo winery.
So it comes down to flair. Everyone’s seen “Office Space,” it’s all about how many pieces of flair you’ve got.
At a wine festival, there are several ways of marketing yourself as a winery. The first and foremost is your wine. This is probably the best sort of marketing because it clearly showcases the product. Second, there is literature that you can give out like brochures and even DVDs about the winery.
The third way of marketing is having other people market for you. This is where that charming flair comes in. This type of marketing normally includes flair, stickers, badges and temporary tattoos.
Did I forget to mention that I love wine season? Over the weekend, I was at the Cal Poly Wine Festival and the flair present was unbelievable. Eberle has the boar. Tobin James has sun. Laetitia has a badge with a L. Norman winery has the cougar. On top of that, I saw so many temporary tattoos for wineries that I actually stopped counting how many I saw.
My friends even got caught up in the quest for flair. It started out being a educational experience and my friends earnestly did want to learn about each individual winery. But as soon as people with straw hats started showcasing their winery flair accoutrement, deal was off. It became, that person has so and so flair, let’s go get one.
This is not the case for wine festivals alone. Wineries, especially ones that are frequented by tourists on a regular basis, know the drill. Bus loads of unruly people have little interest for the smaller eccentricities of individual wines. At one point, those purple stained lips, just want something to drink instead of savor. At this point, they have also become flair aficionados.
Flair can be taken home and posted on blackboards, put on photo frames with pictures of the day taken from an array of copious digital images taken that day. Other observed uses of flair…face decoration and chest showcasing. You would really be surprised what 8 or 10 wine samples with make you do.
In any case, wineries are now cashing in on our feeble attraction to sticky souvenirs. Do you have a creative use of flair? Please email me and share your flair story. Well, Lauren Jeter here, signing off, saying “Be Flair Conscience and Flair Responsibly.”
Lauren Jeter is a 2005 wine and viticulture graduate and is pursuing a master’s degree in agribusiness.
Feel free to submit any recommendations, flair, favorite wines or recipes to laurenjeter@gmail.com