Ep. 753 Christian Miller Pt. 2 of 2 | Get US Market Ready With Italian Wine People

Thanks for tuning into my new show. Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people. I'm Steve Ray, author of the book how to get US Market Ready. And in my previous podcast, I shared some of the lessons I've learned from thirty years in the wine and spirits business helping brands enter and grow in the US market. This series will be dedicated to the personalities who have been working in the Italian wine sector in the US, their experiences, challenges, and personal stories. I'll uncover the roads that they walked shedding light on current trends, business strategies, and their unique brands. So thanks for listening in. And let's get to the interview. Hi. This is Steve Ray, and welcome to this week's edition of Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people on the Italian wine podcast. We have a guest this week who's returning for a a second in a series, of interviews Christian Miller of, full glass research headquartered out of Berkeley, California. I am corrected. And, with a lot of experience also with the wine market council, and we'll get into into all of that. But why don't you just give us a quick summary for those who weren't listening last week, of what, full glass research does? And, then we can get into the other questions. Yes. Sure. Thanks. Full glass research is a, sole proprietorship that I started in two thousand and six. And the members consist of me and whatever team I assemble for individual projects. And we do market research into categories that I would call sort of enthusiasts or, or crafty categories of food and beverages. Wine is m most obvious one, and that's probably two thirds of or more of our research, but we also do work for craft beer producers, artisanal cheese categories, and our clients can be, you know, government organizations, regional, nonprofit organizations, very large and very small producers of these kinds of products. And, the Wein Market Council, is something I'm, research director for the Weinmark Council. It's a nonprofit organization that focuses on helping members in the street better understand American consumers and consumer trends. And these members range from great growers to producers all the way down through the distribution system and service organizations or suppliers. So you have everyone sort of, you know, Bogle or Shide vineyards to wineries from small ones like Farniente, Woodward Canyon, all the way up through Constellation. You have importers like Deutsche or Maison market domain, distributors, allied grape growers, organizations like the missouri wine board or wines of Germany, academic partners like Cal poly or Sonoma State, and, service organizations like Clangelo and partners, which does PR and marketing. So it's a broad assembly of members. So a lot of what happens with the wine market council is is very US oriented or we would call domestic winery oriented. One of the disappointments I have is that I don't see a lot more participation and involvement of Italian wineries and Italian consortsy because it's such a great resource for understanding the US market. And that seems to be the key problem that a lot of producers overseas and particularly in Italy have is understanding why the US sometimes has these, arcane rules and how to get around them. If someone, from Italy were interested in joining the wine market council, how would they get information? The best way would be to go to the Weinemark Council's website, weinmarketcouncil dot com, and you can find out information about joining the dues are on a sliding scale. So it it it If you're a regional organization, there's a, you know, level of membership for you. If you're a very large producer, there's a different mem level of membership, etcetera. The members get access to all the research we do. We would love to have some Italian organizations on board. We we currently have their equivalents in a number of countries and states, you know, we have the Missouri wine great board. We have Lodi, Napa Valley Vintners. We have wines of Germany, Antérone, in France, wines of Spain. So we've had active participation. And, of course, some of our tributor members and importer members sell a lot of Italian wine. So we do have it from that angle, but having the regional organizations input, would be would be great. So and, if you if you wanna contact someone directly, feel free to contact me c miller at wine market council dot com. So the the point I'm why I'm trying to push this is, cost of entry or the, participation is really not that significant and more than pays for some of the research you'll be able to get out. So instead of wondering what or why things happen in the United States, you can get a much clearer picture of how they happen in the United States without having to do first you know, initial research on your own. So moving forward from that, one of the concepts that's been a hallmark of the wine market council is one that that really has intrigued me for years, and the concept is high frequency wine drinker. So could you give us a a background on where that came from what it means and how it's it's relative importance, in the US market today? Well, the, high frequency wine drinker is defined as people who drink wine more often than once a week. And then you could buy if you're looking at segmenting people by frequency, it's useful to look at high frequency wine drinkers. People who drink wine on average about once a week and, less frequent or what we call marginal wine consumers. And, currently high frequency wine consumers are ten percent of the legal adult legal drinking age adults. The once a weekers are about six percent, marginals are thirteen percent. Non wine drinkers are twenty nine percent, and very infrequent. Consumers ten percent, people who abstain altogether from alcohol are thirty one percent of the legal drinking age adults in the US, which is something that always kind of surprises Europeans, I'm sure. What makes the high frequency and the once a week are so important And we'll just sort of collectively refer to them as core wine consumers, is that they drink the majority of wine, over eighty percent. And if you look at high frequency consumers who are high end consumers, they drink the vast majority of wine over ninety percent of the wine over twenty dollars a bottle, which is very important to many small producers and importers. So if that's something to keep in mind when you're looking at survey results in the news or business press two, you know, which wine drinkers are in the survey? Because makes a big difference in terms of the results. And I I would comment on this that a lot of the research that we get and see that is publicly available is the US market as a whole. It doesn't segment out this one particular group. And for most of the people that I work with in Italy and in in other countries, it's the high frequency drinkers, that we really wanna focus on, but nobody is really doing anything like it. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that and what we know about high frequency wine drinkers, pre COVID and, in COVID. So back to you, Christian. And Yeah. I mean, that's a very it's a very good point. And I think particularly you wanna look at that issue when you see serve people reporting on surveys or what consumers are doing or thinking because if the person, just includes all wine drinkers in this survey, you'll get one thing and if you're con but if you're looking at core wine consumers, it'll be a whole different story. A good example of this is the impact of, region or appalachians. You know, you see occasionally articles that say, well, you know, American wine consumers don't know anything except Napa and maybe of them know Sonoma and Bordeaux and Chianti. Well, yes, if you ask everyone who puts a glass of wine in their mouth a few times a year, that question, that's probably true. But if you're looking at the people who actually buy the vast majority of wine, the US, They typically know anywhere from, you know, they're typically quite familiar with anything from four to twelve appalachians, and they're aware of a lot more. And these can be down to fairly small appalachians in terms of, you know, people, high frequency wine drinkers, a large chunk of them will distinguish between Russian River versus Napa Valley when it comes to a pinot noir. Or between, they'll be familiar with, you know, at least four, five high end Italian red appalachians, brolo, you know, brunello, camp, etcetera, and then as well as include county and multiple channel and a few others. And these will make a difference. You know, which region we've done test control tests of this and which region appears on the front label is going to shift the price perception, and the purchase interest of anywhere from five to twenty five percent of the core wine consumers, you know, encountering that label in the store. Like, elaborate on that. So it will shift them. Can you be more specific without Well, for example, we did a controlled test of Appalachian a while back for Sonoma County when they were looking at, whether go ahead with conjunctive labeling or not. And, what we found was that for appalachians that are known for certain things like Rush River for Pinanwar, for example, Alexander Valley for Cabernet from about five to fifteen percent of the core wine consumers that saw the more famous Appalachian versus another one or a generic Sonoma County alone, on the label, found increased their price perception of the wine, what they thought the likely price of the wine would be, by five to even ten dollars in terms of, you know, which price segment they think it it would fall into because this was a a unknown kind of, random label assignment. Similarly, their purchase interest would typically five to fifteen percent of them would shift upwards from you know, somewhat likely to vary likely or undecided to somewhat likely. So, you know, it's not everyone, but it certainly is a significant enough to make a difference in likelihood of purchase and the perception of the quality of the wine. Okay. So I'm thinking about the Italian side of things. Sicily is has has emerged as a a real thing, on everybody's radar screen. There's probably a thirty year trend in the making, but it's just recently with Negaro and some of the volcanic wines. But the Cecilia as it's called DOC is getting a little bit active, but in my mind, that's where Sicily's a a a region where they could really benefit from from this I would think they'll pull a cello would be in the same boat and the whole Chianti Chianti classico in two different DOCs. There's a lot of opportunity for Italian wines to really probe and understand the high end and support these smaller production brands that sell for higher prices. And those are the ones that I get involved in, Van Italy gets involved in, wine to wine, and all of the other things that CB Kim is involved in. So I think it's, well, I guess I'm preaching to the choir here. But, yeah, you guys ought to you guys ought to join. So Yeah. And and there's a lot to be learned about that, you know, for your if you're marketing wines of Sicily, for example, you know, what are the key sort of two or three things that could be distilled down to just a few statements or phrases, that really distinguish that makes Sicily different and, you know, worthy of purchasing or trying. And and it's a little bit tricky because you've got several layers I perceive and sis sil silian wines, you know, appalachians, a rather appeal, I should say. You've got sort of this whole Mount Aetna kind of volcanic soil, higher end artisanals you know, quasi natural group, very hot among the, you know, some of yay's and kind of wine geek community, probably practically unknown to the vast majority of wine consumers, and even, you know, the majority of core wine or high frequency wine consumers. Then you've got these, you know, sort of sicilian varietals that are showing up, you know, anywhere from eight dollars to fifteen dollars very high value for the money wines. And that's, sort of a little bit easier to comprehend all those narrow dabble and some of the varieties are not that familiar. I don't see that as a, you know, one people are much more willing to try new wines now than they used to be. So, I don't see that as a major Hurdle. I would suspect I have not done any specific research on Sicily. I would suspect Sicily's image is quite closely tied to the Italian wine image in general, which is very positive, actually. You know, maybe it's even sort of a distilled version of Italian stereotypes. I don't know. But, you know, Tall Italy is like one of the default categories for wine choices. It's not may not be the first choice for everyone, but everyone likes some Italian wines. And it's got a very strong association with a food culture, which is very important. They're countries like Australia, which produce perfectly good wine, and the people who try them like the wines fine, but they kind of struggle because they don't really have an associated food higher end consumption kind of culture the way France, Spain, even California to some extent does. In Italian, Italy, of course, has this in spades. That's a good segue to the next question, one that you and I were we touched on, in our earlier interview, but I wanted to explore a little bit more because it's it's not not a pet project of mine. I think it's critically important. And that is the importance of back labels and, what copy goes on a bottle front and back label what consumers wanna know. I think my personal feeling from the analysis I've done in some presentations is generally wineries do a pretty poor job of leveraging the potential power of the back label. Can you comment on that and base that on some of the research that you've done? Yeah. I'm a hundred percent on board with, back, you know, the usefulness of back labels. And, for for starters, You know, people are obviously, the front label is very powerful. It's some people's, basically, most wineries only form of advertising in a sense, you know, and it's if you're in off premise distribution, you really need to consider your front labels carefully. Test them if on real consumers and so on. But the back label has kind of a unique role in that. It helps people decide if they get to the point of picking up the bottle, which is, of course, the first battle. That's the front labels role, but, helps them decide if they turn it around, have some interesting information. And the back label, in my opinion, functions as a reinforcer of, of the brand connection to the consumer. Because you take that bottle home, And then, you know, you'll you'll look at it again when you before you shelve it or put in a cellar wherever you're keeping your wine. It'll sit on the table when you open it. You might who knows? You may read it one more time on the way out to the recycle bin. So, that's a lot of impressions. And the sad thing is a lot of back label content is wasted in my opinion. It contains things that people don't need to know, or things that are that they might like to know, but it's too generic. It doesn't really distinguish the wine from hundreds of other wines. I see in terms of food pairings commonly, people will say, goes well with game. Well, I don't know. It's a very small percentage of Americans who are eating games. So I, you know, Christian, I don't know if I mentioned to you the last time, but I don't know if it's a donkey. It's a mule or a you know, Jackass. One of those three things is is a popular meat in Northern Italy, particularly polonian verona. I haven't tried it, but there it is. Anyway, they're getting back. I'd I can't say I recall Jackass week at the local Sizzler, but, So, anyway, I guess the the way I phrase it to a lot of people is and I don't have any research to base this on. It's just a theory based on watching people for many, many years is people really wanna know two things when they're looking at a bottle of wine. What does it taste like in words that I understand? Like, I'm not talking about sauteed gooseberries with a hint of apple blossom. And secondly, is it gonna go with what I'm having for dinner tonight? Generally, as I said, we're not having venison, but, you know, will it go with this chicken dish or that so forth? So you need to explain it in a way that gives them direction, but also freedom to try different pairings. But what do you think? Well, you're you're not wrong on this. And, we've got the some research to back that up on the at the Wymark Council in twenty twenty. We did an extensive study of what you might call wine communications and information. What do consumers? How do they look for information? And what do they actually want in terms of information to make a decision on buying a wine? This is mission critical stuff. Right? It is. Yeah. And the most the most basic desired information is indeed flavor. What does the wine taste like? Especially dryness versus sweetness, and people forget this all the time. I can't tell you, you know, well, I don't have to tell you all the various Rosets, blush wines, rizzlings, shannon blancs, etcetera, etcetera, wines that often have a variety of levels of sweetness that don't give you any clue on the label as to how sweet or dry it is. And I think people in the wine industry need to also bear in mind when the consumer thinks sweet, they're talking very sweet. A wine that is sort of, you know, one percent RS to them is not a sweet wine. They might think of it to serve off dry or slate sweet or something like that, but it's that's not a sweet wine as port or sauternes. So that is, like, one thing. The scale is kind of different. But people can understand scales. I mean, we worked with the International Riesling Foundation to help them develop their scale. Talk about that because I was gonna I was gonna use that as an example. I didn't realize you guys were involved in that. That's really great. Oh, yeah. That was a while back. I love it. I why more people don't use it, not just for riesling, but for things like Shen and Blanc and Rosays and so on. I don't know. But essentially, what what we did it was twofold. One was track was basically assessing. Okay. What levels of, you know, sugar are perceived as sweetened and what kind of acid adjustments should they recommend? Because, of course, a very high acid wine, that is somewhat sweet will appear to many people drier. That was kind of the technical side. Our side was the consumer side. And essentially what we did was come up with a whole list of possible descriptions of, like, you know, desserts, sweet, very sweet, semi sweet off try, etcetera, etcetera. We tested all those words, and we selected out the four, five, that consistently ranked in an orderly fashion from the driest to the sweetest with very low standard deviations. So we could be confident that, you know, if you said Those are the right words. Yeah. Dry versus, you know, semi suite or whatever the case may be, those would be distinguishable and obvious to a large number of people. It's like a four point five point scale, and you put it on the back of the wine, and it tells the people that information. So Yeah. It answers that third question is about sweet or dry. And I think the other factor that comes in here is, I find American wines, particularly California wines in the ten to fifteen dollar range tend to be sweeter than the dry wines produced, maybe even from the same varietals from other countries. I think it's a stylistic thing. It it could well be. And I'd also add, of course, you know, the the the warmer gets and the riper, the grape gets the more and the lower the acid, you know, the more sweet it kind of appears. But I do wanna go on to, like, the next piece of flavor that people really wanna know is body or intensity. You know, is it a full bodied rich, intense kind of wine, or is it a light, you know, lighter, you know, is it less full bodied? Is it light? It is it, easier to drink, you know, things like that. That kind of it's a trickier scale to talk about, but it is the next most frequently requested in our survey type of information. After that, everyone wants to know what it tastes like, but then you're into some really tricky stuff. Like you say, you know, gooseberries. If you've never had a gooseberry, gooseberries means nothing to you, even if literally, you know, the same molecule vocal molecule that's in gooseberries causes the same is in certain grapes. You know? Pyrazines or you can counter in variety of fruits and vegetables. So they do literally taste like that. But if the person hasn't tasted or isn't familiar with that particular fruit, it's not gonna do them. Much good at all. So I admit that part is tricky, but if you can pull it off in a way that is kind of easily conveys, you know, it's a full bodied, you know, intense dry red with, I don't know. You know, that's that is, with a jammie character or something like that, you know, something that people a lot of people can relate to. After that, the next piece of information is where the wine is from and or the variety is critical, but that's often front label stuff. And after that, it's really a jumble of, you know, what are appropriate occasions, what are food pairings, what info about the brand or winery or winemakers, how it is made. Now, stuff very few people care about, except high frequency, high involvement, wine, people, wine geeks, so to speak, how it was grown in terms of the vineyard details, the soil, the weather, nutritional information, details of the barrel aging, like length, type of barrel, etcetera, pH or acidity levels for god's sake. Very few people need to know that stuff or even care about it. There's a a big divide between the people who want that information and they can find it in other places then on the bottle. So don't don't waste that incredibly important real estate on stuff that only is important to a very small number of people. I say exactly. Now there is one role exception to that, and I would say there's a role for it if your winery has a certain position. If it's really mainly communicating to wine aficionados, and it has a kind of no nonsense, you know, you know, technical kind of expertise positioning. That can work, not because anyone cares whether the pH was three point two or three point five in the grapes. But because it's it's positioning the winery as a certain kind of winery with certain kind of customers who think of themselves as very sophisticated and knowledgeable, the people a brand that pulls this off brilliantly is rich. That label has barely changed over many, many years. It is pretty technical. It is very straightforward and clear. There's no puffery or anything like that. And for the rich types of consumers, that probably works quite well. But for the majority of wine consumers, it it doesn't really do much. So that's, you know, that's a case where it's an exception to the rule, and and it works very well. How but how you know, again, how do you just comes back to how do you distinguish an individual winery or wine type or wine region? You know, it it has to be different. Everyone is a small producer. Everyone's a family winery. Everyone picks the best grapes. Everyone handcrafts their wine, etcetera. Especially in Italy. Those just don't set you apart at all any or you have to come up with something that I think either has a feeling or personality attitude that you wanna convey or something that is unique about this particular wine or producer that's not like other people. And Randal Graham's master at this, which is no coincidence. Why he's also a very popular tweeter because the skill set is, I believe, quite similar. Formerly a Bonnie Dune. Yes. I did a presentation once, for a group in Spain. And I I went through my local liquor store, and I took pictures of the back labels of all the Spanish wines that they had there. And I did a, you know, good bad and indifferent type of a chart of all the different things that could be in there and narrowed down to what I think is that what people wanna know what it tastes like in words they understand and will it go with what I'm having? And I wrote an eight line bit of copy that I still think is brilliant, petting myself in the back here. I agree. But it was for a temporinio Rivera Deluero, and it was goes great with tapas, try it with tacos. So consistent with what you were just talking about, It communicates a lot in a very, very few words. The key piece of that thing is you have to be an English speaker, native English speaker to be able to in in American to understand American culture, to be able to write that. It's gonna be very hard to do that from palermo, I think. I don't know. There's a I don't wanna undersell the the actual physical design aspects, the labeling, no color, and so on and so forth. But those things are a matter of, like, both the intersection of basically designers' creativity and, you, you can test labels, you know, even on the internet, often effectively for not too much money. So it the combination of those two things may be some qualitative research to using working with the designer to, like, you know, kind of riff off people's opinion on various things before he gets the final designs. Those are important, very important too. You know, certainly visual cues, God, you just look at the color of Vove Clico. You don't even need the label copy anymore. To know the brand. Yeah. Look at that color and it's you know, it's Vove Clico. So that's kind of the extreme version, but, you know, every label has a potential for a sort of a milder version of that. And there's also, you know, what else how do people read these things? And one of the most interesting things about the Weymar Council Communication study was discover that there's a certain number of people who tend to be more involved in the wine history who do their look up things about wines before they go shopping. And then there's another group that tends to be both younger and often weekly or sort of frequent marginal kind of wine consumers who are more likely to do, use their phones or tablets or whatever in store to look up information. And, that brings us to some that you'd brought up was QR codes, which is, kind of interesting because I I don't know. I the theory is great with your QR codes, you know, being able to access all this kind of information, what could be visually a very cool way. The and I think they have great potential in That's sort of reinforcing the brand connection consumer knowledge after the purchase. However, for purchase decisions, boy, I don't know. I mean, civic science and, Ymart and Council surveys have shown pretty poor usage of the QR codes in the context of purchase decisions at the retail level. And, at the point of sale, one of the weirdest things that we found in the communication study was that most people actually use plain old search for information on products. Rather than any specific app or a QR code or something like that. How how archaic? But I I I think that that that's really important stuff because at the end of the day, you have to be communicating with someone that that that you understand them. I think one of the best ones in the US that does it is, Murphy Good because they make a play on off of the word good, and they've done some tremendous promotions. And one key way most imported brands fail and say I'm not for you as they say serve best at twelve degrees c. Well, we have no idea what twelve degrees c is. Right? We speak in terms of Fahrenheit. We speak in terms of I'm sorry to say it inches not metrics. And so if you're if you're going to be describing your product, describe it in words that matter to Americans. You may not like it, and it may not fit with what you're doing with the rest of the world. But, you know, that's why we have the seven fifty c c bottle. Yeah. And I'd on top of that, I'd say excess precision is as a potential pitfall. You know, you're saying whether you say twelve degrees centigrade or, you know, forty two degrees Fahrenheit. Why plant the seed of worry in the consumer's mind? It's like, oh, gee. Is it forty? For and who knows what action you know, with that kind of precision, what temperature, any of the thing they're serving is. So Leave it out. Right. I just I think, you know, well chilled, cool, seller room temperature, you know, simpler kind of descriptions are to be preferred. And it's the same thing applies to what you were talking about with food pairings. You know, you make the food pairing too precise, and all you're doing is raising the notion that, like, well, what if I don't? And This is what makes me kind of nervous about food pairings in general. The science behind it is really shaky, in, in some cases, I'd say non existent and, extremely variable by consumer because people pallets have all kinds of different variabilities in terms of ability to perceive different types of flavors and, as well as, sort of, a general sensitivity, or lack of it. So that's it really tough to do that in a way that enhances, you know, the people strongly. I mean, how many food wine combinations are actually bad in the sense of the food makes the wine taste worse or the wine makes the food taste We're just relatively small. So, you know, I'd say treat the food pairing concept. Think of it as more a way to, like, evoke an image, you know, the Italian connection with food, with Italians types of foods, even if it's an American rendition of it. Or, you know, sunny summary foods with Rosets and things like that rather than a specific pairing recommendation. Right. Like, picture your I'm just making this up off the top of my head, but picture yourself in Parma, tasting tortellini, which the that's the area that they're from. That that kind of captures the imagery a little bit of the imagery of, of Italy. And and and the whole I I think the the concept of the imported wines, part of it is you wanna transport you can't bring them to the the winery you can bring the winery to them. How do you transport their minds to feeling that they're making this journey to this special place that they probably will never ever get to travel to. So you kind of can bring it closer. A lot of different ways to, skin this cat But I think the important thing that we've talked about here is, usually back labels are given short shrift, and it sounds like it's both your and my opinion that it is one of the more powerful tools that you have to reinforce a decision or to help somebody make a decision between the ninety point line to the left and the ninety one point line to the white that they lift this one up and it says, this one's for me. Yeah. I I think I mean, why waste that space. You know, why it it's an op it doesn't cost you very much to add a, you know, some content on the back label besides just the government warning statement and what, you know, every whatever else is required. Why waste it? Why waste the opportunity? So, yeah, I guess I'm gonna hear from some people who are gonna tell me their opinions, which is great. I would like everybody else's opinion. The only difference here is that you and I have the microphone. So, once again, we're running out of time. I kinda have this habit with Christian, but we're talking with Christian Miller, a full glass research out of Berkeley, California. Been in the business a long time and, has some really interesting insights based on facts, which is something the wine industry quite quite often lacks. That's why I enjoy talking with them. So question, thank you for joining us again. You are very welcome, and, look forward to babbling for endless hours over a glass of wine before too long. Yeah. Me too. Together in person. Okay. Thanks again. So this is Steve Ray. This has been the get US market ready with Italian wine people, part of the Italian wine podcast signing up for this week, and come visit next week for another interesting interview with somebody, knowledgeable about the Italian wine industry in the United States. So thank you, Christian again, and goodbye to all you. Thank you. Stay well. This is Steve Ray. Thanks again for listening. 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