SAIGON WINGS PACK A PUNCH
Spicy treat pairs well with red or white
Making wine is one thing. Selling it is quite another proposition.
There is no easy path to success in the wine business, but a nearempty packaged goods storage space is always an excellent sign if you own a winery. The thing about making a sale, or getting your wine into a new market, is you never know when it’s going to happen or which event, or person, may trigger it.
When I’m checking out a new wine, or any wine for that matter, I often go online and search for the label. The more pictures I see of that wine, and especially high-quality pictures, tells me a lot about its stature in the wine community. In other words, few or no online pictures of your label tells me there isn’t much interest, or it’s not well recognized in the market and likely not selling very well.
If you are making expensive wine, which characterizes most of B.C.’s output, selling it to a new audience is even tougher. It helps to start with a quality a site, experienced staff and a lot of energy.
From there you begin the journey to worldwide sales. If and when you get there selling your wine globally is going to take even more persistence and, frankly, some breaks along the way. There is no single roadmap to success but the “people” connections are key to penetrating most new markets.
In my experience, succeeding is all about penetrating a small web of international wine people, tightly interconnected by their passion for wines, especially those that speak to place or that tell a story. They meet by chance on irregular schedules, usually in cities far from their homeland, either pouring or talking about wines or, in the case of media or buyers on the other side of the counter, tasting and evaluating. It doesn’t take long for the word to circulate throughout a wine show about a particular wine or winery that must be tasted or visited, and so the story begins.
One can only imagine that is exactly how Norwegian Gunnar Skoglund came to discover Okanagan Falls-based Meyer Family Wines and ultimately importing them to Oslo. Skoglund works for Vinarius, a Norwegian wine importer selling wines from around the world since 1997. Its customers include both the off-trade (the Norwegian retail monopoly) and the on-trade private sector. Co- Owner Jak Meyer says, “Skogland took on the Canada/British Columbia/ Meyer project on his own after having experienced Canadian wines and hearing good things about B.C. wines in particular.”
I’m guessing he might have heard about Canadian wine at ProWein in Germany where one day on the convention floor, with a glass in hand, would open the eyes of even the most assured wine producer that the international wine world is huge and competitive as it gets. Skoglund’s interest precipitated a trip to British Columbia as Meyer explains. “to see if he could find a few wineries and then go back and convince his boss the wines could sell in Norway.”
Given the highly knowledgeable and shrewd nature of the Scandinavian fine wine buyer it would be a tall order although Skoglund like any real wine buyer would have known given the quality of some of our best wines his only task would be to get his customers to taste them. His initial order consisted of
about 25 cases each from a few local wineries. They hosted a launch party in Oslo with media and trade, and the wines sold out mostly to restaurants in the first night. A beachhead was established.
A second order followed and again the impression from the trade was excellent. Private retailers are often miles ahead of the monopoly when it comes to discovering the latest in wine, but their actions do not go unnoticed by monopoly buyers. The Canadian wine hubbub at Vinarius caught the interest of a monopoly product manager who came over last fall on a mission to taste local wines.
Long journey short, a call for Chardonnays was tendered by the monopoly, and in the end Meyer Family Vineyards 2016 Tribute Chardonnay made the 7,177-kilometre journey to Norway and a market was pried open within the highly knowledgeable Scandinavian wine world.