San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Job contest pays off for winery, winners
If you hadn’t heard of Murphy-Goode Winery before, you probably have by now. The Healdsburg estate was suddenly all over the internet recently with news of its Really Goode Job campaign, which offered what sounds like a dream gig: a yearlong apprenticeship at the winery, free accommodations in a vineyard-adjacent Victorian and a year’s supply of wine. Oh, and a salary of $10,000 a month.
Few job postings, especially in the wine industry, go viral (though, strangely, another one did recently). “I honestly didn’t expect this much interest,” said Murphy-Goode winemaker Dave Ready. “I was like, ‘Holy cow!’ ”
After winnowing down 7,000 video applications, last week Murphy-Goode named two winners: Veronica Hebbard of Florida and Lindsay Perry of Texas. Both are 28, have never worked in the wine industry and started winefocused Instagram accounts during the pandemic.
As much as it’s a career opportunity, the Really Goode Job is also clearly a publicity stunt, pulled off by one of California’s largest wine corporations, Murphy-Goode parent company Jackson Family Wines. The job contest sounded like it was crafted to become a viral headline — $10,000 a month and rent-free living in Sonoma County?! — and its winners seem chosen, at least in part, for their social media savvy.
Paying those salaries may on some level simply be an alternative way of paying for influencer marketing and targeting one of wine’s most elusive and sought-after audiences: younger drinkers who spend their time on social media. And parts of the campaign have felt more like a reality TV competition than like a hiring process, down to the way Murphy-Goode publicized flying out the 17 finalists to Healdsburg for a Wine Country weekend.
“I feel like a Kardashian,” Hebbard said, referring to all the media attention she’s received since being named a winner.
Well, hats off to MurphyGoode, because as far as publicity stunts go, this one has been highly successful. This job campaign has made the brand a lot more visible, leading to stories even in publications that seldom cover winery news like NPR and CNN. It also shows a canny understanding on the part of Murphy-Goode that digital proclivities may be as important as wine-industry experience for certain types of roles.
Finally, it’s significant that both of the winners are women, a demographic that Murphy-Goode hasn’t always appeared to be reaching out to as customers. Much of its branding in the past has seemed to target men, posting grilling, golf and tailgating content and using the hashtag #winelikeaman.
But the fact that the Really Goode Job is a publicity stunt doesn’t mean that it isn’t also ... a good job. What many people who saw the job campaign headlines might not have known is that MurphyGoode has actually done this once before, in 2009, and that year’s winner ended up becoming an acclaimed vintner, Hardy Wallace of Dirty & Rowdy Family Wines. Wallace describes the job as “one of the monumental experiences of my life.” Though he had a following from an eccentric wine blog before winning the campaign, it was the MurphyGoode apprenticeship that allowed him to move to California and get his start in winemaking.
The winery doesn’t dispute that the campaign is partially an attempt to increase its visibility on social media: The impetus behind the 2009 campaign, quite explicitly, was that Murphy-Goode needed to get on social media and didn’t really know how. “The term didn’t exist then, but we were really looking for what I guess you’d call today a social media influencer,” Ready said. Wallace’s job title at MurphyGoode was “lifestyle correspondent,” and he said he spent most of his time shooting videos, writing blog posts and attending events.
Then as now, the real gain in publicity was as much from the job application process as from the job itself. But it generated some blowback in 2009, with critics pointing out the incongruity of offering a $10,000-a-month job during a recession, and particularly after Jackson Family Wines had just gone through “significant layoffs,” as The Chronicle reported at the time.
It’s hard not to feel a little cynical about the whole thing this year, too. Murphy-Goode was inspired to relaunch the campaign after a 12-year hiatus, according to Ready, because of the country’s high unemployment numbers during the pandemic: Since lots of people had lost their jobs, the winery could at least provide two more. But both Hebbard, an engineer for Disney, and Perry, a marketing specialist for a cheerleading broadcaster, were employed when they applied.
And their experience in Healdsburg will not resemble the typical path to entering the wine industry. Most newcomers to the field have to endure short bouts of employment that pay just over minimum wage, involve lots of manual labor and last only a few months — the length of a harvest season. At $120,000 for the year, Perry and Hebbard’s salaries will be significantly higher than that of the average California winery worker, who earns about $40,000 annually, per ZipRecruiter. It’s the kind of money that only a more monied company like Jackson Family Wines, which according to Wine Business Monthly sold 6 million cases of wine last year, can afford. The company should be judged on its commitment to normal job creation, not viral-contest job creation.
Still, it’s not a bad gig for Perry and Hebbard, and more power to them for landing it. They may have the chance to join Murphy-Goode permanently after their year is up if that’s what they want. “I could see both of them staying a really long time, and I think that might be their intention too,” Ready said. It’s equally possible that they’ll capitalize on the experience, clout and financial security provided by the Really Goode Job and go in another direction in the industry entirely.
That’s what Wallace did. When he left Murphy-Goode he went to work for Salinia, a Healdsburg winery that couldn’t have been more different from his previous employer. Whereas MurphyGoode makes bold, fruity, inexpensive wines for the mass market, Salinia (which has since closed) was one of the most experimental wineries in the Bay Area, producing fewer than 1,000 cases a year of natural wine. That fall, in 2010, Wallace made the first vintage of Dirty & Rowdy, buying grapes from Santa Barbara County, and began to make a name for himself as one of the state’s most innovative winemakers. He’s now known for crafting Mourvedres that are deliberately atypical, light and airy as opposed to the usual heavier examples. Murphy-Goode may have gotten him to California, but for years Wallace downplayed its role in his career. “I didn’t want to just be known as the guy who won the contest,” he said.
Now, however, he embraces it as part of his story. He’s definitely not just the guy who won the contest — he’s formed his own separate professional identity, and he can recognize the role Murphy-Goode played in that. “I can now see it’s not about what the job is, it’s about where the job can take you,” he said.
He hopes that Hebbard and Perry can use it as a similar sort of launchpad for whatever they choose to do next. “Murphy-Goode saw in these women something incredibly special,” Wallace said. “They can go anywhere from here.”