Marketing Wine to Women

Around five years ago, BRL Hardy produced and released a range of four wines that were squarely targeted at women.  The wines were presented in brightly coloured bottles and were aptly named for the target market. The only problem was the wines failed miserably and died a quick marketing death.  

But the lure of the female wine dollar has not gone away and the search for the Midas touch to Bacchus's juice continues.

Two items of interest, from different sides of the planet landed on my computer screen within hours of each other.  The first was a press release from    the media people at Chateau Tanunda titled "The wine women want". The release tells us that a number (it doesn't say how many) women were invited to attend a blind tasting of the top 16 highest scoring wines from the recent 2007 Brisbane Wine Festival. The winner of the Trophy was Château Tanunda 2005 ‘Terroirs of the Barossa” Lyndoch Shiraz. 

As an aside, like all wineries who win a gong, they are anxious to capitalise on it, hence the press release. In another example of trying to capitalise on an award, on TV program called 'Sydney Weekender' recently, the host visited Hope Estate, a Hunter Valley winery. The winery had won a trophy for their 2005 Shiraz at, by coincidence, the 2006  Brisbane Wine Festival. When pouring a glass for the show presenter, the winery person referred to it as "the best Shiraz in Australia" (because it had won the trophy.)  I guess the Bremerton 2004 “Old Adam” Shiraz that won the 2007 award, or the myriad of other Shiraz trophy winners from all the other shows don't count!  Now back to the main focus of this snippet.

The second item that caught my attention was a thread on Wine Spectator Forum about Bitch Wines. A quick bit of research reveals the

Grenache grapes are grown in the Barossa  by David Hickinbotham, with Chris Ringland making the wine for Dan Philips of the Grateful Palate in the US.  According to the WS thread author, "we can’t stock the Bitch fast enough (you don’t even want to know what the mark up is on this crap)." It looks like this gimmicky wine is working in the US as there have now been a number of vintages made. 

In a limited way, Dan Philips has succeeded where BRL Hardy failed. He hit the bullseye of his target market, but as anyone who has seen a dart board will know, the bullseye is a very small part of the whole board. 

According to the Chateau Tanunda press release, "Over the past twenty years the abundance of retail wine purchases for home consumption in the UK has switched from males to females, who are now responsible for 68% of all supermarket take-home wine purchases." One wonders how much that differs in Australia and the US, and one also has to wonder how much wine is purchased from sources other than the supermarket (by males.) 

Women may be buying an increasing percent of wine, but lets not forget that just over 50% of wine sold in Australia comes out of a cardboard box, and world wide, the majority of wine sold in bottles is little more than plonk.  At the volume end, women may be more important in the buying decision, but at the premium end, the males still do most of the wine purchasing. The Chateau Tanunda wine retails for $48. Like the 'Bitch Grenache' a $48 Shiraz   aimed at women is a miniscule market segment and one that is unlikely to make anyone rich now; and whilst that may eventually change, it wont be anytime soon.