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‘We don’t believe that five guys sitting in a room should be able to know the right answers compared to the hundreds of people who are out there. We want to hear people’s comments.’ This statement was made by Kevin Kells, Development Director of consumer packaged goods at Google, to wine industry executives during the Sixteenth Annual Wine Industry Financial Symposium held in Napa Valley on September 18, 2007.

November 15, 2007, 12:01 AM, France. Millions of cases of Beaujolais Nouveau (the new Beaujolais wine, first of the year) are trucked out of a little French village to go across the world. In the United States, in the United Kingdom, in Japan, millions of wine drinkers are expecting the arrival of this easy-drinking wine and are ready to celebrate. All over the world, cafes, wine bars and restaurants have special evenings to enjoy the event and people rejoice — as a pre-Christmas celebration.

In the old days — prehistoric times for the Web — about 1995, an American woman, living in France and owner of one of the most prestigious Bordeaux estates, was painfully surfing the Net on a Compuserve connection at 9600 bps. She read people’s comments on her wines, and their version of the history of her beautiful Château. She thought it would be better to be in control herself of information about her company, as well as its image. In this way she could provide valuable and reliable information about making the wines, and the history of the estate and of Bordeaux, as well as providing tasting notes. That is why, and how, the first web site of one of the five Classified First Growths of Bordeaux, Château Haut-Brion, was born in 1996. Then the four others, at first very skeptical, built their own web sites in the following years.

Marketing wine is a New World concept. The Old World overlooks marketing strategy. As Don and Petie Kladstrup pointed out in their book Wine and War, until World War II most winemakers in Europe felt that the only thing they had to do was make wine, and that people would come to buy it. Advertising and marketing were things they did not think they had to do. Many, in fact, felt it was beneath them. Today, they know their survival depends a lot on marketing and advertising, but they are still not very good at it, while the New World wineries are marketing champions.

The traditional wine consumer is dead! Long live the New Consumer! Changing patterns in the everyday life of consumers affect their values and trends. These global changes apply to the local consumer in his local environment, and create new trends and values common to consumers all over the world. In today’s world, they are global consumers.

In seventeenth-century England, in London, the Frenchman Francois Auguste de Pontac opened the tavern ‘L’Enseigne de Pontac,’ known as ‘The Pontacks,’ to promote his wine, the Pontac ‘claret.’ M. de Pontac was the owner of a wine estate in Bordeaux, in a place called Haut-Brion, which means ‘on a hill.’ He was the heir to a long tradition in Bordeaux. He lived the luxurious life of the aristocracy in his beautiful château but also had a good head for business. He understood the importance of the English market early on in his life, and spent a lot of time in London, at the Court and among his peers, promoting the Pontac claret. Eventually, as its renown grew, the name of the Estate — Château Haut-Brion — came to replace that of its owners, Pontac. This was in 1663, and the first wine brand was born!