Why are wine ads so boring?

Wines & Vines, Dec, 2003 by Tina Caputo

Rutherford Hill: "The taste takes you there." This ad features one of the least attractive representations of a grape I've ever seen. It looks like a black olive, cut in half, with a green olive inside it. There's also a suspicious-looking puddle under the grape. The ad does make you stop to look at it, if only to wonder: "What the hell is that thing?"

Clos du Bois: "It's not about oak barrels and chemistry." Margaret Davenport announced her departure from Clos du Bois just before I came across this ad in a major wine magazine--one of the pit-falls of winemaker-focused advertising. (Boredom is another.)

Opici: "Our passion for wine brings you wines that inspire passion." Don't believe it? Why, just look at these passionate photos of a passionate couple passionately kissing! If there's one word that has been overused in the wine industry to the point of being rendered meaningless, it's--well, you know the word I mean. Get thee to a thesaurus.

Tosti: "Look for the navel." Another ad that falls into the "Eeeew!" category. This one features a decapitated woman with a Tosti bottle's "navel" lined up with her own (or at least where we imagine it to be under her skin-tight dress). Just plain embarrassing.

Champagne Pommery: No tagline on this one, just a woman's mouth biting into a green grape with her front teeth, causing it to ooze oddly colored blue juice down her chin. Does this make me want to drink Pommery? Nope. Does it make me wonder if that grape she's biting is radioactive? Yep.

So there you have it: the best and worst print ads our industry has to offer (at least, in my opinion). Let's face it, there are some real dogs out there. Though I did like some of the ads, none of them really knocked my socks off. The wine industry can do better, and it should do better. If wineries want to woo new customers and wake up the old ones, they've got to show them something different, something fresh and perhaps most importantly, something they can relate to. We've got an industry full of bright, talented and creative people who are more than up to the task. Why not take a chance and see what happens? Who knows? Maybe American wine drinkers aren't as traditional and uptight as some people think.

RELATED ARTICLE: Wine Lovers Speak Out About Advertising

It's all well and good to ask industry experts what they think of wine advertising, but what about the people the ads are targeting? You know, consumers! In search of opinions from "real" people, I posted a query on the wine-specific message board of the Epicurean Web site, egullet.com. The responses were not encouraging. Many respondents expressed an inherent distrust of wine advertising in general, and those who didn't object to the idea of advertising found the current crop of wine ads to be cliched and elitist. Here are some highlights:

* "I know that if you have enough money to do a big glossy ad in a (magazine), then you are probably making too much wine anyway and I probably will not drink or buy you."

* "If a wine is advertising, then it is not worth buying or drinking. It is generally the larger corporate entities selling copious quantities of cheap and uninteresting wines."