I've been wanting to write about this for the longest time and yesterday I had a tasting that put me over the edge. The title may be a little misleading, you could interpret it to be discussing the likes of Scholium, Auteur, Harlan, Colgin or Screaming Eagle that Vinfolio presents on a frequent basis. What I mean is entirely different, it involve usage of initials or numbers in the name of the wine. Take these for example:
A. P. Vin: A new producer of limited vineyard designated wine who has set up his winery in the Potrero Hill neighborhood near Vinfolio.
CL: A brand partnership between Craven and Lattin
Why do I cite these? It is because when you use the web to search for them, you may not neccessarily get the exact information you are looking for.
To retrieve information from most any database you type in a search string of the first few characters of the name, in most cases 3 or 4 is enough to narrow down your search. Anytime you introduce punctuation or spaces, all bets are off. For example: type the word "Mondavi" into a search window and you will get lots of returns, but they will all include "Mondavi" somewhere. In the instances of A P Vin, and CL, there isn't enough information in the name to return the anticipated results.
The bottom line when creating an identity for a product is to make it easily recognizable to allow it to be found later. Vinfolio currently has the
A P Vin and
CL wines in stock. I highly recommend the CL for its value. $16.00 and VF94 score, and the few bottles of A P Vin will make a collector pretty happy, but because of their names they may be tough to locate. If you know the varietal or area of origin, you can use the VinCellar search functions to narrow down the choices.
Oh yes, I mentioned numbers too. Some work better than others. For instance if you are looking for 2480, the wine produced by Hollywood & Vine, or David Arthur's Elevation 1147, the numbers seem to work just fine to narrow down the selection. Here is your homework assignment for today (Hint, this is the wine that put me over the edge yesterday. It was tasty, good price, and plenty of it is around.)
Locate a bottle of 1975 Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley on-line. Not so fast, 1975 is not the vintage, but the name.
Happy hunting!
I'd be interested to hear what methods readers use to narrow down searches for wines. Do you use varietal, vineyard designation, price? Have you ever just given up looking for a wine on-line because your search kept hitting dead ends?
Advice to wineries, You put great juice in the bottle - keep the names simple to remember but also simple to find.