Welcome to “The Craig”!
In the coming months I am looking forward to sharing my adventures in travel, coffee, music, airplane reading, carnitas tacos, aged rum, regional fashion, scotch, Philly cheese steaks where Velveeta is a prerequisite, sociological commentary (how long can it possibly take you to get off this plane) and of course, WINE with those either lucky enough or foolish enough to dig down to the roots of our winery website.
Traveling on behalf of a fine Napa Cabernet house over these last five years, not to mention the six years of suitcase living which preceded my time here at Robert Craig in service to a small Sonoma producer, has provided me a wealth of road experiences worth sharing.
For example, when you find yourself in New York City on a fine morning for a walk, you should be armed with the knowledge that the best coffee emporium/ pasticceria in the United States, Sant Ambroeus is just up ahead at 78th and Madison on the Park side of Madison. Their place in the West Village is also a great spot, but the Upper East Side location is the spiritual center which seems to have been plucked from Milan circa 1940. As you sip a perfectly constructed macchiato next to the sweetest squeezed grapefruit juice you have ever tasted while making small talk with Emeril Lagase or Vera Wang next to you at the counter, you might just decide to peruse the next edition of “the Craig” blog for further insight.
The first edition of ‘The Craig” will not contain the levity and visual documentary of the upcoming editions, because I would like to address the fairly serious state of our business as it relates to the economy at large. All is fair game in “The Craig”, so I’ll start us off with my view of California’s produce at our tables, or more likely it seems, upon the pedestals in our vaults.
Elton Slone
General Manager & National Sales Director
Robert Craig Winery
ISSUE 1: New York, New York; if your wines can make it here, they might not make it anywhere else.
You know that annoying commercial for Comfort Inn which features the great song by The Man in Black himself (probably doing a bit of rolling underground each time a spot airs) with the continuous refrain , “I’ve been everywhere man”. I have been living that damn song since the economy started its downward spiral in mid September of this year.
Thankfully, the demand for Robert Craig wines still exceeds the supply owing to the small quantity we produce and the price/ quality ratio the wines represent (more on that later). Despite the fact that our Cabernet Sauvignons were still being picked up eagerly by our distributors, the news from our restaurant customers was grim with many restaurants down double digits in business from 2007.
Since over eighty percent of our business in the national market is done in restaurants, I thought I should dust off the sample bag, get on a plane and let the sommeliers taste the reason they first put our wines on the list. So off to Denver, New York, Boston, New Jersey, Connecticut, St Louis, Savannah, Hilton Head, Charleston, Greenville, Edmonton, Calgary, and Chicago. Even Bob Craig found his frequent flier mileage account skyrocketing as he hit the markets which I had yet to visit this year. We’ve been everywhere man.
The Wine Spectator Magazine’s “California Wine Experience” tasting in New York held at the Marriott in Times Square in mid-October was at once exhilarating and depressing. On the one hand, I was in Manhattan in the Fall. I was able to connect with my extended network of wine business friends around various fine dinner tables during the week.
Each morning I power-walked through the fall display of colors in Central Park arriving at, you guessed it, Sant Ambroeus to be greeted by “Hey, San Francisco!” from the barista at the coffee counter as I entered. Following the finest cup of jo, croissant, and fresh squeezed juice in the world, it was time to go man the tasting table at the event.
After the general malaise on Wall Street and the closing of Lehman and Bear Stearns, attendance at the Wine Spectator tasting was markedly down, yet we had many enthusiastic customers at our table, and we received a number of Cabernet Club sign ups on the spot. The array of wines was phenomenal, and Bob Craig and I took turns pouring at the tasting table so the other was free to sample wildly. Sample I did. There were so many engaging wines that I cannot even begin to make a list. Some of my favorites were the 2005 Diamond Creek Cabernets which I found to be structured, deep, nuanced and classy. Somehow the Spectator managed to award their efforts with scores all below 83 points. This leads me to the depressing part.
Even with all those wonderful wines, meals in such amazing restaurants as Porterhouse, Landmarc, Raoul’s, Gramercy Tavern, 5 Napkin Burger (what a concept), and the company of my far-flung net of friends each night until the wee hours, I could not help but feel a sense of anxiety. This came the moment I took time to scan the full menu of wines present at the California Wine Experience. Unless the entire production of Napa Valley can be sold in Dubai, our business might be in serious trouble.
Our single-vineyard Mt. Veeder Cabernet Sauvignon sells for roughly $75.00 per bottle in most retail outlets outside of our tasting room. We make less than 1500 cases every year, use 100% French oak from the finest barrel producers (Taransaud, Ermitage) and we farm the vineyard so hard that we receive less than two tons per acre nearly every year as opposed to the six-plus tons per acre which the Napa Valley floor vineyards average. Our fruit and farming costs are off the chart.
Somehow, at $75.00, I found our Mt. Veeder Cabernet to be near the very lowest in price among the hundreds of wines represented at the tasting. The sophisticated marketing machinery that allowed me to taste a current vintage Napa Cabernet which retails for (gasp) $600.00 per BOTTLE, may finally meet its match in consumer disenchantment.
At The Craig, our wines are priced according to how much it costs us to make them, not by our neighbors’ wine prices or Bob Craig’s inflated (ha!) ego. Our bank consistently reminds me that our margins are twenty percent lower than the Napa Valley average, yet we sell out every year without too much teeth gnashing or hand wringing. I would defy any of the producers making wine at three, four, five, or six times our price to show me a Cost of Goods spreadsheet which exceeds ours at Robert Craig. Better yet, I challenge any of them to a brown bag competition in which the judges could not accept advertising revenue or change their scores once the bags were removed!
I guess I would welcome the trophy producers to their margins if it were not for the fact that we are all feeling the backlash in Napa Valley over the extremity in pricing which has become far too commonplace. I say to those producers who are making ten, twenty, thirty thousand cases of wine over $150.00 per bottle retail and more than fifty thousand cases over $100.00 per bottle retail, the bubble has burst. It is time to get real.
I do believe that there are more than a few wines grown and made in the Napa Valley which deserve their place well beyond the $100.00 per bottle level, but those wines are marked by the quality of their vineyard site first (see Diamond Creek, see Spottswoode, see Araujo, see Dalla Valle) and the quality of their marketing team second.
We will weather this economic downturn as a country. I believe in the conviction and intelligence of our new leadership, and I believe in the abilities of Americans to be first in innovation and solutions. The excesses in our financial institutions have certainly enabled excesses in other areas such as California wine pricing. The correction has come. I am blessed to work at producing one of the few products which come from this country, outside of Hollywood, which compete at the very top of the world stage in quality. In an increasingly service-based economy, we are actually MAKING something up on Howell Mountain at our winery every day of every week!
I, for one, have not been able to trade down in my wine habits much. I like wines which require some effort and expense to make. I don’t care for the planky character of American oak in wines. I don’t like wines which are angular, short, hot or made to please a focus group. A horse by committee is a donkey, and I don’t trust a group to make an individual decision. I need a sense of place and some complexity and fine mouth feel in my juice.
I have been spoiled at Robert Craig Winery to be sure, but at least I feel that each velvety ounce of our wine is worth every red cent it takes to purchase it. You can order roasted chicken in pretty much any bistro in the country and get a decent version; but once you break the golden skin with your fork at Raoul’s, a new standard has been set. After a taste of Affinity, how good can a lesser quality bottle of wine at twice the price and ten times the production really taste? Remember people, we all really vote with our dollars.
Look for a less impassioned entry in a couple of weeks my pretties while I enjoy my own coffee and my own bed in Sausalito. In the mean time, 2005 Affinity is officially sold out four months ahead of schedule in the national market. In the end, quality will out!
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