|
Edited on Thu Mar-30-06 09:40 PM by Shakespeare
I've never seen another bunch of people just genuinely love their work and everything it stands for the way my friends do (did). And Fetzer was SO much more than their wines; they really produce some amazing limited production wines that are to. die. for.
The idiots in Kentucky have no idea what they've squandered:
Via Certified Mail
Owsley Brown II
Chairman, Board of Directors
Brown-Forman Corporation
850 Dixie Highway
Louisville, KY 40210
David C. M. Dearie
President and Chief Operating Officer, Brown-Forman Wines
Brown-Forman Corporation
850 Dixie Highway
Louisville, KY 40210
Paul C. Varga
President and Chief Executive Officer
Brown-Forman Corporation
850 Dixie Highway
Louisville, KY 40210
Re: Bone-Headed Corporate Decisions
Dear Mssrs. Brown, Dearie and Varga:
I write regarding your company's sudden decision to shut down Fetzer's Valley Oaks Ranch in Hopland, California. I am a long-time wine club member, and my husband and I visit the Valley Oaks location at least once a month. I am one of Fetzer's most passionate ambassadors--the kind of customer I used to believe you actually valued--and I am devastated and angry (yes, actually angry) to learn of the closure. You can be sure that I will no longer enthusiastically talk up Fetzer wines to my friends, and will instead encourage them not to buy the brand. There are plenty of California wines to recommend in their place.
There are so many aspects of the closure to be angry about, I hardly know where to begin. Your decision to completely shut down the location--ending everything: the tasting room, the market, the amazing garden--simply boggles the mind. My initial thoughts are that this is a decision based in greed and ignorance: greed for a bigger bottom line at the expense of everything that makes Fetzer special, and ignorance about the California wine culture in general.
By closing the tasting room and market, you have done away with a very important public "face" for Fetzer. The employees who worked in the tasting room could always be counted on to be friendly and informative, and were perhaps the best customer service representatives I've ever encountered in a retail setting, anywhere. If not for them, we likely would never have joined the wine club in the first place. The image that they presented to the public for Fetzer, and by extension for Brown-Forman, was as good as any company could hope for. That you show no appreciation for that, and for the importance in general of keeping a tasting room open to the public, belays an ignorance of the wine industry, and in particular the image of the California wine country, that makes you all appear little better than southern rednecks, corporate job titles notwithstanding. I was born and raised in the south, so I know a bit about ignorant good old boys (southern or not), and it's something that defines a person no matter how much education and experience they have. You can put the words "Valley Oaks" on your labels in big, bold letters, but you've just killed off the very thing that built that image.
Nothing publicly has been said yet about the fate of the spectacular small-production wines you make, but with your stated emphasis on supermarket wines as the reason for the closure, the future for your better wines seems dismal at best. Because your winemakers are allowed to make these limited bottlings, most of which are of stellar quality, they are able to retain the respect of their industry peers and, I would imagine, nurture their own enthusiasm for the craft. Your decision yesterday to shut down the Hopland ranch shows an utter disregard for and ignorance of how important this really is to Fetzer's overall image. You have reduced a brand that stood for quality and turned it into just one more faceless, cheap budget wine.
Along with the elimination of the tasting room and market, you're also eliminating the Inn and the organic garden. My husband wooed me in that garden when we'd just begun to date, and we've celebrated our first two wedding anniversaries with stays at the Inn. As he recovered from emergency heart surgery last summer, the place he decided to go for his first public outing was Fetzer, because it always feels like we're among friends when we go there. We obviously have a deep attachment to the Hopland ranch, and we're not the only ones; I know that wine club members traveled from around the country for your first (and apparently last) two winemaker dinners these past two summers. That's a kind of brand loyalty that all the supermarket wines in the world can't buy, and you've chosen to abandon that. How deeply stupid. And how tragic that you cannot see past your bottom line to the benefits of this facility, and to the priceless PR you could use to Fetzer's (financial and brand) benefit. Why no partnerships with the garden and local schools? Why no marketing of products produced by or inspired by the garden? Sure, there were attempts at that with Fetzer's artisan olive oil, but they were met with flaccid corporate support. Why the decision to end the cooking programs and events that brought in world-class chefs like John Ash and Emeril Lagasse--and nurtured and launched newcomers like the delightful Bridget Harrington? Is an extra 100,000 cases of budget wine sales really worth what you've thrown away? I can't imagine how it could be.
And perhaps most tragic of all is your rumored abandonment of Fetzer's commitment to organic and sustainable farming practices. Fetzer took the initiatve as one of the largest buyers of wine grapes in the country to lead the industry to this ethically and environmentally preferable approach to growing wine grapes. I suppose it's fitting, given the poor leadership currently destroying this country, that its corporations would show the same arrogance and ignorance in matters where they could do so much good by the leadership positions they take. To reverse that course now is a profoundly ugly move on Fetzer's part. I had hoped for the last several years that Brown-Forman really was more savvy and more committed to the Fetzer brand than the other corporate conglomerates who come into the California wine country, buy a storied local winery and then run it into the ground. I suppose you'll be selling the brand off to the highest bidder in a few more years once you've exhausted the maximum profit and reduced Fetzer to something associated only with "cheap" and "poor quality." It's a kind of corporate rape not unlike what Maxxim Corp did to PALCO just a bit north of here a few years ago. You're no better than carpetbaggers and parasites, all of you.
So what do we look forward to now? Oh, that's right--increased advertising of your budget line of wines. We trade that marvelous Hopland facility for an uptick in the number of bus stop posters and ads in women's magazines. Fools. Are you really that concerned about competition from foreign dreck now cluttering up supermarket shelves? Do you really feel that your focus should be in outselling the crap-in-a-bottle from Australia we're currently plagued with? If so, then in closing I'll offer my suggestion for a marketing slogan for your new, "improved" image: "Fetzer Wines - Now Just One More Cheap Supermarket Wine."
Admonishingly,
Shakespeare
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
