Further Thoughts on Terry Wheatley

I noted towards the beginning of the quarter that my interest in this class as a non-drinker was in part related to what I do know well, the entertainment industry, and dealing with storytellers and cultural presentation.  Terry Wheatley was the most evocative speaker yet on this topic, and while she rightly identified storytelling as a key aspect of what she does, I think there's more to be said about how the story is told.

From having worked in Broadway theater, television, and music in recent years, and from my personal knowledge of other media, it's clear that the medium itself is at least a big part of the message, if not the message itself, as you sometimes hear.  Time and time again, a story that works beautifully on stage fails as a movie, or vice versa, even when the same script is used (or perhaps because the same script is used).  So what is the storytelling that works best with wine?

Like with poetry, you have a very limited space to tell the story -- sometimes even just a few words.  While a wine bottle could have a couple paragraphs if desired, generally the story needs to be told in a couple sentences, or even just referred to obliquely.  The story must be evocative and attractive while being unspecific enough to allow the consumer to insert his or her own experiences and imagery.

Like much of entertainment nowadays, Terry in particular seems to value pushing the envelope a little.  So pro-mis-Q-ous wine, for example, airs strongly towards the generalizable; the label reads: "The act of blending multiple, mutually attractive grape varieties in an assortment of unorthodox combinations.  Implies a wanton disregard for convention.  May result in an intense sensory experience.  Practice safe sipping."  Her branding plays into the indulgence and sensuality aspects of wine consumption, but with a winking sense of humor that riffs on drinking as a fun vice.  A red wine in this brand runs at $12, which is probably a good match for the image this story is creating -- inexpensive and casual shenanigans on a weekend.  This story would be very unlikely to work commercially on a $50 bottle, where class and connotation become more refined.

The whole wine sisterhood allows consumers to try out different characters in their own imaginations -- a little akin to the re-branding around Coca-Cola that has become so prominent in the past few years.  Though while Coca-Cola has completely simple and fairly unimaginative identifiers slapped onto its aluminum cans, Wheatley has taken things a step further with more memorable characters, often with alliterative names: Glamour Girl, Rebel Red, Sweet & Sassy, Mischief Maker, Surfer Chick.  A common theme seems to be gleeful defiance: I am who I am, and I'll drink what I'll drink.  It's an interesting match considering what she said about women basically making their consumption choices more substantively than men do, but I suppose it goes to show that women do have a meaningful measure of image-based consumption as well.

Girl & Dragon ups the ante.  The artwork imagery is more elaborate and fanciful, seeming like it's been drawn by an artist who does covers for fantasy books.  The story, while still fairly concise, reads like the back cover of a series of fantasy books: "A shadow slips over the land, as the day turns to night.  Glittering stars turn on, one by one; the dragon has taken flight.  Down below, a girl awakes.  Her heart beating; his wings beating.  He searched the world for her.  And now they soar as one."  Now, while I'm a little scared for this girl cavorting with a dragon, I certainly won't forget this wine next to hundreds of others with complicated foreign names that are difficult to tell apart.  But again, while the story is colorful in the few details it offers, it leaves space for the consumer to insert her own passion.

And that connection will only be genuine if the story and the spirit are genuine ones.