For The Love Of Port

Richard Henderson wrote:They mentioned that the current image is one of university professors in leather patch sport coats sipping sherry.

Better stock up now as they practically give away sherry right now. Personally, I love it but wish there were expert around I could lean on. Go to a B&M that has a bunch and no one there has had any or can offer something that I don't already know.

I find most styles of sherry to great with cigars or with cured meats and nuts. To me, sherry like a poor man's Madeira.

They can't buy a lot of advertising for 1 million dollars so I don't expect the price to rise much.
What we have so little knowledge and little supply here are the finos. I learned to like it in Spain . I like the dry, not sweet varieties.
It will be interesting to see if the campagn increases market share.

Ya know, since my last post on this topic of increasing Port awareness & consumption I have had a several repeats of the same scenario in my wine bar.

Even among people who know that they at least like Port, they don't begin to know the difference beyond a Ruby & Tawny Port. Almost no one knows what an LBV is, and very few know of Vintage Port, let alone what the difference is.

I am forced to explain an LBV like it is a Reserve ruby, and that a Vintage VP is a tier above......so they kinda get it. I usually pour a minee Port flight for them to taste the difference as my explaination gets fairtly muddled when i talk about blending and barrel aging differences between ruby, LBV, VP, etc. Way too much info is requireed to explain the difference between only 2 or 3 Port styles, let alone all of them.

In any event, the vastly different names: Ruby, Tawny, Tawny with age, Colheita, Vintage, and then throw in all of the unclear Ports like Warre's Warrior Port Reserve, Dow's Trademark, Dow's Midnight? and the like and you have a product that clearly has some branding issues, or lack there of. Heck, i can't keep all of the value Ports straight as to whether they are Ruby or Tawny when they have esoteric names, can you imagine newbies?

Richard Henderson wrote:They mentioned that the current image is one of university professors in leather patch sport coats sipping sherry.

That's funny; my image of Sherry drinking is elderly ladies sipping a thimble-full in the afternoon and feeling secretly wicked.

This probably NOT what the Sherry-PTB want to hear.

They don't want to hear that , Peter, that was the thrust of the story. They want sherry to become an upscale drink for a younger target market.
I think for the port market, the same must be true. I am guessing that the majority of this board are middle aged curmudgeons for whom most ad campaigns are not the target market.

I can imagine a cute ad where the little old ladies are having a thimble full with a cutaway to a hot mid-twenties couple riding away on a motorcycle with the girl firmly gripping the necks of the bottles ( ( sexual overtones!) with a tag line --this ain't your grandmother's port/sherry!

Richard Henderson wrote:I am guessing that the majority of this board are middle aged curmudgeons for whom most ad campaigns are not the target market.

I am in my early thirties, but probably am still not the target market for these advertisers as I tend to think of most advertising as a waste of money - they could be providing me with reduced prices instead of wasting money attracting new buyers and jacking up the prices for these new buyers...

Richard Henderson wrote:I can imagine a cute ad where the little old ladies are having a thimble full with a cutaway to a hot mid-twenties couple riding away on a motorcycle with the girl firmly gripping the necks of the bottles ( ( sexual overtones!) with a tag line --this ain't your grandmother's port/sherry!

Yikes! May we NEVER have to bear witness to Port advertising such as this!!!