Brave New Grape
Big time book publisher HarperCollins and fashion uber retailer Saks Fifth Avenue recently announced a partnership in which the publisher put a out a book called "Cashmere If You Can", a tale of a family of Mongolian cashmere goats living atop the retailer's Midtown Manhattan store. Yes, really.
Conceived by Saks' own internal marketing machine, the tale shies from overtly plugging the megastore, instead (hopefully) creating buzz about the place simply by way of a good story with, you guessed it, fabulous product placement.
The New York Times says that HarperCollins has already signed on to do another book with Saks and is negotiating additional projects with, among other types of retailers, packaged goods companies.
This all led me to wonder if wineries might be amongst the gaggle of packaged goods companies racing to be a part of the "product placement within a book" trend. It hardly seems terrifically far-fetched. After all, with rampant consolidation afoot in the wine world and consumers faced with an increasingly homogenous group of Yellow Tail-esque wines on supermarket shelves, why wouldn't wine brand makers seek out new ways to differentiate themselves?
And so I started thinking about how these wineries might bring storytelling to life in a vinous vein. The first idea that came to me was that of a winery-dwelling Quasimodo type who would, rather than troll the bell towers of Notre Dame in Victor Hugo's epic The Hunchback of Notre Dame, slink around the barrel room of a spooky old winery at night, stealing samples from the best barrel lots. I couldn't help but chuckle at how this would give a whole new meaning to term "wine thief."
Bad jokes aside (or maybe not entirely), I would welcome the opportunity to intersperse my usual bedtime reading with some well-told grape-themed tales. On that note, I leave you the following title suggestions:
A Tale of Two Wineries
From Harvest to Happiness
A Crush Story
Brave New Grape
A Love Story: When Yeast Met Juice
The End
www.saksfifthavenue.com