A GAY OLD WINE
By Ben Canaider
February 8, 2005
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Drag artist Onya Knees (aka Robert Street, shown at right) with a bottle of Pansy!Photo: Gary Medlicott
It's fruity, pink-hued, requires a certain taste and is targeted at the gay community.
New Zealand's Kim Crawford Wines has released the "world's first gay wine". It celebrated its Melbourne launch recently, coinciding with the 17th Melbourne Gay and Lesbian Cultural Festival.
The wine is called Pansy! - a rose made from merlot, with a splash of malbec and cabernet franc. It's bled from the pressings of these red grapes (which means it's cheap to make), comes from New Zealand's Gisborne and Hawkes Bay regions and sells for $23.99 a bottle.
OK. That's the boring bit out of the way.
The real question is, can a wine be gay? It would certainly add a new and, perhaps, difficult dimension to wine tastings. At least for some tasters. Of course, this is not a serious point - albeit an interesting one.
Pansy! is a wine designed for the gay community. If you think this sounds like a cynical marketing ploy, well, read on.
Co-founder of Pansy!, Erica Crawford, was sitting around her house one night with some friends, one of whom happened to be an Auckland gay bar owner-come-drag artiste, Robert Street. A few drinks were had, the conversation turned to wine, and Street asked why no one made a wine for gays.
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"We thought about it," Crawford says, "and a few weeks later, Kim (Crawford) rang me and said, 'I've made something for the boys'. It just happened to be rose. The name - Pansy! - came to me a few days later. You know how sometimes the mind just drifts."
Mind drifts are not new to Kim Crawford Wines. It's had its ups and downs.
Kim was head winemaker for another company - Coopers Creek - when claims surfaced that the company had sold wines not true to name.
There was no evidence that Crawford knew of the alleged mislabelling, but a lot of NZ wine people still hold this against him, reckoning the incident potentially damaged NZ's wine industry.
The claims were of selling muller-thurgau as sauvignon blanc - which was seen to be worse than mutton dressed up as lamb.
It was at this stage the Auckland gay hospitality crowd got behind the Crawfords, supporting their wines.
"Pansy! was a way of thanking gay friends in the hospitality industry," Erica Crawford says.
Darren Jahn is the president of the NSW Wine Press Club. (Pansy! was launched in Sydney last November.) He has some general comments to make about the wine and its reception bi - I mean by - Sydney's "pink triangle".
"The marketing is a clever concept. I've heard the wine is good, and it has had some good reviews, although I've not tried it myself. I think people see it as a fun product rather than a serious rose contender."
But is it too blatant? Jahn wonders if the Australian gay wine market might indeed perceive it that way.
"The launch parties are in gay bars with lots of feathers and frills, and drag acts." One of Auckland's most popular, in fact: a drag-show hostess by the name of Onya Knees. As Jahn adds: "You might well be after a couple of bottles of Pansy!"
Onya Knees herself, otherwise known as the aforementioned Robert Street, is accompanying Erica Crawford on the Melbourne leg of the Pansy! tour. Street has no commercial interest in the brand; he says he acts only as a friend of Crawford.
"Erica made 700 cases and we held a little party. We obviously have different
ideas about what constitutes a little party. Five hundred people came. And the gay community embraced the wine. If some people say the wine is blatantly targeting that market, well, marketing IS targeting. When it is done successfully, is that a bad thing?"
Street also thinks the gay market is very brand loyal. "We tend to spend a lot of money on entertaining. There's support for wine brands that are good. You'll always buy them when you see them on wine lists, because you don't want to buy a bad wine."
The notion of brand loyalty is not to be sniffed at, particularly when you consider that the Sydney gay wine market alone is estimated to be worth $4.5 million a month.
"Pansy! is about friendship, kindness and generosity of the human spirit," Crawford adds. Indeed.
The proof of the pudding, or the summer fruit compote, is in the drinking. Pansy! has 12 grams per litre of residual sugar. That's not overtly high for rose or light red; but the wine smells like Redskin lollies and, it has to be said, tastes sickly sweet.
"We didn't want to make a winemaker's wine," Crawford says. "The first one we made was 4 grams RS (residual sugar); I'd like it bone-dry but it's important to make wine for your consumers, not for yourself. And for summer sipping, we thought it needed the sugar addition."
That thought is up for debate. Pansy! is more like a light red than a rose. It's also the 2003 model, as opposed to all the 2004 rose wines in the market.
When rose styles need to trade on freshness and thoughtless drinkability, Pansy! seems like someone wearing last season's party boa

Is Wine Gay? by Tom Wark

Yeah, I'm in PR. A marketer. At heart, I'm a salesperson (hell, I once made a good living selling vacuum cleaners door to door). So I understand the importance of getting the consumer's attention and setting yourself apart.
I understand the idea of market segmentation. I understand the idea of looking at the market by age, by ethnicity, by geography and by mindset and catering a product or pitch to the difference that exist between the market's segments.
I understand too the benefits and potential of catering to the gay marketplace. I've worked with wineries that have specifically catered pitches to a gay demographic.
But there is something about Risquesommelier.com that gives me the heeby Jeebies(sp?).
Is it still necessary to appeal to the purely sexual when marketing to the gay community? Must a product or sales pitch to the gay community assume that my neighbor down the street is primarily concerned with getting laid? From the look of Risquesommelier.com you'd think this is the only thing on their mind.
The site describes its focus this way:
Sommelier is a Wine Interest style BLOG site targeting the Gay consumer that goes far beyond the basic “Wine Critique” into detail riche experiences in Wine, Cuisine, Travel, Luxury Goods, Art and Music… all with a little lighthearted risque mischief."
Is there a wine blog that peddles sexual insinuations along side wine that is aimed at straights? Someone point me to it. I can see the benefits of a blog post on how to incorporate wine into the art of seduction. I can see the idea of a blog post that highlights the nexus between sex and wine. I can even wrap my arms around the idea of a blog that chronicles how a person incorporates wine into their love life. But a blog that insinuates that gays must see some kind of connection to sex in order to get interested in the content simply strikes me as too stereotypical to be of use.
Maybe I'm wrong.