THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503020040
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JIM RAPER, SPECIAL TO SUNDAY FLAVOR
LENGTH: Long : 118 lines
IN A GROCERY store a few weeks ago, I bought several bottles of E. & J. Gallo 1990 Zinfandel North Coast on sale for $3.99.
I had tasted the wine previously, and knew I would like it. I knew its robust flavor would mate well with the meat stews, grilled sausages and tomato-infused pasta dishes I prepare often during the colder months.
But I was thinking about more than good, cheap wine when I reached for the zinfandel. I was thinking about Ernest and the late Julio Gallo, the remarkable men whose autobiography I had finished reading only days earlier.
``Ernest & Julio, Our Story,'' which the brothers pulled together with the help of writer Bruce B. Henderson ($25 from the Times Books division of Random House), is not just for wine enthusiasts.
It's for anybody who has tried to make a buck in business. It's for anybody interested in mass marketing, particularly in advertising. It's for anybody who wonders how products are developed. It's for anyone who appreciates Old World values and stamina.
And it's for anyone drawn to a page-turner of a story. The drama follows a couple of heartbroken and nearly penniless young men who are thrust into winemaking when their incompetent and brooding father kills their mother and then takes his own life in 1933. They also must endure a nasty fight with a younger brother as they build an industry-leading winery and become two of the richest men in the nation.
The book roams, here - with pointed and sometimes boastful anecdotes from Ernest, the marketing genius - and there, with the more reserved comments of Julio, the vineyard manager and winemaker. Yet the story flows well.
Family drama is blended with business drama and, by the end, humor and fortune outweigh the sadness and stumbles. FIRST FAMILY OF WINE
It is hard to remember a time when the Gallos were not the first family of wine in the United States. But they once were the underdogs in the industry, and the way they rose to the top is a textbook case of ``why not'' American capitalism.
The Gallos weren't niche marketers; they were all-niche marketers. Anybody with a thirst for wine and a little money was a potential customer. Want a sweet white port? You got it. Want that port a little drier? You got it.
Want wine mixed with fruit flavorings? Want it carbonated? Want a jug table wine with a mellow (read, faintly sweet) aftertaste? Want to move on to dry table wines? You got them all.
Eventually, the Gallos went after sophisticated wine devotees. If you wanted a $60 cabernet as good as any from California, you got it.
Ernest was the market researcher and salesman. He traveled the country for years talking to customers, to retailers. He hired a team of marketers to help him.
In the mid-1950s a field worker arrived at the Gallo headquarters in Modesto, Calif., with an unusual story from San Francisco. White port drinkers there were mixing the stuff with concentrated lemon juice. It had become a fad.
Julio went to work and produced a wine that tasted like lemony port. After successful test-marketing, an excited Ernest decided the wine needed an all-American name. Someone suggested Thunderbird. It was an overnight success.
In the early 1960s, Gallo introduced Pink Chablis as a ``gourmet'' wine, and pushed it with an advertising blitz. But it was a dud. On the verge of giving up on the wine, the Gallos tried one more ad campaign in 1965. An advertising agency proposed a television spot with a fairy-tale setting: A prince pours a glass of white wine for a princess, who sips it and smiles, and the wine turns pink.
The announcer says, ``And so great was her praise that the wine blushed pink. Now this legendary wine is re-created for you by Ernest and Julio Gallo. Pink like rose, drinks like chablis. . . . The first really new table wine in years. The smart wine for young, modern tastes.''
Ernest, who admits he is often contentious with ad people, approved the spot immediately and it ran without a script change. And, as he writes, ``Pink Chablis became a big hit overnight, thanks to that single commercial.''
But as savvy as the brothers were, they were surprised by some of their successes. Boone's Farm Apple wine was introduced in 1961 because a similar product was enjoying a small success on the East Coast and the Gallos were never ones to leave a market to a competitor. Ernest, however, decided the Gallo business was in grape wine and he refused to advertise the new product. By 1967, Boone's Farm was moving at a rate of only 28,000 cases a year.
Then a phone call came from a distributor in Delaware who wanted a train-car load of Boone's Farm. Not long after that came a similar call from Houston. The Gallos were amazed. The wine was flying out of their plant and they didn't know why. They weren't advertising it anywhere.
In 1968, they sold 90,000 cases of Boone's Farm. By 1970, they were selling 2.4 million cases, and in 1972, after a strawberry-flavored wine was added to the label, the Boone's Farm line sold nearly 16 million cases. Julio had to travel the globe trying to find enough apple concentrate to supply the demand. They caused an international boom in the price of the concentrated juice.
Ernest speculates that Boone's Farm was the right wine at the right time to ``convert the baby-boom generation to wine.'' During the last two decades the Gallo brands have held on to millions of those customers, and have converted many of them into drinkers of semi-dry and dry table wines.
Simultaneously they have been a prime mover behind vineyard and winemaking improvements in California. Every wine drinker in the country owes a thank-you to the Gallo empire. PAYING HOMAGE
So there I was in the grocery store, paying homage to the Gallos by grabbing up their good, cheap zinfandel. In the same store were dozens of other Gallo products: wine coolers, ports, sherries, sparkling wines, blush wines. I decided then and there I would never say or write another disparaging word about Thunderbird or Boone's Farm or White Grenache.
Gallo is doing a fine job of meeting the demands of wine drinkers like me. That the company is just as dedicated to its Thunderbird customers shouldn't bother me the least bit. It should reassure me.
MEMO: Julio Gallo died in 1993 in an auto accident, at the age of 83. Ernest
Gallo, 85, remains active in the business.
ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
GALLO WINERY
The Gallo brothers, once the underdogs in the wine industry, were a
textbook success story.
by CNB