Hi friends 👋 | On 31 July 1395, the Duke of Burgundy sat down and signed a document outlawing a grape. | He called the Gamay grape "very bad and very disloyal". The wine had, in his words, a "very great and terrible bitterness". It's "injurious to the human creature". "Every vine is to be cut down within the month, pulled out by the following Easter, reduced to nought ... for ever". | But it didn't work. Nobody dug them up. Forty six years later, his grandson had to issue the same ban again. | Why he did it | In the Côte d'Or, growers had planted Gamay where Pinot Noir would have grown exceptionally well. Gamay was easier, it cropped heavily, and everyone could see that it was working. You know how that goes, you look over the wall, you see the fruit next door, and you plant what they planted. | The Duke said that they left "in ruin and devastation the good places where good wine might have grown". And the thing is, he read the terroir correctly. He never said that Gamay couldn't grow. He just said it was growing in ground where something better could be. | Burgundy's terroir | Burgundy has 1,247 climats between Dijon and Santenay, sixty kilometres end to end, rarely more than two wide. Centuries old walls, hedges, paths, and meurgers, piles of stones cleared off the plots by hand and left where they fell, still marking the vineyard boundaries. Those lines follow the land, its geology, slopes, and drainage. | All growers get to know the lay of the land, its unique characteristics, challenges, and opportunities. Buyers pay varying prices for parcels. They may share a single wall for hundreds of years, but they could be quite different when it comes to what they produce. | The ground you stand on | Have you ever sat down to write something for your marketing but didnt know what to say? Perhaps you looked at four or five others doing what you do. They said more or less the same thing, and no doubt used terms that you agree with, regenerative, family run, working with nature, not against it. Perhaps you took that likeness as proof that it works. It makes sense, and if everyone says it, it must be what buyers need to hear. | That's like what the Gamay grape growers did. For them, it was a sensible reading of the evidence to hand. | Similarly, nobody has complained and your marketing seems fine. Of course, you haven't got an imperilous 14th Century Duke informing you that the fruits of your work are 'bitter'. But perhaps it just doesn't taste as good as it could be, and therefore, it isn't as magnetic even though the potential is there. | The question is, are you planting into your company's uniqueness, its own experience and character, its terroir? | Three things you can do: | Look at what's actually come out of your ground.
It is much better to speak authentically about what makes you different in your category than it is to say what makes you the same as everyone else. This could be a story about what your grapes do after a very dry August, or a homepage section on the reason why there is a distinctive taste difference in your product. You'll likely discount it because it's obvious to you, when it isn't obvious to your customer at all. Go through your marketing claim by claim, can your competitor also make it?
Rewrite every one where somebody else can say the same thing. This is what the Duke got half right, some crops belong to other people's terroir. Let your customers write your marketing for you.
Always scan your inbox, comments, and reviews, read back through what people said when they were pleased or angry, and use that as inspiration for what you create next.
| Where the grape ended up | Gamay found its success on the granite in Beaujolais. There are ten crus there now. A cru is a village whose wine was distinctive enough to be sold under its own name (so the label reads Morgon or Fleurie rather than Beaujolais). There was nothing was wrong with the grape at all, it was just not the best land for it. | The Côte d'Or is now best known for its Pinot Noir for reds and Chardonnay for whites. Gamay is gone. | Growers who are close to the grapes are able to build a solid relationship, but sometimes, in this case, they can be too close. It took an outsider to see something different about the same ground (albeit high-handed). | In writing this, I found out that the growers of Beaune, Burgundy, have written down their picking date every year since 1354. For 634 years, the grapes came in from 28 September onwards. Since 1988, they've increasingly come in earlier. Now, there are reports that this year could be the earliest harvest for centuries. | Cornwall, this week | Like everywhere, it's been bone dry. The raspberries and blackberries have themselves come in bitter for want of rain. It's the same plants as last year, the same hedges, in the same garden and field, nothing's changed, but a lack of water. I am hopeful for rain in the coming week. | This email has been sent much later in the week than usual, apologies. We've moved The Salt onto a new email service this month and recent changes had some unexpected impacts. | Warmly,
Rob | PS. If you missed July's letter, it covered the positioning work I led on Sectormentor's website. You can see their homepage before and after. |
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