ever since i have started my wine studies with wset, i have had this thought that generally speaking wine is, let's be honest, generally poorly marketed. think of france with their difficult labels to understand, left alone relate to, think about italian wines with their thousands of grapes which are not well understood by general consuemrs, think of vintages, regions, red wines, white ines, fortified wines, sweet wines, sparkling wines, cheap wines, out of this world expensive wines. this list goes on and on.

my chief concern these days is to find a ''formula'' that will be key to selling millions and millions of bottles of wine. i am thinking about this days and nights, nights and days.

the other day, i was reading tom peters' book ''trends'' in which he reports that ''about 94% of all household purchases are decided by women''. now that is a great many decisions. that is also a lot of power women have in the choice of products that will show up on the table at dinner time.

yet, look at the way wine is marketed. ask most women who are in the business, including award winning sommeliers and master of wine and they will tell you how patronizing most men are towards them when they talk about wine around them. jancis robinson has written plenty of times about this in particular in this article linked here.

and so, it is in this context that i am now quite interested in how zonin is marketing their ''primo amore'' wine series at the moment. at vinitaly china in shanghai last week, the back-drop of their stand was this huge poster from their marketing campaign that is obviously targeted at women: ''wine. it's all about love'' showing this ansome italian hunk. my wife certainly noticed. in fact she kept asking me to go and taste the wines... here is the poster:

their PRIMO AMORE collection is well made, and i suspect could quickly become the ''vino della casa'' of more than one of my lady friends who are still single and like to have a glass or two at dinner each night. even my wife asked the attendant at the booth where she could buy it in hong kong...

one of them is a red sangiovese + merlot, the other a white which is 100% pinot grigio, and the last one is a ''frizzante'' which garganega and moscato.

as you can see, well selected grapes, all easy to drink, all pleasant, and all conducive to ''amore''.

now, that is a campaign that seeks to establish an emotional bond with it's consumers.

might be a cliché for some, but certainly brilliant for me!