Originally published on January 15, 2012.
A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: This was sucha good idea. Should have done more of this. And should do it again. I could include delivery drivers!
Frankly Wines has a Facebook page. Why? I’m not so sure why, but we have one. And when you have a Facebook page, one of the objectives is to get people to like it, pay attention to your posts, and comment on them.
If those are the objectives, than our two most successful posts in 2011 were:
- A picture of a cat sitting next to a bottle of Puffeney Chardonnay
- A picture of one of my sales reps holding a massive bottle of wine
Those results could lead me to just post links to the Lolcat site, but honestly, those cats sort of annoy me. And they don’t have much to do with wine. But the sales rep posts…that could be fun, relevant….and if done right, not require a lot of work.
And then the idea of the Frankly Wines Five Questions was born.
As background, this idea is based on the idea of the Proust Questionnaire, a sort of party game popular at the turn of century (the last century). Proust didn’t write the questions (which include queries about your favorite virtue, your heros, and how you would like to die) but his answers are some of the most famous. If you’re not exactly a student of 4,000 page novels or the parlor games of the Belle Epoque but this still sounds familiar, you many recognize the modern version that always runs on the final page of Vanity Fair magazine.
So the Frankly Wines version is five open-ended wine questions that we’ll put to the many wine reps that come through our doors. They answer the questions, pick out their favorite bottle in the store (that they don’t rep), we take a picture (and put it in the always-popular fish-eye view) and voila – a Facebook post.
There are some very cool people in the ranks of the wheelie-bag-pulling sales rep army. We know them well, but we thought it would be fun to introduce them to the rest of the world.
(And….it’s a really easy way to put together an entertaining post.)
On to the our guinea pig:
Clarke Boehling, Rosenthal Wine Merchant
1. Your idea of perfect wine happiness: A cellar full of wines that have personal resonance for me, in a house I designed myself, in which I have space and time to cook meals to pair my wines with.
2. Your idea of absolute wine misery: Doing an in-store tasting during which every single customer describes my wines as “tart.”
3. Preferred method of wine sample transportation: Donkey. But, because that’s difficult in NYC, I stick to my red L.L. Bean bookbag from 8th grade
4. Dream dinner companion (living/or dead): David Lynch. (At his house.)
5. Wine pairing that blew your mind: 2005 Montbourgeau Savagnin and raw oysters. BRINE on BRINE! And not something that would have immediately occurred to me.
Frankly Wines Pick: Domaine Macle Chateau-Chalone Vin Jaune 2003: Why this one? We forgot to make Clarke tell us why, but in this case, the wine speaks for itself! You don’t see many bottles of this sitting around, so when you see it, you grab it!)
*That’s Clarke’s cat in the picture.
Fastidious respond in return of this difficulty with solid arguments and explaining the whole thing regarding that.