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INTEREST: Winery Pulls Vintage After Mention in Kami no Shizuku

The manga Kami no Shizuku, also known as Les Gouttes de Dieu, revolves around a young man seeking to inherit his father's wine collection who has competition in the form of his father's adopted son. The father was a wine critic, and in order to inherit the vast array of wines, the two sons must compete to identify 13 obscure wines.

Gotta remember, there's a finite amount of wine that a single vineyard can produce, so if there's a sudden boom of unmet demand, it just gets scalped for outrageous sums of money.

Which isn't to say he's not being snobby about it. I'm sure he's also doing this because the people who would buy it will buy it because of the show and not to enjoy the wine, much like fans of Sex and the City going shopping/eating in NYC. As a former New Yorker who had heard more than one acne pockmarked, doughy woman in sweats shriek, "OH-mygod I am SOOO Carrie right now!" I must say that, though it's pretentious as hell, I sympathize entirely.

So essentially the guy didn't like the idea of the common folk buying his wine? I don't know, I guess I'd be too flattered that people traveled from Japan to buy my wine to pull it from sale.

He said he wanted the wine to be "sold for the accessible good of everyone and not only be reserved for people who buy luxury wine." He keeps "a small stock" for those buyers he deems genuine connoisseurs, and has only raised the price from €15.50 (£13.20) to €18.

I can understand wanting to curb demand so prices don't jump too drastically, but it's the bit about keeping a small stock for connoisseurs that made it seem snobby to me. I guess to me, one person's money is as good as the next. If they can afford it, then I'd sell it to them, I don't much care why they want to buy whatever it is I'm selling.

The advantage is that either way, the winery's name is now out there and this will help sales regardless of the vintage. I don't know how specific Japanese people are toward vintages but just going from another bottle on the shelf to a known brand is a typically a huge deal.

It doesn't look like this entirely worked though. Wine-searcher is pulling up anywhere between $30 and $100 for a bottle.

Château le Puy

The problem with many French wines is that they tend to become overpriced, solely because they are French wines. A lot of it is due to manipulation of the market for the purpose of keeping prices high. Last year French wineries had a surplus, due to a bumper crop, and rather than putting it on the the market and depressing prices they dumped thousands of gallons of wine down the drain. Wine they could easily have sold, but by reducing the available quantity prices remained high.

I love French wines but I rarely buy them anymore, there are others available from other parts of the world that are just as good for a lot less money. You can still get good value for some French vintages, but you have to hunt for them, and that can be a lot of bother.

The Guardian article is all messed up:
First, there is no "Japanese television cartoon" version of Kami no Shizuku.

And second, live action or mythical toon, the March ending occurred in March 2009, not March 2010.

Rather than trouble The Guardian, ranting about it in ANN forum felt more natural.

Step one: Create super-popular manga about wine.

Step two: Indirectly control wine market.

Step three: Quietly buy up tons of bottles of some inexpensive, obscure vintage.

Step four: Write an entire story arc around said vintage.

Step five: GET RICH.