Bad Ideas to Best Seller: The Story of Hamilton Merlot

Hamilton Estates Merlot has evolved from a handful of questionable marketing decisions to an affordable, go-to item for legions of long-time Geerlings and Wade clients.

You don’t just decide to create a brand named after a call center employee without lots of forethought, no matter how fine a worker Ms. Hamilton was. Would a $10 wine with the Monkees on the label, for example, be taken seriously, excluding by the Monkees collectors?

Shouldn’t a bottling sporting a Declaration of Independence/Bill of Rights swipe be at least a little suspect? Especially when this $10 bottle bears a “reserve” moniker, attempting to ride the Glen Ellen brand school of wine marketing, implying that this wine was a better lot, carefully culled out of a much larger production, strictly because you can get away with it legally?

When my team inherited the Hamilton label, it was during the height of American Merlot Mania, so of course all Merlot response rates were quite high – Hamilton Merlot sold like it was free, as opposed to the closer-to-normal–moving Hamilton Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc. Hamilton became “the $9.99 Merlot” label - right place, right time for that decision.

Hamilton Merlot’s continued success is due to the wine over-delivering at its price point.

The real problem, as any production guy will tell you, is that to bottle the volume of domestic Merlot needed to satisfy the market at a $9.99 retail and maintain award-winning quality year-after-year is less rewarding and probably more difficult than making wines greater than the ten dollar price point. Remember, wine is first made in the vineyard!

Plus we didn’t want to fall into the dumbed-down-to-cherry-juice trap that was already starting to sour (bad pun) the world Merlot market. Though there were no illusions that we were bottling Petrus, we were careful to insure that the wine always furnished tangible value at all touch points: supple in the mouth, some heft, adequate structure for short-term bottle aging, a touch of oak to help temper the varietal’s herbaceousness, plus textbook cherry and plum fruit flavors, with a hint of black tea. We still do that.

This involves the assistance of winemakers long on integrity, willing to put their all into a project often less profitable for themselves than their own brands, in the service of our vision. And over the years, Hamilton has been a who’s who of California winemaking talent helping me: Dennis Hill, Guy Davis, Paul Moser, Steve Rued and Philp Zorn have all held the Hamilton reins in different vintages. It’s out of respect to them I refuse to put "reserve" back on the label even though it’s quite legal to do so – they don’t practice misdirection on their own projects.

Finally, the continued success of Hamilton Merlot generates resources that allow us to tackle some other, potentially more rewarding projects.