A Comic Strip Created the Ultimate Cult Wine: The Hero Wasn't Captain Marvel but a Marvel of a Wine Captain
- By CWF Sources
- Published 04/20/2006
- Features
SAN FRANCISCO -- Just over a decade ago, in a far-away country, an comic strip avidly followed by grown-ups turned a California wine that was fairly new on the scene in that country into the ultimate cult wine -- overnight.
The country was Japan; the comic strip for grownups, which is called a manga and which appears on a regular basis in one of Japan's most important daily newspapers, stars a young, swashbuckling wine steward named Joe Satake. The wine he turned into cult status was from California, a Calera Pinot Noir and when this particular manga strip came out, crowds of Japanese wine lovers stood in line for hours, eager to snap up any bottle of Calera available in wine shops. Soon after, when Calera founder Josh Jensen went to Japan to present wine tastings in Tokyo and Osaka, adoring Calera fans lined up in front of him to have the labels on their empty bottles autographed.
This manga series, called Sommelier, stars the youthful Satake, who is not only a brilliant wine taster but also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the world's premier crus as well as the most obscure appellations. Between wine tastings he solves complicated crimes and always gets the pretty girl, all in a Zen sort of way.
In this one single day's strip of Sommelier, drawn and written by Kaitani Shinobu and edited by Kenichi Hori, our fearless Joe Satake recounts that he was at a tasting where he was given two wines to taste "blind." One was the superstar wine, Romanee-Conti itself, from the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the pride of Burgundy; the other was a California wine, Calera Pinot Noir from the "Jensen" Vineyard, named for the owner's father. The rival sommelier, an evil and jealous man, tried to trick Satake by describing the wines and then concluding that the better wine was the DRC. However, at the last minute, Satake realized that there was only one wine similar to the DRC and that was the Calera, which Satake deemed the winner. He not only saved "face" and defeated his evil nemesis, but also got a dreamy eyed-girl racing to his side. Hey, this is a comic strip!
Faster than one could pop a cork on a Calera Pinot, there were long lines of up to 100 wine fanatics, standing outside Japanese wine shops, hoping to score a bottle of Calera.
Ten years later, Calera-mania has not subsided, according to Jensen. "We currently sell almost 23% of our production to Japan, about 7,000 cases a year. One of our Japanese importers sold out his allocation in two weeks. He wanted a lot more. Today, our sales in Japan are stronger than ever, in spite of the slow economy in Japan over the past decade. Looking back, nothing could have prepared us for this. The idea of a comic strip ‘launching’ our brand in such an important, newly emerging wine market as Japan might be seen as mere comic relief, were it not for the fact that still today, ten years later, our sales to our two importers there are still growing -- rapidly!"
The country was Japan; the comic strip for grownups, which is called a manga and which appears on a regular basis in one of Japan's most important daily newspapers, stars a young, swashbuckling wine steward named Joe Satake. The wine he turned into cult status was from California, a Calera Pinot Noir and when this particular manga strip came out, crowds of Japanese wine lovers stood in line for hours, eager to snap up any bottle of Calera available in wine shops. Soon after, when Calera founder Josh Jensen went to Japan to present wine tastings in Tokyo and Osaka, adoring Calera fans lined up in front of him to have the labels on their empty bottles autographed.
This manga series, called Sommelier, stars the youthful Satake, who is not only a brilliant wine taster but also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the world's premier crus as well as the most obscure appellations. Between wine tastings he solves complicated crimes and always gets the pretty girl, all in a Zen sort of way.
In this one single day's strip of Sommelier, drawn and written by Kaitani Shinobu and edited by Kenichi Hori, our fearless Joe Satake recounts that he was at a tasting where he was given two wines to taste "blind." One was the superstar wine, Romanee-Conti itself, from the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the pride of Burgundy; the other was a California wine, Calera Pinot Noir from the "Jensen" Vineyard, named for the owner's father. The rival sommelier, an evil and jealous man, tried to trick Satake by describing the wines and then concluding that the better wine was the DRC. However, at the last minute, Satake realized that there was only one wine similar to the DRC and that was the Calera, which Satake deemed the winner. He not only saved "face" and defeated his evil nemesis, but also got a dreamy eyed-girl racing to his side. Hey, this is a comic strip!
Faster than one could pop a cork on a Calera Pinot, there were long lines of up to 100 wine fanatics, standing outside Japanese wine shops, hoping to score a bottle of Calera.
Ten years later, Calera-mania has not subsided, according to Jensen. "We currently sell almost 23% of our production to Japan, about 7,000 cases a year. One of our Japanese importers sold out his allocation in two weeks. He wanted a lot more. Today, our sales in Japan are stronger than ever, in spite of the slow economy in Japan over the past decade. Looking back, nothing could have prepared us for this. The idea of a comic strip ‘launching’ our brand in such an important, newly emerging wine market as Japan might be seen as mere comic relief, were it not for the fact that still today, ten years later, our sales to our two importers there are still growing -- rapidly!"