Grape vines and living brands.
It’s around 3pm and I’m driving the island highway north towards Courtenay.
As I pop in and out of the interlaced sections of torrential rain and streaming sunlight that is so common there, I listen to podcasts on branding and marketing. This is a particular kind of torture that seems to have become ritualized for me on this stretch of road, feeling compelled to work while I drive. Maximize my time. Learn more.
In truth my attention span is limited and I am only dimly aware of the content of the words, the advice and jargon swirl around with the warm air rattling out of the vents. Outside the sky is busy putting on a show and holding my attention with ease. I'm going North to visit some friends and pick grapes. I’m very excited for the opportunity to be outside. To get out of my chair and away from my desk.
Branding can be…convoluted. The name itself is enough to make business owners groan at the very mention of the word.
As someone who has spent the better part of a decade helping to brand small businesses, I get lost myself sometimes, it’s a remarkably slippery concept.
At least part of the problem is one of complexity. The seemingly endless array of tactics, channels and hacks designed to grab and hold a customer's attention.
Another part of this problem, and one that is all too common in our world today, is that we’re constantly asking ourselves the wrong questions. When everyone in the world is rapidly questing after more followers, more likes and more growth, it would seem risky not to join in the race, we’re pack animals and where the herd goes, we generally follow.
But when you ask questions that chase empty metrics, “how do I get more followers” you get empty answers like, “10x YOUR IG WITH ALGORITHM GROWTH HACKS”. But brands don’t live and die on Instagram accounts, at least not the good ones.
And when a brand starts to ask itself the hard questions, why are we really here? Who is this for? What is all this in aid of? You start to get some interesting answers. Those brands connect with real people doing real things. Those brands are an expression of a collective idea and effort. And when those ideas and efforts are aligned with a higher purpose, brands can become very powerful agents of good in the world. They can make people's lives better. They can make the world a better place. They can build community. They can give people purpose.
And I can prove it.
16 hours later I’m wearing gumboots.
It’s 7 am and I’m at the vineyard after an evening of catching up with my friends. For me, it’s the first frost of the season, it’s legitimately cold. I use the metal handrail to pull myself into the seat of the tractor and instantly regret it as the shock of the frozen metal jolts me out of my morning fog. Pale sunlight makes the crystals on the grass shimmer as the Orange Kubota bumps over frosted runnels in the soil toward the vines.
I’m assigned the task of helping remove the netting on the vines, which I do, following the lead of an experienced vineyard worker. Ice crystals shake loose from the netting and fall around us as we work, down my sleeves, into my coat. In a matter of minutes, my hands are soaking wet and so cold I’m having a hard time loosening the netting from the plastic toggles that hold it in place. As warm blood pumps from my core into my hands, the nerve ends light up with a throbbing ache. The pain is so surprising my eyes start to water and I catch talking to myself, shaking my head. What the fuck was I thinking? I laugh. What did I sign up for?
What happens when a country measures success by its GDP rather than the health of its citizens?
What happens when a marketer measures project success by conversion rates and ROI alone?
What would it look like if the vintners on Vancouver island were measuring the success of their vineyard by how much profit per square foot the land generated?
I don't mean this rhetorically, it's a serious question. What’s actually at stake? What do we have to lose when we start thinking like that? What is the cost, the human and social cost of all that growth? And what’s to be gained by doing things differently?
By the time the call for lunch is put out to the workers the sun is shining, the frost has melted and my fingers have regained 80% sensation.
I walk up to the tasting room deck, chatting with people I have spent the last couple of hours working alongside and getting to know.
The lunch is simple and wonderful. Slabs of thick-cut bread from a local bakery, a huge pot of steaming veggie soup and of course, wine from the vineyard. The winery’s communications manager stands up at one point to thank everyone for coming. She mentions that the ingredients in the soup were grown by her and her partner and that the beans in the soup came from a long-time friend of the winery. There are warm sounds of appreciation from the workers and a toast. As I settle into my lunch and easy conversation I start to realize just how many people at the table I recognize.
I have been to Beaufort once during harvest in 2019 and from then to now more than half of the faces at the table are familiar. Year after year, these people come back to these vines. Back to this table and the people who sit around it. It’s impressive. The vineyard manager, Cohen, taps me on the shoulder as he sees me reaching for my wine,
“So that wine you’re drinking. When you were up here in 2019 shooting video, the grapes you were shooting are in that bottle.” My eyes widen reflexively, “Actually, the grapes you’re picking today are the same vines.”
“Wow” is the best I can muster and I glance down at the red liquid in my glass. I watch the light playing through it. I lift the glass to my nose and inhale. I notice the dirt in my fingernails. I look out at the vines.
If you were to exclusively chase the metrics of growth and profit on a winery, it would get pretty weird pretty fast.
In the 8000-odd years, humans have been drinking wine, objectively very little has changed and the systems that many small vineyards employ to this day would be enough to make a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist or optimization bro foam at the mouth. In fact, wine itself doesn't really make sense when viewed through the lens of cold, hard capitalism.
The time and labour hours are off the charts. The land use is inefficient, there are cheaper, faster-growing fermentables available. It would be easier and more cost-effective to employ a team of scientists to create a profile of terpenes, flavours and dyes that mimic exactly the characteristic of an Island grown Petit Milo and then blend it with cheap, stable ethanol. Bottle. Label. Sell. Profit. As an added bonus you could lay off every specialized person in the winery from the vintner to the vineyard manager, hire cheap labour to work the machines and spend the difference on sales and marketing all while converting that now available land into something profitable. Condos anyone?
But who in their right mind would want to work there?
Making the world or people's lives better? Not really part of the agenda. Community? Is the Amazon warehouse lunchroom known as a community hub? Something tells me you’re not going to be having people showing up to work, year after year in a facility that vibes like stainless steel Mordor.
So again, what’s at stake?
Purpose. People. Health. Community.
Everything.
When we’re done on the vineyard for the day, I get to choose some wine to take home. I take an Ortega because it was the first Vancouver Island wine I got drunk on and it reminds me of pizza and summer heat.
I choose the Ça Beautage because in the bottle are the Foch grapes I was taking photos of some years ago and I like to think that maybe one of the grapes I shot or brushed up against is in there looking back at me. And I take the Rosé because I know very little about wine and it seemed like a happy balance between the deep red and bright white.
Why Freya?
Why are we still sending out groups of people to pick grapes by hand?
Why are humans still meticulously nurturing these living systems?
Taking incredible amounts of time and tremendous care? And why do I care?
Why do I drive for two hours to pull frozen netting off frozen vines and spend a day doubled over (I’m 6’3” and my back was feeling it the next day)?
I wander into the tasting room and see the vintner, Freya, working in the lab. She smiles when she sees me, we hug and catch up.
It’s been months since we’ve seen each other. She has the lid off one of the fermentation tanks so she can take samples for her work. I peek inside and see a riot of carbonation. Bubbles on bubbles. It looks like a jacuzzi. “Is this…” I start to ask and she responds without needing to hear the question, “Yup. Just fermentation. It’s alive.” she’s smiling and her eyes are sparkling. Holy shit. It's more than alive, it’s thriving.
I look around at the fermenters. Thousands of litres of grape juice on its way to becoming wine. Freya is buzzing around, taking notes, looking at samples. She mentions that she has to leave but will be back in a couple of hours to check on them. Then again a couple of hours after that, well after the day is done and the sun has set.
I smile, “Surely there's an app for that”. “There is actually!”, she smiles back, “it’s just not really my speed I guess, I'm not so high-tech. Besides,” she says, peering into the tank, “I like coming back and checking on them myself”.
Yes, I got some wine. Yes, I got a hot lunch. But for what I spent on gas, I could have paid money for both of those things and never left the comfort of my home. So why did I do it?
I did it for friendship. I love the people that work there and seeing them makes me happy. I did it for the experience. I wanted to know how it feels, smells, and tastes working in the vines. I did it because I wanted to connect the people and the place. I wanted to be part of the story. In short, I wanted to be a part of the brand.
That probably sounds silly. Being part of a brand seems like an asinine concept, but we are human and a lot of what we do is asinine.
If a brand is simply an idea or a set of values made real then it’s no different than religion, science, politics, capitalism, nationalism or any other concept that we humans sign up for. Live for. Die for. From the outside looking in, it still seems absurd.
I will openly mock the people that stand in line for hours waiting for limited edition Supreme clothing but so might they mock a tall man for freezing his butt off and throwing his back out for a bowl of soup and a bottle of wine. The point I’m trying to make is that when branding is done well, it's actually hard to see because you’re so caught up in feeling it.
Branding can be complicated. It can be a process that will twist you into semiotic marbles and have you chasing likes and advertising ROI.
But it can also be a process of doing something you love, working hard and inviting others to be a part of it. Doing things that matter because they matter, not because they’ll look good on your feed. No tricks. No shenanigans. No influencers. Current branding wisdom is so jammed up with tactics and metrics that it’s forgotten the most fundamental elements of the craft. Here’s a cheat sheet for those of us caught up in the BS tornado.
Do something you care about. Something that gets you out of bed to check fermenters at 8 pm and again at 7 am. Give people something they can believe in and stand behind.
Invite them not just to buy, but to participate in and be a part of what you do. Help them build a community around your brand. And then tell that story. Again and again. In your own words and on your own terms.
This is not a recipe that will get you a million views. It may not “10x” the visits to your website. There are certainly more profitable paths.
But you’ll probably have a sense of purpose when you wake up in the morning. You’ll probably meet and engage with some interesting, like-minded people. And, unless I’m really off the mark, you’ll probably be contributing to building a world worth living in.
