Replica Wine mimics taste of popular Sonoma County favorites
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
- Oscar Wilde
Frankenstein wine? In Healdsburg's Rack & Riddle, a custom crush facility, a brand is being created in a laboratory of sorts.
The brand is called Replica Wine, and it relies heavily on chemistry to replicate popular brands, offering customers a savings of 15 percent or more. For example, it tempts consumers with a bottling it likens to the Kendall-Jackson Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay for $11, undercutting KJ's $17 price.
“When you talk about the lab, people start to think you're making Frankenstein wine, and that's not the case, but it's not traditional, classic winemaking,” said Ari Walker, CEO of Denver's Integrated Beverage Group LLC, which produces the wine.
Replica has eight bottlings with mischievous names like Pickpocket, Misbehaved and Label Envy. Its irreverent website, replicawine.com, states its unabashed mission: “Unapologetically recreating your favorite wines.” It argues that “Originality is overpriced.”
While Replica wine doesn't begin in a petri dish, it is created, to a large degree, in the lab.
In this case, Walker explained, the wine is developed with an analytical chemistry lab rather than a synthetic one so no chemicals are added to the wines.
So how does it work?
Bulk wine is purchased and brought into the custom crush facility. Then a winemaker uses sensory analysis to find the closest match to a wine the company wants to imitate.
The wine is then sent off to the lab and Brett Zimmerman, a master sommelier, for quantitative analysis. Feedback is given to the winemaker and this process repeats itself, with up to seven iterations of the wine.
95 percent promise
Walker said the brand promises a 95 percent chemical match for macro components and a 90 percent match for micro components. It uses a database that contains 560 “analytes” or chemical compounds that can be identified and measured and they include aromas, flavors and mouth-feel.
While the wine is made locally, you won't find it on the shelves of retail outlets in Sonoma County just yet. That said, the wine has piqued the interest of some people in Wine Country with positive reviews in some credible wine publications. The Wine Enthusiast magazine, for example, rated the 2014 vintage of the Knockoff 90 points on a 100 point scale.
The naysayers on the other end of the spectrum, find the brand disingenuous.
“I've gotten a certain amount of hate mail, and it tends to come from the purist segment of the wine industry,” Walker said. “There's a mindset that exists in some quarters of the wine industry that almost relates to a religious devotion of what the romantic notion of wine is supposed to be. But that's not from consumers. It's from people in the wine industry.”
John Holdredge is one of those vintners who finds Replica's winemaking off-putting. The co-owner of Healdsburg's Holdredge Wines doubles as its winemaker.
“I always thought the beauty of wine is that it captures a moment in place and time, not that it hits ‘60 different taste and aroma markers.' I suppose this appeals to the same people who put the fake Tesla body on the Volkswagen chassis,” he said.
Co-vintner Mark McWilliams of Healdsburg's Arista Winery agrees with Holdredge.
“‘This above all - to thine own self be true,'” McWilliams said. “Call me a purist but the appeal to me with wine is its genuineness, its authenticity. The romance of wine is about the place, the person that grew it, the person that made it … I suppose there are people that don't really care about that. I think this isn't too much different than buying fake Louis Vuitton bags from a back alley in New York City. I assume the same person that buys the fake purse would buy the imitation wine? They don't really appreciate the hard work, skill, and cost associated with the authentic product. If they did, they wouldn't support the cheap knockoff.”
No lawsuits
Consternation has not found its way into the courts.
Walker said no one has tried to sue his company or challenge it for copyright infringement. He said Replica, which launched in June of 2016, is on sound legal footing, pointing out that there are generic brands in supermarkets that also imitate more expensive products.
“We hope the winemakers are flattered to know their wines inspired Replica,” Walker said.
Spokesmen for four benchmark wines preferred not to comment, and their labels include: Kendall-Jackson, 2014 Vintner's Reserve California Chardonnay; Joel Gott, 2014 California (815) Cabernet Sauvignon; Meiomi, 2014 Monterey, Sonoma County and Santa Barbara counties Pinot Noir; and the Prisoner Red Blend.
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