White wine emoji thwarted again, Kendall-Jackson vows to continue the fight

There will be no white wine emoji - at least just yet.

Kendall-Jackson winery has been thwarted for the third time in its quest to get a white wine emoji approved for use in text messages on smartphones across the world.

The company, part of Jackson Family Wines of Santa Rosa, said Friday it has been informed that the Unicode Technical Committee did not approve the application for the white wine emoji at its July meeting held on the campus of Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Washington.

But the panel did not outright reject the bid either, said Maggie Curry, director of marketing for Kendall-Jackson, which produces its company’s flagship brand Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay.

“It’s an unusual case. It’s usually a hard ‘yes’ or a hard ‘no,’” Curry said.

The crux of the debate is over color, not over wine.

A wine glass emoji, filled with red wine, was first approved in 2010 and is used by millions of texters.

“Adding color variation to an emoji is proving more complex because the Unicode standard is not fully defined,” Curry said. “They are much more cautious in adding multiple emojis of the same type of thing.”

The committee, she said, is tasked with protecting the global keyboard, so the admittance of a white emoji could open the door to other wine shades, such as rosé, creating precedent to add new colors to other types of products and adding complexity to the emoji universe.

The winery is updating its proposal for a fourth time. It will add additional research that proves a white wine emoji is necessary based on global use, economy, culture and industry. Chardonnay, for example, remains America’s most popular varietal. In Italy, pinot grigio is popular, while Germans love their riesling.

“We are trying to look at the glass as half full,” she said.