Man pokes bear while wine brand receives cease and desist letter

My two favourite wine PR stories of the year are late entrants and have come one after the other in an extraordinary succession.

Ironically the first thing to be subject to a public relations campaign was the very idea of “public relations” itself.

It is a little over a hundred years since Edward Bernays realised that the word “propaganda” might have something of a reputation problem. His solution was to rename it “public relations”. And in doing so, his act of PR brought about the very existence of PR. One of those instances of a thing willing itself into existence.

A century later, two wine “news” stories have similarly willed themselves into existence, by the sheer fact of someone wanting them to exist. This is Public Relations at its most pure.

A month ago the English wine brand Folc hit the “news”. We will return to those quotation marks presently. The story - covered by The Times - was that the CEO of Folc had been served with a stiff legal letter after running an ad saying “None of the same old Bollie… it’s not Champagne, it’s pink champers”.

This is what we might call a “man pokes bear” -type PR tactic. I’m not sure any of us should be surprised that an incredibly-wealthy-and-notoriously-protective Champagne brand might take agin to a cheeky-upstart English sparkling wine brand playing fast and loose with their intellectual property. And I’m not sure Tom Cannon - Folc’s CEO - can have been entirely caught by surprise when, after running an ad that was clearly and deliberately designed to elicit a legal letter from Bollinger, he should subsequently find himself in possession of a legal letter from Bollinger. Much like the man who deliberately pokes a bear shouldn’t really be surprised to find that he is no longer in possession of a hand.

What perhaps is remarkable is that The Times newspaper should decide that this very obvious confection should be considered “news”. And so it ran a “news” story confirming the commercial equivalent of “bear bites off hand of irritating man”, but from the perspective of a journalist who is astonished to hear of the “bitey” tendency of irritated bears. It’s hard to think of a more predictable story. Save for the hackneyed one about where that same bear goes to the lavatory.

You might infer from this that I am somehow critical of both Folc and their metaphorically-handless CEO.