Omega Point

Failed slogans: “Woodbridge: the wine that takes 2 hours to choke down”

So there I was, wait­ing to meet a friend for sushi, when she called to let me know she was run­ning a lit­tle behind. What to do, what to do? Why hello, Liquor Store!

This par­tic­u­lar BC Liquor Store is located in Vancouver’s classi­est shop­ping estab­lish­ment, Kings­gate Mall. Home to the Worst Wash­room in Canada,¹ Kings­gate also fea­tures stores that sell knock­off swords, hooker boots and hos­pi­tal scrubs, as well as a Shop­pers Drug Mart, which is usu­ally the sole rea­son I go in there.² Also, some­times Pay­less stocks Catherine-sized shoes. Mostly not.

On a side note, I was just buy­ing a replace­ment bot­tle of vodka–my pre­vi­ous one hav­ing gone to a good cause: low­er­ing the col­lec­tive IQ of Vancouver’s Twit­ter com­mu­nity by about 2%. So this was more of an errand than any­thing likely to get my 2-day chip taken away.³

Being a smart shop­per, I gen­er­ally avoid buy­ing alco­hol in the evening because, well, who wants to be wait­ing in line for 15 min­utes? Exactly: bored peo­ple.

While stand­ing there, being told by a vari­ety of drunk, jonesing, tooth­less and urine-smelling peo­ple that my hair, hat, paint­brush case and eyes were pretty, I noticed a dis­play in the “impulse pur­chase” rack pro­mot­ing Wood­bridge cabernet.

The first thing that struck me about this dis­play was not that it was posi­tioned where the gum and Archie comics are sup­posed to be, but rather that it appeared that some of the other peo­ple in line with me had been given a copy of Corel­Draw and hired to make wine ads.

I’m actu­ally not really sure where to start. At some point, I’m sure there was a designer, art direc­tor, pho­tog­ra­pher, the whole deal. Sadly, it appears some­thing hap­pened on the way to the print­ers’. (“I said ‘cre­ative’! Throw some more fonts in there!”)

Pos­si­bly the stock photo of the man and woman enjoy­ing ham and pineap­ple with root beer floats is not the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive image of “any evening” with “6 friends”, but hey, it looks like a really good ham, yeah?

I do like the fact that the inex­plic­a­bly wordy “Enter to Win” bub­ble com­mu­ni­cates its rela­tion to the prizes men­tioned in the ad’s footer by totally over­lap­ping some of the text with its drop shadow. Pretty effec­tive, right?

In fair­ness to Wood­bridge, Robert Mon­davi, and their staff of tal­ented media pro­fes­sion­als, the “ENTER TO WIN the fol­low­ing prizes!” bub­ble does impli­cate the importer, Vin­cor Canada. I do also get that $11.50 wine that comes with a chance to win prizes is unlikely to have its rep­u­ta­tion besmirched too unduly by some bad drop shad­ows. How­ever, I don’t think I can for­give the “yes, we’re using Arial” copy:

6 friends
any evening
2 hours enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion
1 bot­tle of Woodridge BY ROBERT MONDAVI

You know, it’s not ter­ri­ble. That sounds like a pretty good evening, actu­ally. Fun times, am I right? Er, wait, what? One bot­tle? How big is it? Are we sure this wine actu­ally comes in a bottle?

750mL, 13.0% alcohol.

I see: 750mL. Not being a huge wine drinker, I was a lit­tle con­fused, as this sounds to me like a fairly small amount. In fact, I can recall shar­ing a sin­gle bot­tle of wine with only one other per­son. Maybe I am an alco­holic. Is that one of the definitions?

So what gives? The LCBO, Ontario’s coun­ter­part to BC Liquor Stores, describes a “stan­dard” glass of wine as being 5 US fluid ounces (147.9mL) and a 750mL bot­tle as con­tain­ing 5 glasses of wine. In fact, the LCBO goes fur­ther, pro­vid­ing a handy “Party Cal­cu­la­tor” that esti­mates a more rea­son­able vol­ume of wine for “6 friends” to chug back whilst “enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion for 2 hours” is four bottles.

Sweet. I knew I wasn’t some kind of insane lush. Ad writ­ers: you’re clearly there any­way. Make sure you run your mar­ket­ing copy by the line at your local liquor or wine store. It’s important.

1. Dur­ing my sole visit, I was able to accu­rately dis­cern the height of one of the pre­vi­ous vis­i­tors to the stall. Think about that. [↩]
2. Shop­pers Drug Mart is awe­some. [↩]
3. Inter­ven­tion averted! [↩]

Who is Catherine Winters?

That’s a good ques­tion.