Re: Copywriting Stretch Assignment

Oh, no. Wine.

How could marketing copywriters typically responsible for sassy write-ups about Bluetooth speakers and questionable kitchen gadgetry ever get their heads around something as serious and sophisticated as an Oregon red blend from 2023?

Don’t panic. Play it cool. Let’s just pull up an old Casemates offer and see how they described those Pedroncelli Mixed Zinfandels from the other day, and…

THESE REMIND ME OF: “Back in Black” the song, or Back in Black the album.
Either way, “Back in Black” was AC/DC’s tribute to their late singer, Bon Scott, who passed away in 1980. Replaced with Brian Johnson…

Oh come ON. That was berry-flavored booze juice with some vanilla and cinnamon thrown in there at some point. It’s about as connected to AC/DC as things are over here when @dseanadams continues a vaguely serialized murder mystery that’s been unfolding over several dozen write-ups that don’t even pretend to tie in to the products offered or @josh tries (poorly) to weave a compelling narrative about the precarious internal tension of a postmodern technostate with a narrative built around deeply discounted ramen noodles.

So maybe we can do this, you know?

Okay, let’s see what’s going on with this stuff.

For TODAY’S deal, it looks like the wine dorks are describing…

…delicate aromas [why are they always delicate?] of fresh red cherries [sure], and red currants [isn’t that just a pretentious word for cherry?] on the nose [as opposed to delicate]. Palate offers darker cherry notes [still delicate, or…], cassis [huh?] and hints of savoury and herbal notes [like drinking a steak, we get it]. Medium bodied wine with medium finish [sounds like a solid B+ wine, yeah?].

So this must be the part where we try to identify which 80s rock band best evokes this particular blend of glorified church wine?

No thanks. That’s not how we roll around here.

Instead, we’re going to point out the stuff that actually matters to the taste and quality of the wine here.

That’s right.

OREGON.

Because you can keep your California reds and your French rosés and your Italian Lambruscos, with their inoffensive notes of unremarkable generality. Instead we’ve got something from a part of the world where you know the grapes grew under the watchful eye of a dude named “Rain” who always leaves his unicycle locked to the co-op bike rack overnight because the weather looks iffy and he’d rather jump in one of the two dozen Subaru Ubers with Coexist bumper stickers and kayak racks on the roof that prowl the neighborhoods like gentrifying wolves.

We don’t see anything about subtle (“deLIcaTe”) notes of artisanal moss, but since everything else up there seems vaguely damp and mossy, we’re just going to assume it’s present. Like a tech startup run inexplicably from a goat farm that describes itself as “pre-revenue” instead of “broke,” the experience of drinking this wine is all in how you think about it.

Unlike a hoppy-ass IPA that tastes like grass clippings or some sort of weirdo peanut butter whisky, this red blend isn’t going to make you swoon nor run away after a single taste. Heck, you probably haven’t even thought about cherries outside of ice cream sundaes or cough drop flavors enough to even know how you feel about it, so here’s our actual point: this is a pretty killer deal on a bunch of wine, and you’re not going to regret exploring your feelings about cherries over six to twelve bottles of it.

Fair enough?

But crap, we’re supposed to have an opinion about the vintage, too, huh?

This is from 2023, the year that brought us Barbenheimer, a trendy new COVID variant, and a global egg shortage.

If you don’t know how that plays into the nature of these particular bottles of wine, well…neither do we. The Casemates nerds do, obviously, but we’re not big on crossing the streams around here if we can help it, so we’ll all just have to remain in the dark together on this one.

Check ‘em out, though. If we’ve got wine, maybe they have some butterfly knives or off-brand headphones today. (Just kidding. They could never.)