Fisheye Positions Self As Latest In Wine Packaging

California winemaker FishEye Wines is rolling out a $4.5 million national TV ad campaign that highlights the packaging of its award-winning wines, marketing its premium wine cask to 25- to 40-year-old wine drinkers.

The spots, which are airing during ABC hit dramas "Grey's Anatomy," "Lost," and "Desperate Housewives," also aired during E!'s Academy Awards' Red Carpet shows and will run through the first half of 2007. Kase Media Solutions, San Francisco, did the media planning and purchasing for FishEye.

FishEye's brands include six premium vintage-dated varietals: Shiraz, Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio. The wines come in three-liter containers that store the equivalent of four bottles of wine in a cardboard package that fits in the refrigerator and stays fresh for up to six weeks.

The ads compare 18th-century wooden casks and their hip, flexible, 21st-century equivalents. The campaign, whose tag line is "better wine, better idea," was developed by B.A.R.C. Communications, San Francisco. B.A.R.C. used computer animation and stop-motion techniques to animate a painting in the William Hogarth tradition in which 18th-century revelers tap into a cask of wine, then transform into modern-day pop art characters drinking from a FishEye cask.

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Examples of the ad can be seen at FishEye's Web site, which also includes a user-generated content section called the Fish Bowl in which FishEye drinkers post their own reviews of the wines and photos of themselves and their friends enjoying it. There are also warm- and cold-weather recipes for meals to accompany each wine, and five soundtracks, from eurobeat to funky lounge, that go along with the site tour.

FishEye said that AC Nielsen data shows the premium cask or boxed packaging category is the fastest-growing segment of the wine business, up 44% over the past year, compared with 3% growth in overall table wine sales. The market's changing taste in packaging has also accompanied an acceptance of screw caps that replace corks. Long associated with bargain wines, but long popular internationally, screw caps are becoming standard packaging on up-and-coming brands in the U.S.

FishEye is a unit of the Wine Group, San Francisco, which sold 42 million cases in 2005, according to Wine Business Monthly. Its Fisheye 2005 Pinot Grigio won a gold medal in the 2007 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.

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