The world's best-marketed wine
Bedrock builds communities as much as it bottles vintages
EDITOR’S NOTE: My last real journalism job was reporting for AdAge, a leading trade publication for the brand-marketing industry. It was a fascinating gig, and not just because my beat included sports and booze brands. After all, where else could I have learned about the rising day rates charged by chimp actors, or revealed that the most creatively celebrated fast-food campaign of its era cratered sales?
One of the many things I liked about this job was having a hand in selecting the publication’s marketers of the year, the brands bringing creative and uniquely effective approaches to connecting with customers and building their businesses. Periodically, when I encounter brilliant marketing “in the wild,” my instinct is still to call it out.
This will be the first in an every-so-often series of posts about marketing and marketers I admire, beginning with one of my favorite wineries.
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Most great brands have a great backstory; Bedrock Wine Co.’s is a doozy.
Founder Morgan Twain-Peterson, then aged five, created a Pinot Noir dubbed “Vino Bambino” that was good enough to make it on to some notable New York wine lists.
Now there was of course a reason young Morgan had access to grapes and winemaking equipment: His father, Joel Peterson, founded Ravenswood Winery and is rightfully credited with popularizing Zinfandel in the U.S. Eventually, Joel sold Ravenswood to the global wine behemoth Constellation Wines, and he wound up pouring some of the proceeds into acquiring what became Bedrock Vineyard, a 150+ acre Sonoma Valley site originally planted in the 1850s, and then replanted in 1888 by William Randolph Hearst’s father, Senator George Hearst.
This slice of viticultural history served as Morgan’s estate vineyard when he launched Bedrock in 2007, making wines out of a converted chicken coop. Bedrock’s early releases were built around what the winery initially dubbed “heirloom” or “heritage” wines, field blends made from ancient vineyards comprised of a range of grapes (usually Zinfandel, but sometimes dozens of others.) These wines don’t taste so much like any one grape variety so much as they express aspects of the site.
The early critical response was strong, with the first vintage if the Bedrock Vineyard “Heirloom Wine” getting multiple 90+ point scores from major critics. The winery’s output and reputation grew with each subsequent vintage. By the time the Bedrock Vineyard Heritage wine was named one of Wine Spectator’s top 10 wines of 2019, Bedrock had established itself as fine-wine unicorn, simultaneously elite, exclusive and accessible.
Part of that magic is rooted in Bedrock’s hybrid business model, which combines a direct-to-consumer mailing list (with a multiyear wait list) with some relatively inexpensive, larger-production bottlings (such as the excellent $25 California Old Vine Zinfandel) that I can typically find at a major wine retailer like Chicago’s Binny’s chain, while some of single-vineyard offerings are made in such miniscule quantities there us not enough to go around even to the winery’s mailing list.
But there’s more to Bedrock’s mystique than its business model. Here are a few reasons I think it might be the best marketed wine brand in the world.
DRIVEN BY A (RELEVANT) MISSION
There’s an adage in the wine business that to make a small fortune as a winemaker, you need to start with a large one. And if that was true before the recent shocks of Covid and climate change, it certainly is now.
Nevertheless, if a winery was primarily motivated by profit margins, it’s safe to say it would not build its business around ancient-vine Zinfandel, a grape that even in its most coveted and established vineyards fetches only a fraction of the cost of more commercially established grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay. Older vines also typically yield far less fruit each harvest than younger, more precocious plantings, adding an additional economic challenge.
So there is a certain sacrifice built into Bedrock’s premise, as Morgan makes clear in the manifesto published on the brand’s site: “The winery is first and foremost a mission-driven operation dedicated to preserving and rehabilitating old vineyards around California… If something has been growing for over 100 years it not only deserves the respect of us humans, but it probably makes some darn good wine too.”
It is not hyperbole to say these vines are, in fact, endangered, either from upstart wineries who would rip them out in favor of more profitable varietals, or from developers after typically precious California real estate. In 2017, Bedrock acquired the 36-acre Evangelho Vineyard after the death of its namesake, Frank Evangelho. Morgan memorably observed that the Contra Costa County vineyard, planted in the 1890s on the area’s signature sandy soils, was a survivor—”wedged between a PG&E plant, a Burger King, and a motel that rents rooms by the hour”— and that Bedrock’s purchase was likely the only way to save it.
But Bedrock doesn’t claim to be alone in this endeavor. It’s conservational efforts are joined by a small group of similarly quality obsessed winemakers/farmers, including Mike Officer of Carlisle Winery and Will Bucklin of Bucklin Old Ranch, among others. These producers could easily view each other as rivals; after all, the market for high-end Zinfandel is small and they are likely competing for share of wallet among the same connoisseurs, but they operate more like siblings, making wine from each other’s grapes. One of the best wine-drinking nights I’ve enjoyed in recent years was a 2023 barbecue where we opened the 2020 vintage Old Hill Ranch vineyard bottlings of all three wineries, sampling the subtle differences in how three brilliant craftsmen handle a storied vineyard in the same vintage.
Bucklin’s was the most immediately accessible, Carlisle’s had the most alluring and racy texture, and Bedrock’s had the most evident structure and power. Collectively between the quality of the wines and the community they represent, it is hard to imagine a better way to wash down a giant brisket.
These rivals also rarely miss an opportunity to cross promote, such as on the gloriously geeky episode of the Bedrock Wine Conversations podcast featuring Carlisle’s Officer, a gifted and mission-driven winemaker in his own right who happens to make a few of m
The episode amounts to extraordinary compelling commercial for a direct competitor, sure, but the mutual respect and deep knowledge both men flash throughout the conversation really winds up as an ad for the category as a whole.
MAKING CREATIVE CONNECTIONS
That aforementioned podcast is one of many ways Bedrock creatively connects with its customers. While the bulk of the episodes are dedicated to conversations with growers, winemakers and other industry notables, three times a year it is dedicated to a preview of the winery’s upcoming mailing list offer, which typically arrive each February, July and November.
Morgan and partner Chris Cottrell go through each release’s dozen or so wines, discussing each wine in detail. I sometimes joke this is the most expensive free podcast in the world because whatever I intended to buy before listening to it typically becomes a fraction of what I wind up purchasing. I find it irresistible, in part because my impression of individual wines is elevated when I understand the rationale behind barrel choices and pick times, or that stylistically his rose is inspired by Domaine Tempier, or that the current vintage of the Bedrock Heritage wine reminds him of the epic 2016 version that the same point.
More than the winemaking details, as you listen to the podcast —or read the release notes Peterson sends with each offer, or follow his enthusiastic participation in an online enthusiast forum like Wine Berserker— what comes through so clearly is Peterson himself, not just as a winemaking mad scientist, or as an aficionado, but also as a friend, a dad, a husband and a son.
Sometimes these things collide. When Peterson was married, he made a wine to serve for the occasion. As a native of Sonoma Valley, he took select barrels from Bedrock’s individual Heritage Wines from three stories Sonoma Valley vineyards —Bedrock, Old Hill Ranch and Pagani Ranch— and made a super cuvee to serve guests at the wedding. And then he offered the leftover wine —joking dubbed “Wedrock”— to customers, with proceeds going to charity. It’s hard to let your customers get much closer than sharing your wedding pour.
(Fun fact: When I met Morgan’s business partner, Chris Cottrell at a Suburban Chicago retail tasting and mentioned that I had a bottle of ”Wedrock” at home, he shared that he was recently engaged and, with Morgan’s help, had been assembling a wedding cuvee of his own, complete with grapes from the vineyards that featured the couple’s first kiss and its engagement.)
A LITTLE LESS MARGIN, A LOT MORE JOY
Bedrock’s customer-friendly ways don’t stop with wedding pours.
While most fine California wine has soared in price —in part because glass, corks and insurance have, too— Bedrock has largely held the line on pricing of its entry-level bottlings like the Old Vine Zinfandel, the Sonoma County Sauvignon Blanc and the Ode to Lulu Rose, all of which are still offered at less than $25 a bottle. In these inflationary times, that’s rare. (Some of the rarer, smaller production bottlings have crept up in recent years, but the overwhelming majority of the portfolio is sold under $50 a bottle, and the wines that aren’t (such as Cabernet from storied vineyards like Monte Ross or Montecillo Vineyards in Sonoma) generally sell for far less than other wines made from the same fruit.
Shipping, too, bucks a broader inflationary trend. I’ve been buying Bedrock wines since the 2017 vintage. When I started, shipping on orders over six bottles was offered at a flat rate of $35, whether the order was six bottles or 60 bottles. Shipping costs generally have soared since then, but Bedrock’s have stayed the same. Surely this policy has trimmed the winery’s margins, but as a fan it has made it easier for me to introduce more friends to amazing wines (and offer them some of my wine allocation.)
Typically, when I receive a Bedrock offer, I immediately text a group of neighbors who’ve come to love the wines, and take their orders. We wind up drinking a lot of the wines together, such as on a three-family summer 2020 retreat to a Michigan lake house where three bottles of a perfect Bedrock rose and pristine lake views provided brief but soul-warming respite from Covid-19 isolation.
(We all enjoy that the flat-rate shipping means each successive bottle makes all previously ordered bottles that much cheaper, on average.) And then we all look forward to getting —and drinking— the wines. How much? Consider that on one delivery day a few years back, I lugged a few bottles to a neighbor, only to have him meet me at the door — with a corkscrew.