For a few years I was employed by one of the biggest in big box wine retailers. Given their litigious nature, I think I’ll keep the name to myself. I can see now how hopeless and idealistic I was when I joined the legions of other wine managers under this infamous banner. I had just come from the restaurant business and I was used to spending the money of New York restauranteurs that definitely had more money than sense who would let themselves get carried away cramming every esoteric and cult wine into every corner of their cramped restaurants that they could. And they turned the other way if I did likewise. There were a lot of hard lessons coming to me when I stepped into the realm of Big Business—a lot of lessons I should have learned years before. More than anything, though, I was shocked at the level of cynicism and sarcasm that is pointed at you, the everyday wine customer. But you know what, you probably deserve it. 

This bitter pill took a peculiar shape for me, the shape of the everyday starburst—those little star-shaped pieces of brightly colored paper you can find strewn around the shelves in almost every wine store in the world. Oftentimes the scribbles on these things are inane enough, but they are indication of a very serious shortcoming in you, the consumer—a shortcoming I bet you didn’t even know you had.

The fact of the matter is, even those of you who might consider yourselves the most astute of shoppers, all or most of you have one fatal flaw: you love pretty shiny things. Part of the Monday morning regiment (for which reveille was 6am) for wine managers at said Big Box Retail (BBR from here on) store was doing something called “working the excessives”.  BBR was a very astute company and had a suite of software written specifically for it that would help it do the unique job of treating wine like Sam’s Club does incontinence products. “The excessives” were a list of wines that the computer spat out at you to let you know what wasn’t selling and what was needlessly tying up the company’s money. Sometimes these wines existed because someone made a boneheaded buy, but most of the time these were good wines that just went underappreciated and slipped through the cracks. There were a number of ways you could combat the worst of the excessives. Anything from making little cheat cards for wine associates that made clear which wines they were to sell, to moving the wines around to multiple locations in the store to maximize exposure. Smart as those may sound, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, worked better than a specific kind of simple starburst.

When I first walked into the BBR as an employee I saw several starburst that said things like “Our #1 Merlot!” or “Our #1 Sauvignon Blanc!” and even some more obscure like “Our #1 Portuguese wine!” –an elite group to be sure. It took me a while to find out what every BBR wine manager knows—those starbursts aren’t really lies, but self-fulfilling prophecies. For you see, those “Our #1” starbursts were reserved for the worst of the excessives. A pathetic ploy you say? Not so, for given just a few weeks the worst selling Sauvignon Blanc in the group would suddenly become the best selling Sauvignon Blanc and usually by a mile.

People would commonly make the mistake of thinking that we meant that the wines were our best selling wine, but we never said that. If pressed, we would just say it was the wine that we found to be the best _{to sell to get the District Manager off our ass}. For our own sense of propriety, we told ourselves it was only a lie for a short while. Never mind the fact that sometimes there was an “Our #1 Chardonnay!” starburst on a Pouilly Fuisse and an “Our #1 French White!” on some Sancerre at the same time.  For you, dear reader, were going to fall for it and save our asses. And it never failed.

BBR shouldn’t be totally singled out in this. As a wine purveyor I get to see the insides of lots of wine shops and I know first hand that the phenomenon is spread all over the world as the best kept secret you probably should have known. When I talk to retail people about it they get this dumb, almost dumbfounded smile on their face because they can’t believe that it works and that it keeps on working. They laugh and smirk when you grab those bottles. It’s like the bank is continually making errors in their favor and will seemingly never pick up on it. How can it be that easy?

In my later days with BBR I did what I called a personal study into the nature of starbursts. I was curious if it was the medium or the message that was doing all the work. I called it a study, but believe me, it was anything but scientific. It was a way of keeping my sanity in the face of the fact that banking on the ignorance of the customer was almost always the right and easy path. At first I would keep my starbursts simple. What I consider my crowning achievement in starbursts for its style and brevity was a starburst that just said “DAMN!” in a gently upwardly swooping arc. The day after I put that on some Cote-du-Rhone (that I really did like, by the way) one of my more reserved wine associates brought it back to me thinking it a bit too extreme I guess. I told him to put it back and “watch the magic”. And magic it was. From some point a few weeks after I placed that starburst that Cote-du-Rhone became our best selling CDR, then eventually our best selling French appellational red, then our best selling appellational French wine, period. Though it could never match some of the cheap schlocky VDPs out there for sales, the fact that I made a simple little CDR outsell any cheap ass Bordeaux or Burgundy with only just a one-word starburst spoke volumes about the nature of man and how starbursts play a part in God’s Great Plan.

As my starburst study matured, I got more sophisticated, though I have to say the “DAMN!” starburst proved that brevity was the preferred mode of communication for the starburst. There was a pretty affordable Pouilly-Fuisse that we all loved that no one was buying, so we cut it into the general Chardonnay section and put a detailed rectangular sign on it that gave tasting notes and some facts about Pouilly-Fuisse and the Maconnais in general. That didn’t help sales at all, even though the Chardonnay section enjoyed 20 times the traffic of the French section.  One day I got an epiphany and put a starburst up that said “The best Chardonnay you aren’t buying!” And while this starburst certainly made the wine pick up, quite significantly in fact, it was the fact that it was totally honest that made me proud.

I also used customers for my inspiration. I met a man who was to become one of my favorite customers one Saturday behind the tasting bar during our regular weekly public tastings. There was a crowd around the table at that time and I remember a short, somewhat chubby guy walked up to the tasting table wearing a Tasmanian Devil tee-shirt and a camouflage mesh baseball cap. He asked to taste some wines and, I admit, I though to myself “It’s only a matter of time until this guy asks me for the Muscadine wine section.” He tasted through the wines and talked quietly to his wife about them. When we got to the end I had a pretty nice Chateauneuf-du-Pape open that was pretty nice and a nice price to boot. He asked for a sample and I poured it for him. He carefully swirled it around, sniffed it, sipped a bit then yelled, “Hooooweee! That’s baby-makin’ material right there!” Sure he was a redneck, but he had a pretty good palate and over the following weeks I found out that he got a lot of enjoyment out of food and wine and had a pretty unaffected and refreshingly unsophisticated approach to wine. Months passed from that first meeting and that very same CDP showed up one day on the excessives list. I knew instantly that I had to let my friend help me sell the wine. Sure it was a little bit edgy, but it worked. Too bad my ladder-climbing pencil-pushing faker of a District Manager made me take it down.

Some time later I actually went back to brevity and tried just blank starbursts but found their effect to be negligible compared to a well-written one or one that had even just the hilariously transparent “Our #1 Wine!” on it. I guess what it boils down to is that anything that makes people stop to laugh, or to read, or even to be offended, is bound to make them buy eventually. I guess my only advice is that maybe they should stop to think as well. After all, as entertaining as the humble little starburst can be, it rarely has any effect on the taste of the wine.