Word: vintner
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When Susan Shand, a journalist in Washington, needed wine for a dinner party she was hosting, she headed for the store to buy her favorite brand: Kendall-Jackson Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay. Later that evening, however, she discovered that she had bought Turning Leaf, a new Gallo wine, instead. "I looked like an idiot," she recalls...
...petit faux pas, at worst, certainly nothing to make a federal case out of--unless you happen to be Jess Jackson. The burly lawyer turned winemaker created a new market segment with Kendall-Jackson Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay. When mistakes are made like Shand's, he believes it's because Turning Leaf's owner, industry giant E. & J. Gallo Winery, has unfairly copied his bottle design. So Jackson is suing Gallo, claiming it has co-opted sales of his category-topping Vintner's Reserve. Gallo disputes the charges, but there is no disputing Turning Leaf's rousing success. It shot...
Jackson has the ego and pocketbook to do the job, and his efforts have paid off in a rare, unfiltered glimpse into the inner workings of the family-owned Gallo empire, the country's largest vintner, with sales last year of $1.2 billion. Gallo's wines may vary in quality, but its marketing and distribution muscle is top shelf. Turning Leaf turns up everywhere, and with good reason. Aided by a series of confidential memos, Jackson's lawyers showed how Gallo executives, pressured by their demanding chairman Ernest Gallo, took careful aim at the leader of the popularly priced Chardonnay...
Kendall-Jackson, whose total ad budget is $1 million, never knew what hit it. By late 1995, after a heady decade of 15%-to-20% annual sales growth, Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay began to falter. Gallo's Turning Leaf, priced at $6, was cheaper than Kendall-Jackson's $10 bottle; but its packaging, from the flanged top, visible cork and thin, cigar-band neck wrapper down to its multicolored grape leaf, was strikingly similar...
...FRANCISCO: A federal jury put aside the wrath of grape magnate Jess Jackson, denying winery Kendall-Jackson's claim that industry giant E&J Gallo deliberately copied its bottle. The suit matched two of California's most stubborn and litigious vintners, Jackson and Ernest Gallo, over whether Gallo's Turning Leaf Chardonnay was designed to cleverly imitate the look (and sales success) of Kendall Jackson's top-selling Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay. Indeed, with its flanged top, visible cork and yellowing grape leaf, Gallo's bottle looks remarkably similar. It's been similar in the stores, as well: in just...