Three things that really frustrate me: Part 2
November 16th, 2007Another thing that I just don’t understand is when whisky companies launch a new whisky but don’t send whisky writers (i.e., people like me) a press release and a review sample. This is one of the smartest things they can do. How can we write about their whisky if we don’t know anything about it and we can’t taste it?
The general excuses I usually get are: “We just don’t have time to send it, we don’t have time to write a press release, or that the whisky is just too expensive to sacrifice.” But the best excuse I get is: “the whisky is already pre-sold. There’s no reason to send you a sample.”
Then I ask, “What does pre-sold mean?”
Their reply: “All the bottles have been committed to by various retailers.”
The last time I checked, the bottle isn’t sold if it’s sitting on a retailer’s shelf collecting dust. Someone still has to buy it. And that’s where writers can help, by letting the consumer know what the whisky tastes like, where they can buy it, how it’s made, etc.
There are probably about a half dozen key whisky writers in this world. How hard is it to send them each a bottle? And even if the whisky is expensive, it doesn’t take that much time to divvy up one bottle, put them into 100ml samples and send them out to those writers with a press release. In the long run, everyone wins. The consumer is more educated, I get to do my job better, and the whisky producers sell their whisky.
