At the close of 2009, when the Liquor Control Board of Ontario revealed its top sellers for the year, the No. 1 retail product wasn't Smirnoff vodka, Bacardi white rum or one of the other perennial bestsellers. It was a cheap red wine from a little-known Argentinean winery.
For the first time in the provincial liquor board's 82-year history, a wine made the top of the charts—the only one, in fact, to ever crack the Top 5. And it brought in more dollars than the big spirits brands, even though they sell at more than four times the price and are backed by massive global marketing campaigns.
The wine's name is Fuzion.
You may have heard of it. In recent years, the shiraz-malbec blend has colonized Canada like no vinous concoction before it, spreading west from Quebec where it first emerged as a hit. But it was in Ontario that the craze reached its fever pitch, with people driving hundreds of kilometres to catch new shipments, carting cases off of pallets, and fighting in the aisles for the last bottles on the shelves. The product's ability to accomplish this without any marketing was as remarkable as the fact that the phenomenon seems to be limited to Canada; nowhere else has Fuzion seen this kind of popularity.
The LCBO sold 419,000 cases of it last year—more than the total sales of all 13 Yellow Tail products, the Australian line that dominated the wine category before Fuzion. “It's the single-largest success story that LCBO has had to date,” says Shari Mogk-Edwards, the liquor board's vice-president of merchandising.
In the midst of the craze, struggling to navigate—and capitalize on—the chaos, was a 41-year-old wine importer with a handful of employees. Alex Patinios had been doing decent business serving as the Ontario agent for a few dozen foreign wine brands, but he had never been the middleman on a breakout hit, never mind this—a runaway sensation. And he almost missed it.
When his Toronto company, Dionysus Wines & Spirits Ltd., signed on to represent the producer, Familia Zuccardi, it was after initial reluctance. He didn't foresee — nor did anyone else, from his competitors to the provincial liquor monopoly — that a mix of consumer and economic trends would create the perfect window for Fuzion's launch. “It was a combination of Argentina's popularity, price point, economy and reviews,” Patinios says. “We didn't plan for any of that.”
It made the phenomenon that much harder to manage. Fuzion was sold out for months, threatening to undermine the new brand — and, for Patinios, to jeopardize his relationships with Argentina's second-largest winery and the LCBO, practically his sole customer. It took until last fall — almost a year and a half — for the Fuzion team to get a handle on and fully supply Ontario's demand. Now, Patinios faces a new, perhaps even tougher, phase: transforming the mob mentality that fed the wine's spectacular rise into a customer base he can guide toward Zuccardi's other — more lucrative — fare.
Typically, there is a moment in every market fad when mere popularity tips into craze territory. Whether the trend can capture and build on that surge in demand determines if the trend ignites or fizzles. For Patinios and Fuzion, that moment came in early November, 2008, roughly three months after the wine appeared on the shelves in Ontario. In mid-October, the LCBO had received 18,000 cases of Fuzion that were intended to supply the retailer through the December holiday rush. Instead, the entire shipment was sold out in a week and a half.
So the LCBO ordered another 19,000 cases, with a proviso: Zuccardi had to ship them within one week or they wouldn't make it to the stores in time for Christmas. “Think about it,” says Patinios, punching numbers on a calculator: 19,000 cases times 12 bottles makes 228,000 bottles, each of which needed containers manufactured, labels printed, screw-tops made. This kind of order would usually take three months to process. But, says Patinios, “if we didn't have those bottles that Christmas, that's 228,000 bottles that wouldn't have gotten to customers who wouldn't have sampled Fuzion at that critical time. That could have killed our momentum.”
