New Swiss Wine Promotion videos

Swiss Wine Promotion recently produced six videos on the six Swiss wine regions, and the organization has now posted them on YouTube, as well as on the group’s Twitter page. Fashion and fine art photographer/filmmaker Patricia von Ah made the films, with wine consultant and writer Chandra Kurt narrating in English.

Note that the interviews are not translated, so if you don’t speak French or Italian or German you’ll miss out on some of those, a shame, but you can follow the main themes easily.

Kurt’s voice is just right: her very good English, soft voice and light Zurich accent coupled with her obvious knowledge of Swiss wines works well.

The films are attractive and move away from many of the Swiss wine clichés, although the necessary ones are tucked in there. They’re also a good way to see the new SWP logo at work, and I like it here. It also appears on the SWP Facebook and Twitter pages.

Expect to see many of the best-known Swiss wine producers here, something of a  who’s who in the business, with the upcoming generation much in evidence. My own hope is this will whet wine writers’ appetites and they’ll go on to discover the myriad of other very good wineries as well.

The new marketing approach of Swiss Wine Promotion is starting to become clearer with these films, where the mandate appears to have been to select key areas, key messages, and focus on those to make the now-famous Swiss diversity approachable. Vaud, for example, is all about Chasselas and the Lavaux Unesco World Heritage site. Both make good sense, but there’s much, much more to Vaud. Geneva focuses more on growing grapes than on the wine the canton produces and visually I get the feeling von Ah couldn’t forget that Calvin lived here.

Twitter seems an odd starting place to house the films but the SWP is mainly active on social media, with its web site waiting for a makeover. The films are presumably for wider distribution and use in any event – my guess is we’ll see them soon on Swiss airline flights. They’re each about six minutes long.

So let’s start by adding a couple here:

Valais, the largest wine region

Followed by Vaud

and Geneva, the third largest region.