Product placement in comics? Why would anyone bother? Here’s why: Yahoo News has a story press release about the manga (actually, it’s a newspaper strip) Sommelier, which created a boom in California’s Calera Pinot Noir. The hero, a super sommelier with an encyclopedic knowledge of wines, was in a blind wine-tasting with a tricky rival and happened to remember that the only wine similar to the one he was tasting was the Calera.
when this particular manga strip came out, crowds of Japanese wine lovers stood in line for hours, eager to snap up any bottle of Calera available in wine shops. Soon after, when Calera founder Josh Jensen went to Japan to present wine tastings in Tokyo and Osaka, adoring Calera fans lined up in front of him to have the labels on their empty bottles autographed.
And this wine has legs:
Ten years later, Calera-mania has not subsided, according to Jensen. “We currently sell almost 23% of our production to Japan, about 7,000 cases a year.
[...] Here’s an example of product placement in manga, over at the blog Thought Balloons. Manga starts California wine craze. [...]