Orson Welles Paul Masson adverts

Orson Welles acted in a series of adverts for Paul Masson California wine from 1978 to 1981, best known for their slogan "We will sell no wine before its time"; and for a bootleg recording of an out-take showing a clearly inebriated Welles on set, becoming a much-parodied cultural trope of the late twentieth century.

In 1978, Paul Masson's California wines hired actor-director Orson Welles to make an advert for their "Emerald Dry" white table wine. Although Paul Masson's winery had been producing California wines since 1892, they had long catered to the lower end of the wine market, and this advert was part of a concerted effort by the company to rebrand itself as a higher-end wine producer, tying in with a period of diversification, when they were seeking to expand from the sparkling wines which had first brought them success, and to sell more of their other wine ranges, including chablis, burgundy, riesling, chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, port and sherry. As the New York Times noted in 1990, Paul Masson's long-term problem remained the same: "While many consumers know them - who can forget Orson Welles's breathy incantation of 'We will sell no wine before its time' for Masson - they lack cachet." After the success of the initial advert, Welles was signed to a Paul Masson contract worth $500,000 a year plus residuals, making further adverts for the brand on television and in print, which continued for three years until his sacking by the company in 1981. Despite Welles's poor behaviour on set, Paul Masson was described as "a very happy client", with sales of their wine reportedly rising by 30% during the Welles advertising campaign.

By this stage in his career, Welles found it nearly impossible to obtain work as a director (his last directorial credit to be released in his lifetime was a TV movie for West German television, which aired in 1978); and from the mid-1970s onwards, his only acting credits were cameos appearances, mostly in low-budget fare. Accordingly, he was heavily dependent for his income on a series of adverts, for products of variable quality. These included Carlsberg beer,Domecq sherry,Sandeman's port (playing the "Sandeman Don" in a TV advertisement),Jim Beam bourbon whisky,Nikka Japanese G&G whisky,Perrier mineral water,Nashua photocopiers,Vivitar instant cameras,Preview pay-per-view television, the board game Dark Tower,Eastern Air Lines,Texaco,Post's Shredded Wheat, and perhaps most infamously, Findus frozen foods. Although Welles had made adverts for his entire career, beginning when he was a well-known radio actor in the 1930s, by the late 1970s these had become his staple, and he was often (anonymously) directing them as well. John Annarino, the advertising executive handling the Paul Masson account at the time, remembered that Welles, "was eager for almost any kind of work in the early 1980s, hoping to complete a film that was languishing in some European vault (The Other Side of the Wind)." Welles was often highly dismissive of the work, pointing out that he tended to be hired "to give a little class" to such productions.

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