Vineyard Parameters
Basic Wine Tasting Outreach
If you want to invest in your tasting room because it is where you can gain higher margin sales, let us be your tasting room on the road. We can increase your depletions, educate current and future customers to your portfolio and expand your wine club membership.
When we engage a vineyard as a client, it is important to set up rules of engagement. It is important to make sure that the winery has as good an experience with us that their customer is having with their wine.
Here are a few bulleted items that will need to be discussed and agreed upon:
Integrity: You must know any customer we are engaged with and approve of any additional customer engagement. We cannot represent a vineyard from the same region or a like producer that questions who we are working for. It is important not to have any conflict of interest.
The Problem: Let us look at what area of the sales cycle is not performing well. Does this problem have a history? Are their multiple ways to solve with tastings, customer education, brand building, market expansion, etc. Can we look at sales by product, email database, wine club membership, marketing materials, electronic marketing, or any other source of promotion.
Timeline: If we are to meet realistic expectations, we should define the length of time to accomplish or measure and how much time is expected to be spent on the defined project.
Goal: A goal must be able to be measured. This can be in percentage increase in sales, bottle depletion or any specific measurement needed.
Support: We need to identify who will help in providing marketing materials, bottles for tasting, or any other specific need from the vineyard, distributor or any other partner.
Audience: Let’s look at the current customer’s and let’s understand who we are communicating to and what the geographical boundaries are for the project.
The Villains of Small Production Wine
Big Production Wine
The strength in numbers works in mysterious ways. If you are the giant in the room, you control the market because of production and money. If you are the small guy, you will have to have something very special to survive. Big wine controls the distribution pipeline. A distributor makes more money handling one big giant than many smaller vineyards together. They are buying up the small and reducing competition. They control the number of spaces on shelves in stores. Also, the more you produce, the more you source, the less the quality.
Distributors
The number of distributors is continuing to become smaller through consolidation and merger. This makes the pipeline smaller and limits the number of available wines. Small wineries are being squeezed out. Those who have distributor representation are not being supported well enough or their portfolio being understood. Minimal commitment to education and tasting.
State Governments
The archaic laws are being controlled by the state liquor lobbies and the contributions to the political purses of state legislators. The 3 tier system is broke and the government is allowing the distributors and lobbyist to dictate the rules with consequences to the consumer.