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Getting Where We Need To Be

Written By: Kasey Carpenter on Monday, February 4, 2008

The Sales and Marketing Guide for Small Wineries ( and a list of options for your business ).

Many people think they have an understanding of what is involved in the sales and marketing of a wine. And for some of the larger more commercial concerns (though any successful winery has to be commercial to some extent) with deep budgets it is a pretty straightforward path. But for the little guys, well aside from some stupendous score, how do they get heard in a market that shouts big dollar (business) wine?

There are many paths one can choose and there is no clear cut direction to take. I have outlined a few steps from my own playbook and those taken by previous successful growing brands.

You can:

1) Put a commerce page on your website and wait for the orders to come flooding in.
2) Keep submitting those samples to the press and waiting for the elusive three digit review.
3) Sell it all off for pennies on the dollar as table wine for a huge cruise line.
4) Put a picture of a celebrity (dead ones sell better) on it (or a cute brightly colored animal), anything that makes buyers ignore the contents of the bottle and become engrossed in the label itself.
5) Make it resemble a more successful brand as close to trademark infringement as possible. Hey, it’s worked time and time again.
6) Make it "low carb," or attach it in some other way to any dietary fad du jour.
7) Send it off to a distributor and hope for the best, knowing that the larger wineries come in with their own people, hired guns, wallets full of Amex gift cards, trips to Argentina, Tequila girls, answers to any request on the part of the retailer, and they visit the market every three weeks, if not live there.
8) Align yourself with some huge national portfolio, perhaps replicating the problem of number 7 on another level entirely (again a small fish in a big pond.)
9) Hire your own National Sales Manager, sending him out into the world with meal vouchers and frequent flier miles to fight the battle with the big boys, slay the dragons, make the sales.
10) Hire a broker. Color me biased but having your own hired gun on the street who knows who to sell to and who to skip, who only works for commission (he only eats what he kills) and can work with and independent of, the distributor of your choice, is not such bad option.

Of course, the first six, while all having been actual business models at some point in time for some winery, are all meant to be tongue in cheek. But the last four are really the only viable solutions for a small winery that hasn't blown up in terms of press, and cannot afford to triple the cost of making said wine by employing vast throngs of warm bodies to beat the streets. It is a lot like lobbyists these days. The big companies get the most, but not always the best. Occasionally a smaller concern finds a lobbyist who shares their common view, and instead of selling out altogether, he and the concern strike a happy medium under which both thrive.

And realize that all of this depends on the wine, the market in question (both as it relates to time and location), the tenacity and interest of the distributor, the layers of cost and so on.

But realize that the marketing of wine, especially in the last decade, has become crowded and competitive, and I for one think it a good, so long as the gems aren't sifted out while we all clamor for the big paydays.

I'll be in San Francisco next week covering a very cool Burgundy tasting – SOPEXA will be in town and I will be there, glass in hand and laptop at the ready, so look for a few gems from that trade tasting, sure to be revealing as there are slated to attend some wineries that haven't been in the US as of yet, ah fresh meat...

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phantomoftheoffice
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Posted on 2/15/08

Thank you for that list! It always makes things more digestible that way.

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